Issue 73 - Stanford Lawyer - Stanford University

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14 FALL 2005 Technology’s Field Generals The general counsels at Microsoft, Google, Cisco, eBay, Yahoo!, Qualcomm, Autodesk, and Oracle—<strong>Stanford</strong> Law School alums, all—have changed the face of the technology industry and redefined the role of the general counsel. WRITTEN BY JOSH MCHUGH PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER STEMBER William Neukom ’67 looked up from his desk in the Seattle offices of Shidler, McBroom, Gates & Baldwin. William H. Gates, the firm’s managing partner, had just popped his head into Neukom’s office to ask him something: “My son’s coming to Seattle. Would you be the lawyer for his company” “I don’t know why he asked me. I wasn’t an expert in any particular area—kind of a country lawyer, doing a little bit of everything,” recalled Neukom 26 years later. “But when the managing partner says, ‘Will you’ you say ‘Sure!’” Six years after that conversation, Neukom went back to his managing partner to make the case that it was time for their client, Microsoft Corp., to have its own legal department. Some of the partners might have been concerned about losing a client, an experienced lawyer, and lots of billable hours. They may also have been mystified that a partner would want to alter the trajectory of his career path to go in-house—especially with a company that, at the time, cast a relatively short shadow on the national corporate landscape. But Gates senior agreed with Neukom’s recommendation, as did Microsoft, which then formed a legal department and asked Neukom to head it. The rest is history. Twenty years ago, the title of general counsel often evoked a cozy sinecure, a haven far from the high-pressure partner track, a semi-retirement spent vetting corporate documents and keeping regular hours. But a group of <strong>Stanford</strong> Law School graduates at the legal helm of some of the world’s most powerful technology companies has played a critical role in redefining the job. Today’s high-tech general counsels have a hand in nearly every major strategy decision their companies make, from designing the legal infrastructure underlying the new markets their companies are creating to shaping international policies on technology and intellectual property. They are the field generals of their companies’ senior executive teams, experts in the tactical execution of high-level strategies.
FIELD GENERALS 15 STANFORD LAWYER David Drummond ’89 Vice President, Corporate Development, and General Counsel, Google William Neukom ’67 Chair, Preston Gates & Ellis; former Executive Vice President of Law and Corporate Affairs, Microsoft
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