From J.D. to CEO: Legal Training an Advantage for Corporate Leaders
When Troy Bader ’88 launched his legal career 30 years ago, his long-term interest was in a transactional practice. His immediate impulse, though, was to get into the courtroom and try cases.
He’d just graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School and landed a position at Gray Plant Mooty in Minneapolis, working in the firm’s commercial litigation practice area. While he enjoyed arguing for his clients, he’d begun working in litigation largely because he thought he needed to develop his oral skills in front of large groups— and after a few years, his interest in a broader commercial practice reasserted itself. “I came to realize that I didn’t want to just resolve conflict,” Bader recalls. “I wanted to help organizations build longer-lasting value and help these organizations grow.”
Fortunately for Bader, he was working in the firm’s franchise and distribution practice group, which gave him the opportunity to expand his practice with a number of clients, one of which was Edina-based International Dairy Queen. Bader developed a strong relationship with DQ, and in 2001 the company offered him a position as head of its mall division. By that time, Bader was a partner at Gray Plant Mooty and was co-chairing the franchise and distribution group. But he wanted new challenges, and the DQ offer intrigued him. “I was counseling my clients on business topics every day, but I never walked in their shoes,” he says. “For my continued growth—and I would even say credibility, and to be a better lawyer—I needed to walk in their shoes.”
In so doing, Bader joined a small, but potentially growing cadre of CEOs who have J.D.s. According to an August 2017 article in the Harvard Business Review by University of Chicago law professor Todd Henderson, 9 percent of the 3,500 CEOs that he and three colleagues examined in a massive study had law degrees. Other findings from the study raised the question Why aren’t there more? The study found, for example, that firms headed by lawyer CEOs experienced significantly less corporate litigation—ranging from 16 to 74 percent, depending on the litigation type. They found further that, particularly for companies operating in environments that involve high litigation risk or high compliance requirements, the more risk-averse policies favored by lawyer CEOs enhanced company value.
‘Legal Training Brings An Advantage’
Professor John Matheson, who directs the Corporate Institute at the Law School, believes there is a growing perception in corporate America about the potential benefits of naming CEOs who have J.D.s. “The milieu today is one where risk management is an important topic,” he says. “One reason there will be more J.D.s as CEOs is that a bigger piece of the business pie is risk management and compliance. They understand how to manage risk and how to follow the law.”
“The rap is that lawyers are risk-averse, but I’m not sure that’s the case,” says the Law School’s dean, Garry W. Jenkins. “I would argue that they understand risk better. And certainly they understand risk management.”
But beyond risk management and legal compliance, Jenkins argues, lawyers possess many other attributes that lend themselves to business leadership.
“I think legal training brings an advantage to running any kind of organization,” he says. “Certainly the analytical skills, the reasoning skills, the critical-thinking skills, the project-management skills have applicability beyond law. People with these skills have the opportunity to not just practice law, but also lead organizations, whether they be corporate entities or nonprofit organizations or government agencies.”
Matheson agrees.
“We’re not just teaching students risk management and compliance with the law,” he says. “We’re teaching students now to be leaders and problem solvers. We’re trying to train lawyers to be at the head of their organizations, to be problem solvers—and not just to fix things when they go wrong, but to solve them in advance.”
The Route To The Boardroom
In sharing stories about their own career paths, Law School graduates who have become CEOs make it clear that there’s no such thing as a typical route. But while their tales of advancement to top executive positions are diverse, there are also similarities and common themes. The CEOs interviewed for this article all maintain, for instance, that the primary benefit of their J.D.s is not so much technical knowledge of the law, but rather the range of skills that they as lawyers have had to master and that are applicable in toplevel management.
“A J.D. is a wonderful thing to have in your pocket, especially in tough negotiations or tough situations that are fraught with peril,” says Liwanag Ojala ’98, CEO of CaringBridge, an Eagan-based nonprofit that connects people on health journeys with loved ones via private websites. “I think what’s most important for me is the critical thinking and the assessment of risk, which CEOs have to be good at because there are risks in almost any strategic decision you make. This ability to think critically about risk—about what chances to take and how you weigh the analysis against that—has been very helpful for me in my career.”
“The requirements, the rigors, and, frankly, the Socratic method that’s exercised in law school are quite helpful. When you’re a CEO, you’re put on the spot all the time—media, your own employees, your board, your colleagues. The ability to know how to respond to questions, how to articulate big ideas and make them concise, these are skills that I think are developed throughout law school.”
As a student at Minnesota Law, Ojala thought she wanted to be a litigator. She took a summer-associate internship in the litigation group at Gray Plant Mooty after her first year, but her career goals shifted a year later with a summer internship at Briggs and Morgan. There, she got her first taste of business law—and realized that’s what she wanted for a career.
After receiving her J.D. in 1998, Ojala joined Briggs and Morgan and practiced in the firm’s business law group, handling mergers and acquisitions, real-estate financing, and general business counseling. After two years, she received an offer she couldn’t refuse to join the legal department at Nash Finch (now SpartanNash), a Fortune 500 food distributor and retail grocer, and thus began her climb up the corporate ladder.
In 2004 she joined SimonDelivers, an online grocer. She was the president of SimonDelivers when it was purchased in 2008 by Coborn’s, which then launched CobornDelivers.com, where she was general manager of e-commerce.
Her career path next led her to Meijer.com, a general-commerce e-merchandise business in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After two and a half years there, she stepped back and did some thinking about her life.
“After all those years of working in digital commerce, I started to do an evaluation,” she recalls. “‘OK, I have skills as a digital executive, and how am I really bringing that to bear on the greater community?’
“And that’s when I sort of took a pause.”
She left Meijer and took a year off. The job offers came, Ojala says, but she was looking for something that would provide a new kind of fulfillment. Then one day a recruiter contacted her to gauge her interest in moving into the nonprofit world with CaringBridge, which was looking for a chief operating officer. Ojala was already aware of CaringBridge and the support it had provided for her husband’s cousin’s father late in his life.
“The excitement for me was: How do I apply the expertise and what I’ve learned in the for-profit world to this nonprofit business that is very unique?”
Ojala accepted the position as COO. Just over a year later, she was promoted to CEO after the founder of CaringBridge, Sona Mehring, retired. CaringBridge has pioneered a system that allows people to create their own websites—in its 21 years of existence, more than 740,000 have been created—for purposes of sharing and receiving information from family members and friends during a health journey. Last year, CaringBridge had $8.1 million in revenue—90 percent of which ($7.4 million) came from individual donations.
“Mission-driven work is the best,” Ojala says. “I was selling things before—and there’s nothing wrong with that. But when you do mission-driven work and you see the impact on people who have used the service, it’s very satisfying.”
Another Track for a J.D. CEO
Unlike some future J.D. CEOs who identified their ultimate calling after a bit of initial trial and error, Peter Gilbertson ’79 always knew he wanted a career that had something to do with trains. A St. Paul native, Gilbertson got an undergraduate degree in history at the University of Denver, where he once wrote an honors thesis about railroads in which he argued that, contrary to popular belief at the time, they might have a future.
During law school, Gilbertson met the former chief counsel of the Federal Railroad Administration who was opening a law firm in Washington, D.C., focusing on administrative law for clients in various transportation enterprises. In 1980, shortly after Gilbertson joined the firm, Congress passed the Staggers Act, a law that suddenly altered the economic viability of short-line, freight-hauling railroads. The act largely deregulated the industry, allowing owners to abandon unprofitable lines—of which there were many. The result was a new opportunity for investors to buy them and operate them without the previous regulatory shackles.
“But what I learned during that nine months,” he says, “was that there could be a viable business underneath all that.”
Therefore, rather than look for a new job as a lawyer, Gilbertson saw short-line railroads as an opportunity he wanted to pursue. He and his wife moved to Chicago, where he and others pulled together the money to buy a rail line between Chicago and South Bend, Indiana, that was in bankruptcy. The new Chicago South Shore & South Bend Railroad proved to be successful, and four years later the group acquired 106 miles of rail line from Conrail to create the Louisville & Indiana Railroad. Three years after that, in 1997, Anacostia Rail Holdings was formed and Gilbertson became the CEO. Since then, Anacostia has added four more railroads to its holdings.
As Gilbertson describes it, running a railroad presents myriad legal challenges. Every grade crossing creates a “natural point of friction,” and the company has responded to that risk by installing locomotive video cameras that automatically activate at every crossing to provide evidence in the event of a lawsuit. Another quirky legal area involves workplace injuries, which are governed by a unique body of law, the Federal Employers Liability Act. Unlike workers’ compensation, FELA is a fault-based system in which injured workers must prove negligence by the railroad.
“Risk management is a huge issue in this business,” Gilbertson says. But he makes it clear that he loves the day-to-day challenge of pursuing his lifelong passion.
“The industry has really come back,” he says. “It’s such an old industry, but we can still make fairly significant produc-tivity improvements. Part of it is technology, but part of it is just operating in a more disciplined way. There are always new things we can do, and that’s what makes it fun.”
Foundations of Becoming a Philanthropic CEO
Like Gilbertson, David Etzwiler ’90 had a strong inkling at an early age about the kind of career he wanted to pursue. Etzwiler is the CEO of the Siemens Foundation, the corporate philanthropic arm of Siemens USA, the American division of the German electronics technology conglomerate.
He grew up in Edina, one of four children of Donnell and Marion Etzwiler, who devoted significant portions of their lives to nonprofit work. His father was a physician who founded the International Diabetes Center, and his mother was the executive director of the Minneapolis Foundation for a decade and a community activist her entire life.
“They talked to us about the fact that there was a fair amount of privilege that we were born into and that leaving the world better than you found it was kind of an obligation,” Etzwiler recalls. “But the bigger thing was that I saw tremendous joy in their work with teams on social justice issues.”
He went to Northwestern University for a bachelor’s degree in history and political science, and then to Claremont Graduate University for a master’s in public policy.
“By the time I finished my public policy master’s and was coming back to the University of Minnesota, I was pretty certain I wanted to get into the foundation world,” he says.
First, though, he worked in two Minneapolis law firms—Best & Flanagan, and Leonard, Street and Deinard—where he focused on estate planning. After five years working in those firms, he left to join The Family Partnership, a Minneapolis nonprofit that provides services to vulnerable families, as an executive associate, and then, a year later, he became interim CEO of what is now FamilyMeans in Stillwater. From there, another year later, he landed his first foundation job as director of the Allina Foundation’s Day One Project, which focused on reducing domestic violence.
After three years, he joined Medtronic, where he would remain for 13 years and rise to the position of vice president of community affairs and executive director of the Medtronic Foundation. He left to take a position with the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic as executive director of a state-funded initiative called Decade of Discovery, devoted to the elimination of type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Two years after that, he got a call from a recruiter wondering if he’d be interested in heading the Siemens Foundation as CEO. He took the job and has been working for the Washington, D.C.-based foundation, mostly from his home office in Minneapolis, ever since.
He describes his work at Siemens as carrying forward an approach that he developed at Medtronic: leveraging the firm’s assets through its foundation division to serve the community. At Medtronic, that meant helping underserved people with heart disease and diabetes. At Siemens, the focus has been on workforce development— and in particular on middle-skill jobs that don’t require a four-year degree and that pay good wages. Under Etzwiler’s leadership, the Siemens Foundation is partnering with the Aspen Institute, New America, and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, among others, to scale proven models of middle-skill job training and rebrand those careers in the eyes of all Americans.
Every step of the way in his career, Etzwiler considers his J.D. to have been valuable, as he has had to learn how each organization operates.
“There is that intuitive sense of knowing how to approach a problem, break it down into specific issues, and articulate it in the most efficient way possible,” he says. “Those core skills seem pedestrian when we think of them as lawyers, but we sometimes don’t understand how solid they are when you’ve been trained well.”
At Dairy Queen, Bader had a similar assessment of how his J.D. has been helpful in his own corporate career.
“I think that as a lawyer you’re not as intimidated by something that’s new,” he says. “At least for me it wasn’t; for me it was the next challenge.
“I think that you know how to attack the issues, how to break them down. You’re not overwhelmed by the new areas of responsibility. You know how to learn and, ultimately, how to manage the unfamiliar.”
