In-house attorneys offer career advice

Panelists from AAA, eHarmony, Sempra Energy & more speak to students

-By Lori Craig

Law students eyeing a future in corporate counsel should consider working in a law firm first; learn all they can about the company’s industry; and keep in mind that moving in-house does not always beget a better work-life balance.

Attorneys from AAA, eHarmony, Princess Cruises, Sempra Energy, ServiceMesh, Inc., the United States Postal Service, and Warner Bros. offered this and other advice to USC Law students during a March 8 Corporate Counsel Career Panel, sponsored by the Southern California Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel.

The panel was moderated by Michael Chang, senior counsel for business and legal affairs at Warner Bros. Consumer Products Inc.

Vince Gonzales, Richard Bonkosky & Dawn Haghighi

Six of the seven speakers began their careers at a firm, which is a good way to get on-the-job training as well as a diversity of experience that is useful for practitioners who later join a business’s legal department, panelists said. It’s also the way the legal industry is set up, said USC Law grad Vince Gonzales ’87, senior counsel of Sempra Energy.

“A law firm is designed to bring in new lawyers and train them according to whatever rules and culture they have,” Gonzales said. “And once you’re trained — which takes a couple years or so — then [associates] become attractive to corporations who are looking for lawyers who already know how to read and write, talk and interface with people.”

Gonzales was an associate at O’Melveny & Myers before joining Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) and later Sempra as senior environmental counsel.
Dawn Haghighi, assistant general counsel with Princess Cruises, worked in a firm where she got litigation and corporate experience before moving in-house with Charter One Bank. She also worked at Interstate/Fireman’s Fund and Nordstrom prior to joining Princess six years ago.

“I think the firm experience was extremely helpful because being in-house, you’re hit with so many different things,” she said.

With the cruise line, for example, lawyers deal with food and beverage, employment, medical personnel and facilities, casinos, and a huge number of buses.

“As you can imagine, there’s a whole host of things I handle: I focus a lot on the governance issues, anti-corruption, privacy, international affairs,” said Haghighi, who created Princess’s government affairs program and helped the company establish a foundation.

Kristi Ashman, Cary Berger and Tammy Brandt

Kristi Ashman ’93, on the other hand, has only worked in-house. As a 2L, she was an intern with an oil company in Long Beach, where the general counsel became her mentor and eventually hired her. She currently serves as a labor and employment attorney for the U.S. Postal Service.

“I’ve never had that law firm experience, but currently, [the] postal service does not hire outside counsel, so we do our own litigation,” Ashman said. “I do my own hearings, I do my own depositions … so I’m kind of getting that training on the flip side.”

Some tips to help the associate who wants to become corporate counsel: learn as much as you can about the company and industry in which you want to work, and think like a business person.

“Know the business — at least the funding — so you can understand how the business makes money and pressures that your clients are under,” said Richard Bonkosky, corporate counsel for the Automobile Club of Southern California (AAA). “And, hopefully, you can speak their lingo.”

Being fluent in “techie” helped Bonkosky land his job as the lead technology lawyer with AAA. And it wasn’t by accident. A self-described technology geek, Bonkosky moved to Silicon Valley after graduating from Pepperdine Law School to work in a boutique law firm that he targeted for its clients.

“I wanted particular experiences representing particular firms,” he said. “I was leveraging my knowledge of a particular business, telecommunications in general, and technology, and also I spoke ‘geek.’ I leveraged those skills to gain more and more experience.”

But it’s not all about specialization. Tammy Brandt, general counsel of ServiceMesh, Inc., a cloud computing company, said her adaptability allowed her to move from firms to Toyota Motor Sales USA, Inc., to her current position, which has a very different corporate culture.

“I do employment things, contracts, cutting deals with executives, potential lawsuits, intellectual property issues, things like that,” Brandt said. “So it’s been a very different job for me, but very challenging.”

An in-house lawyer often needs to be a jack-of-all-trades, and it is skills that matter, said Carey Berger, general counsel of eHarmony.com.

“We’re looking for skill sets, but we’re mostly hiring people,” Berger said. “We’re hiring people who have known excellence at some point, hopefully at many points, in their academic career and in their professional career.” He looks for people who have “gotten outstanding results and were surrounding themselves with great people and demonstrating things like project management or other skills.”

Berger worked with Irell & Manella for 10 years after graduating from Stanford Law School. Following another 10 years with Broadcom Corporation, he said he worried about getting pigeonholed as a semiconductor lawyer, but eHarmony’s leaders recognized that his skills could be applied elsewhere.

The panelists agreed that a corporate counsel career generally means getting away from the grind of firm life, although there is a tradeoff in salary, and the hours don’t shrink to a 9-to-5 workday.

“I work fast, and I work smart, because I do have other obligations,” said Ashman, adding that she’s averaged 50 hours of work per week for the past 20 years. “I will cram 12 hours of work into eight hours.”

Measuring performance isn’t as straightforward as a firm’s hours-counting, either.

“When you go into a corporate environment, you’re evaluated on much more intangible factors,” Berger said. “Yes, it’s your results and things, but you also have corporate goals and you might have to further those goals and a lot of times in the corporate environment they don’t understand what you’re doing in the legal department.”