Former General Counsel of Apple Interviewed by Columbia Law Student, Doreen Benyamin

hi my name is Doreen and welcome to today's legal tech Association event from big law partner to former general counsel of Apple Bruce will shares insights until a legal career spanning 30 years today's event is being recorded and will be posted online on a YouTube channel called before you take the LSAT if anyone is interested in seeing the recording today we are on a toast mr. Bruce Sewell who is very humbly mentioned that we can just call him Bruce yes please do by way of introduction Bruce has had an illustrious career spanning 30 years he has worked at three law firms ranging from roles and as a associate to a big law partner at Alec litigation firm to serving in the role of general counsel at two multinational technology companies Intel and apple Bruce has had an interesting path and that he had never wanted to be a lawyer he grew up in England earning his undergraduate degree in clinical psychology and always assumed that he would attend med school after undergrad he moved to America and worked as a fireman in Maryland he received unexpected news in 1982 GW University offered to pay Bruce's tuition for his postgraduate degree he immediately filed an application for med school only to find out that they meant any degree except for medicine which was deemed too expensive Bruce decided to ask the school what their second most expensive degree was to which to which they replied law and here we are today thank you Bruce so much for taking the time to talk to us today we are honored to have you and truly appreciate your time I'm so happy to be here all right so just to get started because you did have a path where you weren't intending originally to go into law I'm just curious what qualities you've seen yourself that you think may be successful no matter what career path you chose I think I have a capacity for being relatively calm in a crisis I don't tend to get too wrapped up in in things and I think that's a sort of useful it's useful to be able to stay calm to remove yourself from some of the stress of things particularly when you're trying to lead an organization or you're trying to lead a team in a time where people are under a lot of stress there's a crisis and we were talking this morning in a different context about leading through crises and how when you're in a really tough situation when you're in a crisis several things start to happen the first is that the the timescale compresses everything happens quickly and everything seems like it has to happen at once things get certain things get sort of disproportionately important in a crisis it seems like every decision is a make-or-break decision and so that combination of a lot of stress and noise and compressed timeframe and disproportionate importance all of those things make for bad decision-making and if you can find a way to sort of step back from that keep your head be level-headed I think that's a capacity that I have and maybe something that's been useful also I'm just curious the people who are here how many of you are one else two L's three L's whoa so you've previously said that the key to doing a successful job as a general counsel is the ability to be a business person and I'm just excited I'm just curious if you could expand on that and like what do you mean by business person yeah I don't mean to suggest that General Counsel's ought to be product managers or they ought to run big parts of the corporation what I'm getting at really is that in the corporate context more than in a law firm context or a government role your job has to do with making decisions that are inherently both legal and business-related if you are simply acting as a lawyer then your training and most of the things for which you are rewarded in law school and in firm practice have to do with avoiding risk minimizing risk counseling to to reduce risk whereas a business person again by training and by necessity in the corporate context is really trying to manage risk not reduce it but but essentially embrace it and figure out how do you how do you optimize in a risk environment and it's a very different way of thinking about things neither one is is uniquely good or bad but they're just different and as a lawyer in a corporation your ability to be sympathetic to and to respond to that approach of I'm not trying to eradicate risk I'm trying to manage risk I'm trying to use risk as my friend if you will is a unique skill and it requires lawyers to do something that they're not generally trained to do so that's what I meant by by thinking like a business person understanding that you're in a risk profile and you want to compromise for them so on the topic of being multinational tech company I'm just curious what was it like to manage it it doesn't feel in most cases like you're actually managing 900 people because the way that any organization is set up there are there are levels within the organization and from my vantage by dealt mainly with 10 people and those 10 people in turn manage the team of people and so it actually feels quite manageable it doesn't feel like 900 people except for the occasions where we would do department off-site where we'd all get together maybe once or twice a year and everybody all 900 people would be there and so it seems sort of sort of big but generally you know when you're managing a team like that you take it in in bite-sized pieces and and my role primarily was to try to set direction provide some sort of strategic compass if you will to the to the group and then be an immediate mentor and supervisor to the ten people who work directly for me and then they would carry that message and they would hopefully role model those same characteristics that I wanted the department to exhibit they would role models and push them down in the organization here is between the legal department that you worked with and the executive how did your time split between them two so as a general counsel I probably spent more time interacting with senior executives at the company then with the legal department generally that would change according to what was topical at the time so for example many of you may recall some of the smart phone Wars when when Apple was at the center of a very protracted and very complex set of patent cases involving Samsung Motorola Google in an instant like that for the year or so that that was that was going on I probably was was focused more on the legal side by contrast you know probably the most intense couple of months that I ever spent at the company were during the time when Apple was litigating with the FBI over access to syed farook phone this is the San Bernardino bomber during that period of time I was almost entirely locked down with the GC I started with the CEO and the head of Public Affairs basically our PR people and not doing a whole lot on the legal side we had great outside counsel and I have at Apple one of the most incredible directors of litigation that any company has the privilege to employ she's just incredible and so I could leave that stuff to her and I was really focused on talking to the media talking to Congress talking to the White House that I think an interesting thing to note about your path is in your past it's also the you've worked with Apple and multiple different areas right you worked as an outside counsel for them you've worked negotiating against them and you've also obviously work with a white Council yeah my question is what I know that there is no typical day but if you have to explain kind of what the responsibilities look like and then day to day sense or I know you've mentioned in the past that you spent your time traveling so yeah I'm just figured to Europe what your day to day looks like and what the balance how you make sure that it's balanced and meaningful and not overwhelming what are the problems with being a general counsel of a company like Intel is that you really don't have a typical time great I mean you know you're reacting to stuff that happens in real time and so you don't really know but that's a sort of routine day for me with the it starts early the reason it started early at Apple is because my my sort of principal focus at Apple is Tim it's the CEO it sort of it's what's going on in his life that largely dictates how I spend my time if Tim's out of the picture then then I can sort of control my own schedule but if Tim needs me then that's going to take priority call this a priority interrupt no matter what else is going on in Tim needs to be the nuts or I have to be and Tim is a little crazy he's work schedule he gets up around four o'clock in the morning and then he's in the gym by 5:30 and he's in the office by about 7:30 but so from 4:00 a.m. to 5 a.m. there's a there's a lot of activity so my first thing when I got up around 6:30 a.m. would be to check my email and see all the stuff that Tim had left for me so little cookies that he's left for me from 4:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. but I would say I deal with the any immediate problem something that had to be dealt with immediately I do first thing then I try to get in the office by about probably about 8 o'clock and the way that Apple is organized and this is true at Intel as well General Counsel's have two offices more often than not so you have an office in the c-suite in the case of Apple the offices went Steve originally then Tim then the CFO then me sort of going around the corner and that's really useful if you need to talk to your CEO immediately or just the fact that people had their doors open a lot of times you hear things and could come out in the corridor and sort of get in the middle of conversations but then I also have an office at the legal department so in the law department itself which is in another building so I'd usually start the day going into the c-suite check-in with people getting again get online and see what was going on there might be some sort of project that he carried over from the day before and I would usually work in the c-suite until about noon or 1:00 o'clock and then try to get over to the legal department if I could at least three or four days a week and spend an afternoon there checking in with people but as you said correctly I was probably traveling 30 or 40 percent of the time so the vast majority of my days weren't that orderly and weren't that sort of Placid it was jumping on planes meeting with people and and often having projects that were very sort of long-term projects so you see the Google negotiation for example between Apple and Google over search probably took us four months meeting almost every single day with with Sasha who was running the running Google at the time and Kent Walker who's the Google general counsel and then with myself and either Tim or Eddy Cue who was the Mike report on teal so we pee it at Google or they'd be that Apple almost every day it's just one example there are a lot of those kinds of negotiations or lawsuits that just completely suck up all your time do you think that you enjoyed the aspect of not having a routine and do you think that it's possible to be successful as a GC if you don't if you do like having a routine hmm so I'm not a routine kind of guy I don't like having a routine and to me the excitement of a job like GC at Intel or GC at Apple is is that you're constantly reacting to things you're constantly responding everything is happening in a very short timeframe so so I prefer that that's definitely the view in which I am more comfortable could you have a more routine job as a general counsel I think it's possible but I also think you'd miss a lot you could set up the department so that you really just managed and managing tends to be a a more predictable way to spend your time to me that would be really boring because if you're managing then sort of by definition you're not actually getting involved in the case you're not arguing the case you're not writing the brief you're not testifying in front of Congress you're managing other people who are doing that and that would be boring to me but but I think you could I think you could do that it's also interesting that I think there's been a sea change in the way large corporations think about their general counsel over the last 10 or 15 years and the reason that's relevant to this discussion is that I think if you look back 10 15 years ago it was not at all uncommon for big corporations to go to big law when they needed a general counsel and pull a partner who was probably in the corporate group so someone whose practice had been representing companies in front of the SEC making sure that the corporate formalities were currently observed and and that person's job was really to sort of run the administrative side of the corporation and to be a functional legal rep inside the company I think that's changed dramatically now if you look at the people that are being hired by major law major corporations as general counsel now they're often litigators they're often people who spent time doing international transactions or doing intellectual property and the corporate side of things has been more often than not outsourced there's bail be somebody who's like the the corporate director inside the corporation but they're working mainly with outside counsel to do that work and the real the sort of day-to-day nitty gritty representation of the company and defense of the company is more often done by litigators and by people who have a different set of skills I also want to mention that even though we will have time for questions at the end people have questions throughout that are really yeah feel free to to raise your hand and and we can have questions throughout it could be more interactive if anybody does want to yeah I'm curious to hear a little bit as you transitioned from Brown in vain to Intel and then from Intel to Apple or just even just generally in your career path what were some of your greatest challenges and how did you overcome them uh so the move from brown and Bane to Intel was shocking in a lot of ways because I really had come from a very traditional law firm environment and was thrown into what was a very organized and very well-run corporate environment but there radically different yeah and one of the most important differences we've already talked about that sense of learning how not to think like a lawyer in every case but learning how to apply your legal skills and your legal knowledge in this context of thinking like a business person so that's a that's a hard transition to make the first time you try it the other thing that's that's difficult I think the first time you make that move and this sounds sort of simplistic but in a law department as a lawyer you're it you're the product you're what the Colt company is about and so everything in a law firm is focused on making the lawyer as successful as possible so so you're sort of like you're the person in a law firm particularly if you're a partner in a corporation you're not the thing at all the thing is something completely different you're part of a much bigger broader team you're one piece of a larger puzzle that is all geared towards selling micro processors or selling iPhones and so that that psychological shift from from being the thing which is at the center of the enterprise to being something which is important but but very much a part of a larger picture and the enterprise is a very different way of thinking about things so that was an important shift as well going from Intel to Apple some cases was like going from university to kindergarten I guess but because apples just this wild place apples are very different from a sense of a management even though the business and the company is is among the most sophisticated in the world but the the atmosphere at Intel was very formal the atmosphere at Apple is very creative very lace affair and so there's this sense of order leading to the good result at Intel and kind of chaos leading to an incredible result at Apple and so it was a very different environment the thing that was the most difficult for me at Apple was at Intel I came in at a sort of mid-level I was a partner in a law firm three years in as a partner and made the bounce to to Intel so I did not go in as general counsel event didn't tell for about six years before I became general counsel as a result of those six years I I grew up with a peer set that we're also moving up the corporate ladder at the same time that I was so by the time I became general counsel I had really good contacts in the organization people that I'd worked with that were peers of mine as a director as a vice president and then as a senior vice president when I came into Apple I came directly in as general counsel and as a senior vice president and so I didn't have that depth of knowledge I didn't know who deep in the company you called when you needed an answer to a particular kind of question and so the first six months or a year that I was at Apple I spent a lot of time trying to meet people and develop relationships with people other than just the nine other members of the executive team apples apples run by ten people essentially one of whom is the CEO so at first it was Steve and then it became Tim and that executive team really worked as a as a unit and then we worked very closely together but not knowing the people below that meant that I would take me longer to find out information and I would have to create relationships that I could rely on whereas when I took over at Intel those relationships already existed yeah corporate structure influences in your operation as the general counsel and kind of ice person how your operations so corporate structure has a big impact on the structure of the legal department there are certain kinds of functions that that have to exist in a legal department and they map against needs that the corporation has so normally we think about corporate structure as a as a matrix and there are sort of vertical pillars in that organizational structure those pillars are generally business units that are responsible for a product or a suite of products they're piell's so they run on a profit and loss basis they are then supported by the sort of horizontal slats in the organization which are functions that cut across those piell's like marketing sales legal finance HR and so you have this sort of matrix of things well that's the way most companies are set up and then legal departments have to reflect that as well so I would have to have a bunch of what we call business attorneys people who are directly responsible for maintaining instantly supporting those vertical columns and then I would have a series of specialists either litigators intellectual property attorneys tax attorneys so think so so the structure of the company does largely dictate the structure of a law firm it's also true I think that the culture of the company is is important to the culture of the law department Apple has a very strong culture in tilted too but apples is more externally facing because Apple is a consumer company which intel never was Apple has a brand that I think most of you would recognize is a is a particularly powerful brand and it's it's it has a lot of connotations and a lot of of power in the marketplace so as a result the the legal team needs to be consistent with that brand there would be times when when I was communicating externally that that my closest colleague would be EPR because the issue was yes okay you're communicating on a legal matter but we want to make sure that even the legal communication is consistent with the culture and the image that the company wants to portray because even legal things that come out of Apple will get read and dissected and analyzed so there's a real feeling of wanting to be consistent the reverse of that the extent to which the legal team can influence the culture I think is more subtle but there there is a sort of two ways of looking at that there's a space that is principally in the compliance in the ethics in the legality kind of the way in which the corporation acts in those spheres where legal has a very important role not just in representing the company and defending the company but in setting the tone for the company and that I think is a critical role it's one that the general counsel largely is responsible for but in close concert with the CEO and it's the thing that you we use this to turn tone at the top and I think that's an incredibly important part of the relationship between the general counsel and the CEO to set that tone to role model the the cultural things that you want the company to reflect beyond that there's also the ability certainly to in any given point advocate for and articulate reasons why the company should take a position or not take a position it's critically important in what a General Counsel does and it gives you an opportunity to move the company in different directions your ability to be successful that that depends largely on some of the stuff we've already talked about it your ability to gain the trust of the business people your ability to be able to talk to the business people using the same kind of nomenclature and language that they understand but there's there so the answer is there's lots of different things that the corporation is influences the law Department law department is also capable of influence corporation yeah sure you see before when you talk about a specialized people they feel high do you externalize some of the activities to loafer and yeah it's a great question and probably a complicated answer and it's also evolved a lot over time 25 years ago the default condition within a corporation was essentially to move all of the legal work outside and the law department would tend to be fairly small and really functionary they would be the interface between the corporation and the law firm but but that's about the only role of in-house counsel that's changed radically in the last 25 years and more and more large international corporations are building small law firms within their own sort of border so the story mentioned I had 900 people that worked for me about 600 of them were in the law group and so most of them were lawyers but also paralegals and and other kinds of you know sort of legal professionals the decision of what you move and when you move it it depends a little bit in in some places for example litigation you can't staff an internal department to handle large pieces of litigation in the seminar that I teach we went through this the the one of the Samsung cases and in one of the Samsung cases we had 350 this is just one and there were seven of them going on with 350 people billing time on that case at any given moment most of them were outside counsel we had I think he was seven or eight million documents that were produced that had to be reviewed the law firms collectively think build us two hundred and eighty thousand hours so you can't you can't have a legal department that is staffed to handle that kind of spike in demand so most litigation is managed internally but the work is done by outside counsel and ideally the best relationship is that you're the team leader inside and the senior partner on the outside are working just and they really managed the case by contrast things like intellectual property maintaining the IP portfolio doing a lot of the patent prosecution handling a lot of the licensing is I think more efficiently handled by people who are experts internally who not only have the skills to do the licensing but also have the knowledge of what's at the core of the corporation's needs in this space what is it's really important to the business people what kinds of rights do they need in order to be able to do the kinds of work that they want to do that's hard to communicate to outside counsel and it's much easier for in house to do that so you know the reality is that now with six hundred people in my department it's like a mid-sized law firm but we still would spend you know my budget was just show I have a billion dollars a year and a lot of that would go on outside law firms because of the litigation and because internationally there's there's also we would have we had people spread out all over the country but the particular group in London for example would be responsible for a lot of Europe and if we had a problem in Spain then we need local council in Spain so we go and get outside council in Spain and that would be true anywhere in the world so that the international bills were probably a little bit heavier on outside council or the biggest biggest portion of a certainly litigation yeah you know / kind of separated from so it is just absolutely undeniably true that that Apple from day one and even today still reflects a lot of Steve's DNA and it's I think magnificent that that's true tim has has tried to stay as faithful to sort of the vision that Steve has as he can but the company is also involved in ways that differentiate it from from the time when Steve was running the company it's it's probably more engaged in society now than it was before it's more engaged in issues like human rights the environment cultural issues than it was under Steve's guidance but but the core values that that sense of perfection that sense of producing the very best thing that you can and and then putting it out in the world with the hope that if it's the best thing that you can do other people will find it good too as opposed to I'm gonna figure out what everybody wants and then try to build something that looks like what they want apples philosophy has always been sort of the converse of that we're going to build them that's thing that we can and then hope that it's what what other people want but it's going to be what's out of satisfies us first and foremost and that's remained a part of the corporate culture the the kind of dedication to excellence the focus on just being smart and and he would say wicked smart is also part of the corporate culture how much that bleeds into the Laufer I think the law department as we said before always reflects the corporation and so the same kinds of characteristics attention to detail striving to do your best those things are part of the law culture as well Wow yeah yeah so the reason I laugh is because the in-house decision was a little like the law school decision I was out of firm ground in vain and the Palo Alto office was going through a churn a lot of partners were leaving there was some discussion about whether we were going to close that office the reason they were leaving is because the the Palo Alto office represented about 25 percent of the partners in the firm that contribute about 80 percent of the profit of the firm and there was sort of you know a little mini revolt by the partners in Palo Alto against the larger partnership in Phoenix saying you know we either want to be compensated more appropriately for the amount of revenue we're bringing in and there was a sort of fracture in the firm and I was a third-year partner and looked at the course of the future if I stayed at the firm stayed at Brown and Boehner or went to Perkins and to me it appeared that as this fracture is occurring the likelihood would be that I would have to spend even more time than I was already spending developing business because a lot of the partners we're leaving and they were going to take clients with them and so instead of being a litigation partner in trying cases I was going to spend a lot more time wining and dining with clients and doing the kind of rainmaking stuff which didn't do a whole lot for me and and it was no one's gonna get a relief from the litigation this was just gonna be on top of it so I sort of stepped back and said which partners are successful in this big law context that don't spend a whole lot of time doing that kind of rainmaking stuff and it occurred to me that there's sort of a shortcut around that and it is if you can ally yourself with one big major client a company like Intel or Apple spins off hundreds of millions of dollars of legal work every year and it's a consistent flow of money so if you can be a partner at a Offerman you're sort of tapped into that because you have a special relationship with the corporation then that's a pretty successful way to be in law firm so my whole thought was I'm going to go to Intel for a couple or three years and sort of get to know the company develop a special relationship be known by the general counsel and then I'm going to go back out into the law world and and the successful partner of course I got to Intel it loved it and never never left the corporate side but originally it was it was the sense was that that's what I would do I actually was Tom Dunlap who's the general counsel of Intel approached me at exactly this time and Intel was looking for a director of litigation and so Tom and I tried a couple of cases together and he knew me well he said would you consider coming in-house to take over the litigation function my response to him was funny you should mention that Tom I'm just thinking about making the move in-house but I'd really rather not litigated because I kind of know how to do that it's something that I've been doing for a long time what I'd much rather do is come in house and learn the transactional side of law in a corporation how to do licensing how to negotiate contracts how to support a business unit and and Tom very generously said okay you don't have those skills but I know you and I think you're probably smart enough to figure it out so they brought me in as a transactional lawyer which then obviously was sort of one of those things where you get in and go I started my career ago and I often found that the only time that they actually cared about lawyers was when they were in trouble and I was on the transactional side of things so I think one of my biggest struggles was I found it much easier to actually negotiate a contract with a lawyer of the other side but before getting there you have to first convince internal stakeholders your business and I mean like you said we're kind of trained to be risk averse so everything could be a possibility of life so my question is that especially someone who's starting out of the transaction inside of things how do you kind of take a call on what is good to have versus what is it must have because I mean everything could be a risk so when you know like how how can you tell when something is the tangible risk versus something which is just nothing so when you're a brand new lawyer it's it's harder to know that I think one of the things that you get as a more experienced lawyer is the sense of when something's really important and when something isn't and as a brand new lawyer it's probably better from a career perspective to try to spot the things that are risks and then maybe get somebody else to help you figure out how to prioritize their importance but ultimately the place that you want to get to is not so much recognizing what is real risk and what isn't risk but actually one stage beyond that you want to get to the point where you can use risk as a competitive advantage that's the point at which law actually becomes a commercial asset to the company if if you can figure out how to get closer to a particular risk but be prepared to manage it if it does go nuclear then your company think of it as a sailing metaphor your company is able to sail closer to the wind then its competitors are and that's a real advantage and so what you're trying to do is a lawyer in house as a transactional lawyer is is not only know the stuff that you don't need to pay attention to but be laser-focused on the stuff that that could become really problematic and figure out through a combination of experience of creating contingency plans of being prepared to react if something goes wrong but to steer the ship as close as you can to that line because that's where the competitive advantage occurs but it's hard to say exactly where that line is and that's something that you just develop over time and you have to have the permission of the company to do that because every so often you're going to get it wrong Apple got involved in a very ugly suit with the US government here in the Southern District of New York that had to do with our release of the iBookstore and that was an opportunity where an example of where I tried to chart a course that I thought was incredibly good for Apple and and would bear legal scrutiny there were some things that were going on amongst a group of publishers that I didn't know about if I had known about them I would have taken a different tack forgive the metaphor but but that was an example of sailing as close to the wind because it was so important to Apple but in the end I got it wrong and Apple ended up being sued by the government the reaction from Tim was you that's the right choice I mean we all you made the best choice that you could with the information that you had you didn't know about these other things don't let that scare you I want you to stop pushing the envelope because that's why legal is an important function in the company you spoke a lot about how you have to deal with a lot of people and there's so much there's so much like elements of business and what you had to do I have a two-part question the first part is what drew you to business and neck and you mentioned that you would like to business law and economics what drew you to business and those two other fields as well like to begin with and do you think that your background having studied psychology was helpful in the fact that you had to deal with people so much yes yeah I mean it seems to me that's two sides of the same coin I like interacting with people I like negotiating with people talking to people which is important what led me to psychology and in part I think that same trait or characteristic made in house practice of law and made that sort of law business interface more attractive to me that's yeah so that's what that's what sort of drew me there there are lots of people who go into law and go into corporate law who have a different perspective who think about these things differently like there are some General Counsel's who really just want to be administrators and they they don't want to be in the thick of it but I mean you could even trace this further as a litigator and that's you're sort of you're talking to people you're persuading people you're trying to articulate things to people that you think are important and you want them to subscribe to the same belief so so all of that is sort of piece of the signal is it just want to see how much time we have left we have about 10 minutes before anything people have to start heading out could you comply the ones they heard the different challenges of going in yeah it's it's a great question I don't think that there's a better one's not better than the other there they're different and it depends in some respects what you really think your career is going to be and by that what I mean is that if you go in house as a litigator it's going to be probably easier to move around within the corporate environment and that's because litigation has a sort of foundational set of skills identifying risk being prepared to deal with risk understanding how conflict gets resolved which is fairly generally applicable to many things that you do in the corporate context if you go in as a transactional lawyer you will have opportunities to probably step over into the business space that don't exist for other people in the legal department but you probably won't have a lot of opportunities to move around within the legal department so if you're going as a litigator and you want to become a transactional lawyer that's not a hard step to make if you go in as a transaction lawyer and you want to become a litigator that's a difficult path to follow but if you come in as a transactional lawyer certainly some relatively small portion of people that come in that way ultimately end up on the business side right so they're supporting a business unit they learn a lot about that business unit and the the general manager of that unit says you know why don't you come work for me because I think you're really good at what you do so that exists as your transactional later if you want to be a GC I don't think that there's one or the other that's better or worse it's just that your path will look a little different but if you want to be a GC the idea is to get as much exposure as you to do a really good job at the various tasks that you do and get noticed by the company so it doesn't really matter if you're a litigator or a transaction or consider or be considered as most of you probably know that the the general principle is that corporations don't hire right out of law school the reason for that has always been that corporations aren't set up to train lawyers where law firms are very much set up to train junior lawyers the way we talked about this in the seminar is that one of the differences between being a lawyer in house and being a lawyer in a firm is that in a firm there's there's an expectation that as a junior lawyer you're learning your craft and you're you're advancing your skills when you go in house you are an expert from day one the first day you get in there and sit down at the business table with the general manager of the unit that you're supporting your the legal expert there's no thing while I'm in the first year I don't know the answer to that I'm sorry you're there because you're the legal experts on day one you have to be completely proficient so corporations usually almost inevitably wait until people have a little more experience the sweet spot I think is about three to five years and then the next sweet spot is that kind of ten to eleven year so junior partner space but for associates between three and five years is sort of the ideal time because from a corporate standpoint you've now learned the basic nuts and bolts the skills of whatever practice area you've decided to pursue but you're still sort of young enough in your career that you can learn how to do it the Intel way or learn how to do with the Apple way and so that's sort of an ideal I mean an ideal place to go I have two questions that I want to ask you before you finish so I'm gonna try to do quickly so we focused a lot on the beginning of a career like how you start going into or something like that but I'm curious what does it look like at the end of your career when you decide that how do you decide that this is the right time to retire or finish I'm sure it's different for everyone yeah for in my case it was kind of a series of things I had been doing the general counsel thing for eight years at Intel and eight years at Apple in almost nine years of 16 17 years as a general counsel and well I loved it more and more of what I was doing in the later part of my career was was really business advice it wasn't practicing law it was doing business things and I really enjoyed that part of it I also was absolutely blessed through through no particular skill on my part to be in a position by 5859 that I could retire that I was no longer an issue of of having enough money my wife kind of said look you know why are we doing this if we don't need the money why not do something else and so it was a kind of coincidence of recognizing that I didn't need to continue to be a GC and thinking if I stop at 58 59 60 then there are a lot of other things I can do with my life for the next 20 years if I continue to work until I'm 70 I probably won't have those same options so it just it was it came to a a reasonable point at which I remember sending a note to Tim saying you know I I think we sort of reached the point where this time by this time next year you should have somebody else in place he didn't respond to like five days he's just dead he sent me the most beautiful note he said sorry it took me so long to respond but I kept thinking was a nightmare and I was gonna wake up from it so it took us 18 months to find my successor and so I ended up staying a little bit longer than I had intended but but for very good reasons and we ended up with an amazing person at Apple just again war stories but when Tim and I sat down the first time to talk about finding my replacement he said we're gonna go with the outside firm Spencer Stuart will be our headhunting firm but I want you to give them a head start because you know the industry better than any of us so who are the people that you think would be great and you know give us give me a list and give Spencer a list of like your top 5 of 7 candidates whatever so I wrote down a list with 7 names on it the very top name was Kate in case the person who ultimately got the job took us 18 months to get there but from day one I thought she was the perfect pick and also another question that I want to ask you is do you feel like you've achieved your life I hope not no look I hope within the legal profession I've had an amazing time here this has been incredibly fun so you know by definition are not done in the legal world I'd like to continue to contribute I'd like to do some some other things I think in the sort of corporate context I've been there done that I mean the the legal corporate context I'm working now I'm on the board of a start-up but when you're on the board of the startup you do a lot of stuff that's not legal and everybody in the startup know that's so that's a philanthropy that's a that's a charitable organization and I am on the board of that but I'm on the board of an AI startup called c3 and and that's a lot of fun I'm having a great time doing that and I hope there are other things I'd love to do I some passions in life eradicating poverty in Africa is just one of them but there are other things that I'd like to do as well and I'm in a position now to be able to spend more time doing that and and also you know put some money behind what I'm interested in which is a real privilege it's a good question because some companies have that model none of the companies that I've afford for Intel or Apple have that model and it would be one that I'm not comfortable with if you're an attorney in the company you should ultimately report to the general counsel the reason for that import is because if you are part of a business PL then you're also part of the the ability of that general manager to either higher up or higher down and what I worry about is if the company needs to begin to trim and you're a business general manager you may well decide you know I don't actually need five lawyers I could do with four that's not a decision that a general manager should make that's a decision that the general counsel should make and so I have always insisted and have not ever had pushback that the lawyers need to be on my payroll I need to be responsible for their costs and for their training and things like that all right I think that's all the time we have I just want to say thank you so [Applause]

Channel: Before You Take the LSAT

Views: 15,269

Rating: 4.8899083 out of 5

Keywords: Bruce Sewell, Prelaw, law school, columbia law school, columbia, gw, gw university, apple, general counsel, ip law, lsat, columbia law, 1l, 2l, apple ceo, top law school, harvard law, law school admissions, george washington, george washington university, intellectual property, ip, tech law, career paths in law, lawyer, t14 law school, how to go in house, going in house, inside counsel, in house, biglaw, biglaw partner, corporate, litigation, law school vlog, law school lecture

Id: -wuf3KI76Ds

Length: 51min 41sec (3101 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 09 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Great video! Wish this sub had more like it