Santa Clara University

“We did as much as we could as fast and furiously as we could,” says Scott Shipman ’99, privacy counsel for eBay, of the time back in 1998 when he joined the company as an intern. Internet law was a new frontier. “We were making it up as we went along.”

The In-House Crowd

SCU School of Law alumni serve as general counsel at some of the most dynamic companies in the nation.

By Rita Beamish B.A. '74
Photography by Charles Barry

The Silicon Valley start-up was 70 employees strong—and growing—when Scott Shipman was an intern back in the summer of 1998. The company’s one lawyer urgently needed help with his galloping workload. Shipman, interning for credit through Santa Clara University School of Law, found himself dividing up the legal baskets with the lawyer, from user agreements and domain names to privacy policy, Internet advertising, and commercial agreements.

“We did as much as we could as fast and furiously as we could,” recalls Shipman. Internet law was a new frontier. “We were making it up as we went along.”

“There’s no book that’s going to tell you what you’re going to do. That’s what was exciting. It was taking the principles that you learned in law school and applying them on a daily basis as an intern.”

In fact, Shipman was contributing to the emerging business profile of a niche company that ran online auctions.

That fall the company went public—the eBay explosion was underway. Shipman went back to classes but also kept his job, and after law school signed on with eBay as a full attorney. Today, he holds the longevity record among the company’s legal team of more than 100 worldwide—eBay now employs some 8,000 people —as well as the title of privacy counsel, overseeing all matters relating to online privacy.

“I’d done the right things without even knowing it,” he says looking back on the phenomenal growth of the company whose mission is to provide “a global trading platform where practically anyone can trade practically anything.” Shipman ’99 credits a law school internship at Honda in Tokyo, the summer before he joined eBay, with revving him up to a singleminded focus on high tech.

His incredible fortune is the dream of law students—a combination of hard work, skill and the always-elusive luck, perhaps unfathomable for many. But like Shipman, more than a few graduates of Santa Clara’s 93-year-old law school have joined an enviable club: the fraternity of Bay Area in-house counsel. The Silicon Valley boom found Santa Clara law grads poised to take up residence in the area’s growing roster of corporate legal offices, and today they are general counsel and in-house lawyers at top companies throughout the region.

That Santa Clara is the training ground for these attorneys is not surprising, says Casey McGlynn ’78, a partner with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati. “They understand this market and they’ve responded in a very pragmatic way to help educate young lawyers to address the needs of this incredibly vibrant market we’ve got here in Silicon Valley,” he says.

Adds Lisa Herrick ’91, president of the Santa Clara County Bar Association, “Because we are in a location where new ideas are streaming up every day, and Santa Clara has a terrific network as well as a really strong program in protecting the sorts of ideas that come up in the valley, it’s a natural fit for the businesses that are developing here.”

The University’s nationally-regarded High Tech Law Institute, with a whopping 50 high tech law and intellectual property courses, its renowned faculty members, and its High Tech Law Certificate, has marked Santa Clara as a school that draws students like Shipman and feeds the legal domain of a local economic linchpin.
General counsel have more than high tech on their plates, however. Their panoply of demands ranges from corporate governance to patents and litigation as well as the constant pressure to comply with regulatory strictures such as those flowing from the sweeping Sarbanes-Oxley legislation.

“The general counsel has as his clients the company, the board, the various committees of the board, the CEO, the CFO, and obligations to the SEC if you are publicly traded company,” says Fred Gonzalez, B.A. ’71, MBA ’73, J.D. ’77, who is vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary for Internet security systems company SonicWALL, Inc. “That makes the job very challenging because you have all these different client groups.”

A fateful drive

It’s familiar turf for Gonzalez, who was general counsel or associate counsel for three high tech companies before arriving at SonicWALL last year. “Don’t overplan,” is his motto. “You may overlook opportunities that you would not otherwise have thought existed.” In fact Gonzalez started out as a chemist, having grown up in a blue-collar San Francisco household with no exposure to lawyers at all. So it was with some uncertainty that he procured his law degree after earning his Santa Clara MBA while employed by Lockheed, first as a research chemist and then working on contracts. The legal department of big companies like Lockheed, however, had little interest in brand new lawyers. It was on a fateful drive to work one day, that Gonzalez noticed the “Amdahl” company sign off Lawrence Expressway. Shortly thereafter he saw an article about the burgeoning mainframe manufacturer, “a startup before there were startups,” he says. He fired off a resume and hit it off with Amdahl’s sole counsel. He won the number-two slot and stayed for 21 years as the company morphed into a major force before being absorbed by Fujitsu.

Gonzalez went on to launch legal departments at two other local companies, Polycom, Inc., which grew from 20 patents to 300 in the two-plus years Gonzalez was there, and Extreme Networks, before landing at SonicWALL last year.

General counsel are problem solvers, he says. “There’s a certain amount of entrepreneurial spirit that you have to have.”

A mother’s inspiration

Flexibility also marked the career of Elizabeth Harris ’86. Harris is the senior corporate counsel for Safeway Inc., overseeing labor and employment matters involving 31,000 employees throughout Northern California, Nevada, and Hawaii.

“Sometimes you have to go with your gut.You can give sound advice without having to open a book and research it,” says Elizabeth Harris ’86, senior corporate counsel for Safeway Inc. She says the School of Law at Santa Clara University helped her develop that knack through its diverse law program.

She advises Safeway on employment law, but as a political science major, she once eyed a career in the realm where laws originate—politics. After college she worked as a paralegal, and seven years flew by. She then felt too old for law school. Now it was her mother who pointed the way, because around the same time the mother of five grown children enrolled in Santa Clara’s law school. Seeing her success, Harris finally applied, too. “My mother was an inspiration to me,” she says.

After working as a litigator for several years at an Oakland firm, Harris was intrigued when a former colleague urged her to consider a position with a leading supermarket chain. She signed on with Safeway in 1996, and remains there, taking pride in her proactive efforts to prevent litigation through training and communication.

Career choices, she says, have something in common with a corporate counsel’s work. “Sometimes you have to go with your gut. You can give sound advice without having to open a book and research it.” Santa Clara helped her develop that knack through its diverse law program, she says, and especially by facilitating her externship with California Supreme Court Justice Allen Broussard, an experience that helps her to this day.

Coffee, anyone?

Early in her professional career, men asked Carrie Dwyer B.A. ’73, J.D. ’76, to fetch them coffee. Once, a subordinate even stalked into the men’s room to escape her directives. But it would take a lot more than those slights to knock Dwyer off stride. Today, as general counsel and executive vice president, corporate oversight, for the Charles Schwab Corp., Dwyer oversees some 80 lawyers and a broad legal portfolio for one of the nation’s largest financial services firms, with more than $1 trillion in client assets.

Her impressive post is the latest in a head-spinning career that saw her become senior counselor at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and during 15 years on Wall Street rise to become the general counsel and senior vice president of the American Stock Exchange. Not that fortune exactly fell into her lap when she first landed in New York with her husband and law school classmate, Richard Konecky. She encountered a frosty job market, and only after knocking on many doors did she land a desk at the ASE. “There weren’t many women back in those days. It was all men all the time,” she recalls. “I just kept going. I took every job that nobody else wanted to do…It didn’t occur to me that I couldn’t do anything I wanted to do.” The strategy propelled her to the top of the hectic ASE, and from there she accepted a senior policy role in the SEC pressure cooker. It was during her three years as a regulator, especially working on historic reforms in NASDAQ trading, that she caught the attention of San Francisco-based Charles Schwab—a company slapped by the very sanctions she implemented—and found herself heading back to the Bay Area.

These days, Dwyer enjoys working at Schwab while confronting the greatest regulatory and compliance amalgam of her career. She says her analytical thinking was molded as much by her SCU undergraduate experience as her law school days. “The rigor of all those Jesuit professors was really helpful,” she says. “It does give you a different perspective and training.”

An engineer’s path

When Tom Dunlap ’79 joined Intel Corp. it was six years old and only a whisper of the $30-billion-a-year semiconductor powerhouse it would one day become. As Dunlap retired in January at the age of 54, he wrapped up three decades at the company he joined as a young electrical engineer just out of college.

Back then, not knowing he was working for the world’s future chip-manufacturing leader, Dunlap considered various advanced degrees before settling on law school—night classes while remaining with Intel by day. Dunlap credits Santa Clara’s night law program for sparking his career path at a time when high technology itself was embryonic. Dunlap sought out any course with a hint of intellectual property or business linkage, while at Intel he worked on technical contracts, toting his law school texts on business trips abroad. When he graduated in 1979, Intel tapped him as its first European counsel, and based him in Brussels.

“After that it was my career strategy to continue to learn and improve my skill set in whatever was the logical thing for me to do in my current job and grow a little bit and be ready for whatever was the next opportunity that came around.”

The opportunities never stopped at Intel, where he was one of four lawyers in the early days. “We had to be pretty interchangeable and deal with whatever came in,” he says. For two decades, he was the company’s general counsel, heading up an in-house legal team of 389 people by the time he retired with the title of senior vice president as well.

Longevity did not mean monotony, he says. “The job was different every year. The challenge was varied.”

Dunlap was a key player in litigation and legislation that were vital to chip and microcode protection, but he counts as his proudest accomplishment the development of “a full service legal department” that understands the company’s needs and seeks the best solutions for the corporation and shareholders.

Bicycling to the Sun

Mike Dillon ’84, general counsel, senior vice president, and corporate secretary of Sun Microsystems, says he remembers the open door, “human approach” that he found at the School of Law. “I felt I could always walk into a professor’s office and ask him a question,” he says, adding that he tries to emulate that approach with his own employees.

Mike Dillon ’84 had an epiphany while bicycling across New Zealand after college. Dillon, general counsel, senior vice president, and corporate secretary of Sun Microsystems, had little clue then about what he would do with his hybrid degree in sociology and communications. At a youth hostel he fortuitously met a newly minted lawyer who convinced him that law was the way to go.

Dillon launched his career as a litigator, but over time began looking for in-house opportunities for a closer and more proactive client relationship. He found Sun, already on its way to becoming a networking systems leader. Dillon joined Sun in 1993 and after leaving once to help launch an optical networking company called ONI Systems, he returned to Sun. He became its top legal officer last year.

Among Sun’s 32,000 employees in 25 countries, Dillon says, are “some of the most brilliant minds on the planet,” and their innovations spawn equally cutting-edge legal issues for Dillon. As Sun also undergoes a major internal transformation, Dillon manages a worldwide legal group of 250. As a manager, Dillon remembers the open-door, “human approach” that he found at law school. “I felt I could always walk into a professor’s office and ask him a question,” he says, adding that he tries to emulate that approach with his own employees.

Synergistic relationship

There is clearly a synergy between the School of Law and the local business community, notes Alexa Horne ’92, outgoing assistant dean for law and technology and director of the High Tech Law Institute. Not only do graduates find their way into local companies but they and other attorneys are on campus as professors, guest lecturers, luncheon speakers, and participants on advisory and policy committees.

“Because of where we are located, we’re able to benefit from all the IP attorneys in the valley,” Horne says. “Even as a law student here you get to work with and know some of the most interesting practitioners in the world of high tech. That alone prepares you as well as any other institution in the country.”

Rita Beamish ’74 earned her master’s degree in journalism from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she has also taught journalism. She spent more than a decade as a reporter for the Associated Press in Washington, D.C., covering the White House, politics, foreign policy, and the aftermath of Sept. 11.