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Jumping the fence: Could you do your client's job? Should you?
Featured: Sandi Kellman (JD '77), David Drew (JD '77), Tom Morsch (JD '55),
Jim Reiman (JD '80)
Alumni in the News
Featured: David Rone (JD '87), Gay Parks Rainville (JD '88), David Hill (JD '88),
Jim Reiman (JD '80)
Law School Update
Law Review editors relish a century's good work
Featured: Georgia Alexakis (JD '06), Richard C. Tallman (JD '78), Dawn Clark
Netsch (JD '52), Harold Shapiro (JD '52), Jeffrey Berger (JD '03), Kate Shaw (JD '06)
Celebrity profession or civil procedure?
Featured: Evan Eschmeyer (JD-MBA '08), Devon Spurgeon (JD '06)
Alumni Profiles
Shake well: Howard Tullman's (JD '70) recipe for a turnaround well done
Action! Ivy Bierman (JD '87) combines arts, law in L.A.
Joan Safford (JD '76): Justice without borders
View all Class Notes and submit your own
Jumping the fence: Could you do your client's job? Should you?
Look before you leap
Sandi Kellman (JD '77), a partner in the real estate group at DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, has pulled off so many deals in the last 30 years that she could
do the routine on autopilot. She knows her clients' businesses so well she could probably run them
herself.
Come to think of it, why doesn't she?
Why don't you? If you're a lawyer like Kellman whose clients include businesspeople and entrepreneurs—retailers, money managers, investors, developers, you name it—chances are you've thought about trading places and becoming the client. Kellman says she'll entertain the idea "from time to time," especially during the letdown that follows a big deal: when her client is charging ahead into the next phase of the business plan while she's back at the office with a different client, again at square one.
So far, though, she has resisted the urge to try her hand at real estate development. "I've seen the downside," Kellman says. "It's a very cyclical business, and maybe I'm too risk averse or something. I also really enjoy what I'm doing."
Clear your head
In contrast, David Drew (JD '77), Kellman's Northwestern Law classmate and a colleague at what was then the boutique real estate firm of Rudnick & Wolfe, made the jump and is now a developer. He says he can't imagine going back, that "being a lawyer again wouldn't give me the freedom or sense of ownership that are so important to me." He also loves what he does now — its variety, the deal making, and immersing himself in details like a new home's custom library or a shopping center's monthly cash flow.
But meanwhile, Kellman says the same things about her job. She calls
herself a "deal junkie" who loves the variety,
the pace, the people, and the pressure to perform. "My job is
less about risk and reward [than a developer's], but as a partner here
I have my own set of risks and rewards," she says. "They're
different, but for me they're dramatic. I get the deal kick, I get
to build my clients' businesses, I'm very well compensated, and I'm
part of a giant firm so I have that support. And I'm sure plenty of
clients think, ‘Wouldn't it be nice to get a paycheck every month like
Kellman does?'"
Probably—but that's a topic for Kellogg World to tackle. One thing is sure, however: The steady pay keeps plenty of lawyers at their desks. Just ask Tom Morsch (JD '55), a longtime firm attorney who now advises entrepreneurs as director of Northwestern Law's Small Business Opportunity Center.
"The law is both terribly narrow and terribly lucrative. You're so protected, and the money is so good that it takes an unusual person to say, ‘I'm kissing all of this goodbye,'" says Morsch. "But the law firm environment can be frustratingly antiseptic, and as people ask themselves whether they want to do these same agreements and deal with these same people for the rest of their lives, this other path [in business] starts to look more attractive. They look at their clients and think, ‘They're no smarter than I am.'"
Stick the landing
So the next question is, are lawyers succeeding after making the jump? Kellman
and Drew agree: Sometimes. Both say that in business a lawyer's analytical
mind can be a big leg-up, but a lawyer's trademark caution can be crippling.
For example, Jim Reiman (JD '80), CEO of Chinese cellphone retailer EBT Mobile (see Alumni in the News), attributes his entrepreneurial success to his legal training. "You learn how to think critically, to see all sides of an issue, segment problems, prioritize pieces, devise a path, and then reassemble the pieces into the correct form."
Similarly, Drew says his Northwestern JD gave him an invaluable foundation and essential skills for business, especially the issue-spotting techniques he learned from Professor Bob Bennett. But Drew also warns, "Law school pounds into your head an analytical approach that doesn't lead to entrepreneurial behavior. You can become almost too refined in your thinking. You paper the deal, always protecting your client, and if you let it, it's a leveling of your spirit."
Kellman says she's seen those traits in some of the lawyers-turned-developers she's encountered. "Their mindset is different," she says. "They go into the business world and can't make a decision without seeing 20 memos exploring every option. To be a good real estate developer you have to be able to go with your gut and be confident that you can recognize a good deal. The lawyer's mind can get in the way."
So Morsch's advice for lawyers considering the jump has added meaning: "If you're prepared to take the risk, then do it." — SH
Rone takes reins at Fox College Sports
Fox Sports Network (FSN) executive David Rone (JD '87) is taking
charge of Fox College Sports (FCS) in addition to his role as a deal maker
for FSN. FCS is a suite of three regionally programmed channels dedicated
to college sports. The channels draw heavily on Fox's local and regional
sports networks for content. Rone hopes to add more original programming
this year.
"This is a move toward having a business that I can operate, mold, and grow," says Rone, who ranked 40th in Sports Illustrated' s 2004 list of the most influential minority figures in sports. "I've had a senior role but haven't run a business. This FCS experience will give me a platform to run bigger networks in the future."
Rone led the Fox team that acquired rights to the Bowl Championship Series, and FCS will be a major venue for Fox's use of the rights starting this year.
Rone serves on the Law Board, the Law School's top advisory committee.
Third time the charm for Rainville, Pepper?
"This is it," says Gay Parks Rainville (JD '88) about
returning in August for her third stint at Philadelphia's Pepper Hamilton. "Of
course I always say that." After a year as in-house counsel for
the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Rainville says she "realized
the grass wasn't greener. I missed being a litigator, missed being on
the front line."
Rainville, a partner who specializes in complex commercial litigation, started at Pepper as an associate fresh from Northwestern in 1988. She left in 1994, returned as a partner in 2000, then left again for the hospital last year.
She says her most recent homecoming was warm. "Everybody—from the mail room staff to the executive partner—came by to say hello. There's a collegiality about Pepper that I took for granted."
Hill weathers challenges in DOE post
David Hill (JD '88) was in for a busy fall. Appointed general counsel
to the U.S. Department of Energy in late summer, he was charged with implementing
the newly passed energy bill he had helped to create while deputy general
counsel.
Then Hurricane Katrina struck on August 29, devastating one of the nation's leading natural gas-producing regions. Hill says he was glad the bill, passed just one month earlier, included measures like easing restrictions on the movement of gasoline and diesel fuel supplies, which Hill says are very helpful in crises. Hill praised his team's response to Katrina, pointing to their experience facing the 2003 blackout in the Northeast.
Hill says the energy bill's implementation has been smooth, much like his own transition. He adds, "I am enthusiastic about the work we do and the contribution we make. This is a great job in a great department."
Like Rone, Hill is on the Law Board.
Cellphone CEO Reiman takes AIM
Jim Reiman (JD '80), chairman of top Chinese mobile-phone retailer EBT Mobile,
recently took the company public on the London Stock Exchange's Alternative
Investment Market (AIM). Reiman, who lives in Winnetka, logged more than 300,000
air miles shuttling between the United States, Europe, and Asia to complete what he
describes as "the most complicated transaction I've ever been part of."
He chose the London AIM partly because it is geared toward emerging companies like EBT, and also because European investors are familiar with China's mobile-phone market model, in which consumers buy phones outright rather than having them included with service contracts. Reiman adds that EBT is unique among Chinese companies in that it meets Western standards of retailing practice and corporate governance under a leadership that is—except for Reiman and one other executive—all from China.
Reiman admits it's a good time to be in business in China: "I'm usually fighting the curve. I've never ridden one before."
—SH
Law Review editors relish a century's good work
By Georgia Alexakis (JD '06), special sections editor, Northwestern
University Law Review
It is getting late on a beautiful Thursday afternoon in the Law School's Atrium. A handful of students are still here, checking e-mail and making weekend plans. For third-year students with smartly planned class schedules, the weekend is already at hand. For first- and second-year students, it's tantalizingly close.
The week is winding down all across campus except for a cramped fifth-floor conference room in the Rubloff Building where the action is just heating up:
"There's no way we can publish that! The author's argument is entirely muddled — not to mention unoriginal."
"I completely disagree! You've missed the entire point of the article."
"Set all that aside. Do we really want a piece on Kantian moral autonomy? I mean, who's going to read it?"
No, it's not an Oprah's Book Club discussion gone awry. Rather,
it's a meeting of the Northwestern University Law Review articles
board, the few hours each week when 10 third-year law students get
together to debate, wrangle, and haggle over the articles they will
publish. Close to 2,000 manuscripts are submitted annually, most by
junior law faculty from across the country with their eyes on the tenure
prize. Less than 20 submissions will make the cut—and none from
this meeting.
But as the editors file out, some are still arguing the merits of just-axed pieces.
Such is the passion inspired by the Law Review. Well, passion might not be the word, since the journal is dedicated to promoting legal scholarship, usually in the form of long, dense, heavily footnoted, and, dare I say it, occasionally stodgy articles. But in 2006 the Law Reviewwill mark its centennial, celebrating a century of advancing legal thinking and helping budding lawyers, judges, and academics fine-tune their legal research and writing skills.
"Editing the Law Review was an invaluable experience which has served me well over the years," says Richard C. Tallman (JD78), a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and a former executive editor of the Law Review. He says he gained both writing and mediation skills: "Some authors were sensitive about taking suggestions from student editors, and it required judiciousness and finesse to convince them that the changes were improvements. Those same skills came in handy later in my profession," Tallman says.
In January the Law School will host a centennial celebration with Tallman as keynote speaker, and the Law Review will publish a special 100th "Symposium Issue." Included in the issue will be a history of the journal coauthored by Law School professor emerita Dawn Clark Netsch (JD '52) and long-time adjunct lecturer Harold Shapiro* (JD '52), both members of the 1951–52 editorial board that gave the journal its current name.
Among Netsch and Shapiro's findings: the history of the Law Review, like so many Northwestern Law traditions, can be traced to Dean John Henry Wigmore. In 1906 Wigmore wanted to found the region's first law review, which meant beating the Universities of Chicago and Illinois to the punch. The Illinois Law Review, as the journal was first known, published its inaugural issue just three months after it was first proposed.
But no official history can fully capture the pulse of life on the journal: the long hours, the friendships forged under deadline pressure, and the satisfaction of holding a flawless new issue in your hands.
"In the third year of law school a lot of people are toning it down a bit, but not the Law Review staff," recalls Jeffrey Berger (JD '03), another former Law Review editor in chief. "Being editor was absolutely worth the sacrifice. I wanted to challenge myself and be involved in something bigger. The Law Review gave me that opportunity. And I'll never forget what it felt like to hold a copy of our first issue."
In Berger's experience the Law Review' s former editors in chief share a special bond. When he joined the Chicago office of Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw after graduation, Berger almost instantly became close colleagues with two other former Law Review editors in chief there, and this summer he worked alongside Mayer Brown summer associate Kate Shaw (JD '06), the journal's current editor in chief.
"Jeff seemed to have an automatic faith in my abilities," Shaw says. "Because of our common Law Review bond, it seemed we were close even before we got to know each other."
For Shapiro it's no surprise that he's still close friends with many of his fellow Law Review former editors, including Netsch, because "it was like sharing a foxhole with people. You truly, truly got to know them."
And it's a safe bet that editors of future issues will feel just as Shapiro says he, Netsch, and their Law Review colleagues did: "We accomplished something major. We created one hell of a book — a book and a half."
*Beloved Law School alumnus, adjunct faculty member, and 1951–52 Law Review editor in chief Harold "Hal" Shapiro died in December 2005.
Celebrity profession or civil procedure?
Of the students each year who come to law as a second career, few are leaving dream jobs behind. Even fewer are giving up professional stardom. But two students now at Northwestern Law did just that.
Evan Eschmeyer (JD-MBA '08) is used to being a big
man on campus—both literally and figuratively. An inch shy of seven feet tall, he was a
basketball All-American for the Northwestern Wildcats in the late 1990s. Now, after
his bad knees ended a six-year career with the New Jersey Nets, Dallas Mavericks, and Golden
State Warriors, he's back at Northwestern.
"It sounded strange telling people I was retired at 29," Eschmeyer says. "At first it didn't feel like I was making a transition so much as it felt like I was finished."
Two experiences during Eschmeyer's NBA career steered him towards the Law School's joint-degree program in law and business. First, while involved in the NBA Players Association he observed some excellent lawyers in action. "I was able to see how they thought, analyzed situations, and drew conclusions, and that was very impressive to me."
Second, he and a friend from Northwestern started a dot-com that offered college athletes a streamlined way of exchanging information with recruiters. The company didn't outlast the dot-com bubble, but Eschmeyer caught the entrepreneurial bug.
"I really liked that there was some ownership involved, that success or failure depended on what I did," Eschmeyer says. "Anyone who succeeds in life is a risk taker. It's just a matter of how you learn from your experiences and how you incorporate what you've learned into your next opportunity."
So in late 2004, soon after he and his doctor determined that his knees could not withstand another NBA season, Eschmeyer applied to Northwestern's JD-MBA program. But the transition wouldn't be easy.
"When you've already had the ultimate, you worry that whatever you do next is going to be second-string," he says. "But I feel there are goals out there that I have yet to achieve, and my life would be unfulfilled if I didn't give everything I had to go after them. This program will help me zero in."
Now that he's back in school, what will motivate this multimillionaire to study all night for exams?
"Evan is relentless in his approach to everything," says Kevin O'Neill, Eschmeyer's head coach at Northwestern and now an assistant with the NBA's Indiana Pacers. "He has a great work ethic, great people skills, great leadership skills. And he works hard every day."
Sure enough, on the first day of fall term Eschmeyer was front and center in Sue Provenzano's Communications and Legal Reasoning class. "I want to be in the front row because I want to learn. I know that may sound completely cheesy, but it's the truth and it's partly why I'm excited to be here. There have been only a few other instances in my life where I've thought that I could apply what I was learning in class to something concrete."
Lately he's been giving thought to a future business that would help develop renewable fuels. "I'd like the United States to be completely nondependent on foreign fuel sources," he says. "That's a pretty lofty goal, but if I can contribute to it in a significant way, it'll be worth me giving up some time on a river fishing."
Eschmeyer has quit telling people he's retired. "Now I say I'm a law student."
Devon Spurgeon (JD '06) always figured she'd go to law school. But after wrapping up her bachelor's degree in 1997, she was too tired of classes to press on right away. Plus, she had a chance to do administrative work for Washington Post columnist Bob Levey. She hadn't taken a single journalism class, but living in D.C. sounded like fun, so she went.
While at the Post, Spurgeon had a few assignments
to write small articles, and she made the most of them. After a year
she transferred to the paper's New York bureau, where her job involved
more reporting and writing. She liked it, she was good at it, and soon
she had scraped together a portfolio good enough to earn her a job as
a crime reporter at the Baltimore Sun. Spurgeon spent 14 months
there, honing her skills and breaking a couple of big stories. She later
moved to the Wall Street Journal's Chicago bureau, and in 2001
the Journal of Financial Reporting named her one of the 30
best financial journalists under 30. She loved the pace, her proximity
to news and newsmakers, and knowing that her stories affected the market.
But in 2003 she left the Journal and enrolled at Northwestern Law.
"As a journalist you're chronicling decisions that other people make. You're an observer," explains Spurgeon. "As a lawyer you're driving those decisions. It's much more intellectually satisfying to me to be making the decisions than writing about them."
Becoming a lawyer was attractive to Spurgeon also because, as she says, "the law is always evolving." She felt that the promise of ongoing personal and professional growth was missing from her work in journalism and that her early success had become a problem for her. "I felt that once I had reached a certain level in journalism, it just meant that I had the necessary skills and could apply them to different stories," she says. "My fundamental skills would never have been forced to evolve, whereas in law the challenges are continuous."
Choosing law also kept a family tradition, as Spurgeon will be a fourth-generation lawyer. She's also not far from the news business: her husband, Kevin Helliker, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer for the Wall Street Journal.
After two years at Northwestern, Spurgeon isn't second-guessing herself. She'll head to the Chicago office of Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood after graduation. And she's started to see parallels between her old job and her new one.
"I think corporate law is very interesting. Being a lawyer means being ethically bound to represent someone's interests, and I think you have that as a journalist, too. As a lawyer you are committed to making sure your clients get the best deal possible, and that's something I take incredibly seriously." — SH
Shake well: Howard Tullman's recipe for a turnaround well done
"There's nothing more entrepreneurial than starting a restaurant," says
Howard Tullman (JD '70), and he ought to know: He's founded or run more than
a dozen companies, including a video game developer, a music web site, and
a data provider for the auto insurance industry. Then again, while he's successfully
invested in several restaurants, he's never been a restaurateur.
But in late 2002, "with no background in food and
no interest in food," Tullman became president of Kendall College,
long regarded as one of the nation's best culinary schools but with
a future threatened by financial distress. The board of trustees gave
him carte blanche, including the option to close Kendall's doors after
67 years.
Tullman, however, had a turnaround in mind and took on the challenge with the boldness and flair of an artisan chef. For starters, he moved Kendall from its aging Evanston facilities to Chicago's industrial Goose Island neighborhood. It's now in an eight-story building combining classrooms and kitchens, financed in part by such food giants as Kraft, Leo J. Shapiro, and Sara Lee, which use space at Kendall for product development, focus group testing, and special events. There's even a kitchen that doubles as a TV studio. Postmodern art is everywhere, on loan from Tullman.
He also partnered with for-profit Laureate Education on a $25 million loan to cover the balance of the relocation costs, a step that brought Laureate's renowned Les Roches School of Hotel Management to Kendall. If all goes according to plan, Laureate will exercise an option to buy Kendall in 2007.
So far, so good. But then he told the faculty he was eliminating tenure.
Gulp.
"I told them, ’You may sleep with that three-year contract under your pillow, but you're kidding yourselves.The school doesn't have enough money to last three months, and I'm not signing anything that makes a promise I can't keep,’" recalls Tullman.
Not everyone responded positively, and as Tullman points out, "the fact that these chefs were working with fire and knives made it even more challenging."
And he didn't stop there. He demanded more hours from faculty, brought in new technology, and expected longtime chefs to learn how to use it. He hired new faculty with different styles and backgrounds. And he did it all in his exceptionally blunt, extremely demanding style.
"If I had it to do over," he concedes, "I would be less profane." But even as Tullman made what he calls "ridiculous and disproportionate demands," he earned the faculty's respect with his hard work, caring, and honesty.
"These were people who had gotten stale," says Tullman, "but it's not like their heart wasn't in it. They were educators. Our job was to reinvigorate them.
"All authority comes from authenticity, and I never said one word that wasn't true. Over time, if you are consistent, do what you said you'd do, and you see small victories and show progress, people of goodwill give you the benefit of the doubt."
Now that Tullman's ways are working at Kendall, he's already started his next venture, also in education: a company that gives upper-elementary school kids the chance to see what it's like to run a city. Tullman isn't leaving Kendall just yet, but he knows that the shelf life of a turnaround artist is short.
And before he leaves Kendall he wants to pass his entrepreneurial "cookbook for change" onto a few of Kendall's budding restaurateurs: "I can't teach somebody to be an entrepreneur, but I can teach entrepreneurs to be a lot smarter about how to face common, recurring business problems. You don't get to be Emeril until you've spent five years chopping extremely rigid corners on cubed carrots." — SH
Action! Ivy Bierman combines arts, law in L.A.
By Jodie Rosello (JD '07)
Ivy Kagan Bierman (JD '87) says her aspiration to be a performer almost derailed her legal career.
Instead she found ways to integrate law and her love of the arts — first by stealing the show as a law student in Northwestern's annual Wigmore Follies productions, later by emerging as a preeminent entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles.
"It's important to be passionate about what you do," says Bierman, who has successfully carved out a niche for herself by focusing on labor law — both transactional work and litigation — in the area that has always interested her: the entertainment industry. She has counseled studios as well as performers and is an expert on matters relating to the Writers Guild, Directors Guild, and Screen Actors Guild. She attributes her success to having a narrow focus and proving herself versatile within it.
"Establishing and cultivating a specialized expertise was crucial for me," says Bierman. She is also an expert at spreading the word: The extroverted Bierman finds an outlet for her performer's instincts by participating frequently in symposia and other speaking events, including a panel on entertainment law at Northwestern Law's John Henry Wigmore Club Dinner in 2004. She says that "public events that are of interest both to attorneys in the field and also to executives and clients in the industry are great ways to expose yourself and build rapport."
Joan Safford: Justice without borders
Joan Safford (JD '76) never planned to be a federal prosecutor. Even
the feds were surprised. When U.S. Attorney Tom Sullivan hired Safford two
years out of law school in 1978, officials delayed her clearance while they
investigated her various trips through Latin America in the 1960s.
She kept the job for the next quarter-century, at times traveling back to Bolivia and Chile as the office's international security coordinator. Those trips stimulated an interest in Latin American criminal justice systems, and in 2002 Safford left the U.S. Attorney's Office to take a position as a Department of Justice attaché to Mexico, where she focused on the extradition of fugitives.
Safford arrived in Mexico City at a time when the U.S. government was struggling with extradition requests for several reasons. Not least of these was a Mexican law barring extradition for fugitives who faced sentences of either death or life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. U.S. state sentencing statutes often prevented American officials from satisfying the Mexican government demands. Safford was frustrated when she could not win extradition in cases involving crimes she describes as "horrific, vengeful, mammoth, and corrupting", a change from her Illinois work, which involved mostly nonviolent crime. The breakthrough came when Safford figured out that the Mexican objection to life imprisonment did not extend to lengthy prison terms or stacked sentences.
"For someone who marched around as a young person, to feel effective is gratifying," says Safford. She takes particular pride in the cooperative spirit she helped foster with Mexican officials. "They're very talented, very young, and very dedicated to what they're doing. It was a joy for me as a teacher—which I can say because these people are younger than my children—to work with people who cared so much and whose courage was really something."
Safford came back to Chicago earlier this year. After working for several months on a limited basis for the U.S. Attorney's Office, she is now retired—sort of. She was back in Mexico in November assisting part-time with criminal justice reform. – SH
