- Reflecting on your time at Davis Graham, what was the most valuable lesson you learned?
- It’s extremely difficult to narrow it down to a single lesson. If forced to choose one, I would say it is that building and maintaining relationships matters. Obviously, you must continually grow as an attorney and become better, especially as a junior attorney when the learning curve is the steepest. However, if that is all that you do, then you are missing out on the people side, which matters just as much and is even more rewarding. I couldn’t be prouder of being associated with Davis Graham, the attorneys there (past and present), and the clients.
- How did your time at Davis Graham prepare you for your role at Black Rock?
- Being in-house at a rapidly growing company, with a very lean legal department (single attorney, and an administrative assistant that splits her time helping out the development team), means that on a given day I’m asked to weigh in on topics ranging from securities to real estate, to corporate governance, to intellectual property, to litigation strategy, to insurance claims, and to human resources. Some issues are really important to the company, and others are less material, but still important to the person that asked. Luckily, at Davis Graham, I was often the point person for clients and would then direct them to the firm’s internal specialist, where I learned as much as I could from them about their disciplines. Now, my job is not so different, as internally people expect me to know all laws in all states at all times (I don’t), so I have to figure out when to get specialists involved.
- What is the biggest difference between working at Davis Graham and running an in-house legal department?
- Budgets. At Davis Graham, I was fortunate to be insulated from budgets for the most part (thank you Sara Kraeski and the rest of the Executive Committee). Because of that, I was able to focus on practicing law and trying to build a practice. Now, while not necessarily the first questions asked, but certainly questions that ultimately always get asked are “How much will this cost? Did we budget for it? What will it do to our financial results? Do we still need it with that in mind?”.
- What is your favorite memory of working at Davis Graham?
- It’s hard to pinpoint one, but I’ll tell a a story I told many junior associates. I had been at the firm for about a month when I had the opportunity to work with John Elofson on a registration statement for PDC Energy, Inc. (two relationships that would define a large part of my time at Davis Graham). I was adding little value to John on this Saturday afternoon, but he asked me to do two things (i) make and handful of changes to the prospectus (by hand) and (ii) scan and send those changes to the financial printer. Only problem, I misspelled the same word 4 times in my hand markup and didn’t know how to use the scanner yet. John, graciously, taught me that day how to spell and how to use the scanner, despite it making him stay at the office an extra hour to correct my mistakes. I circle back to the story often because I like to believe that at some point over the years, through hard work and dedication, I earned John’s trust despite my spelling and scanning ability.
- Who are some of the people at Davis Graham that had the greatest influence on you and why?
- These lists always get you in trouble because you inevitably leave off people that influenced you and deserve to be mentioned, but I’ll give it a shot. Chris Richardson was the first attorney I ever met, and once I learned he worked at Davis Graham, I knew that’s where I wanted to work because I wanted to be just like him. Ron Levine for hiring me (despite not going through the proper channels, as I would learn is typical for Ron). Kristin Lentz, John Elofson, Patricia Peterson and Deborah Friedman for teaching me to be a lawyer. And, Jon Bergman and Sam Niebrugge for mentoring me and being my friend as I transitioned into the partnership.
