MoForever Alumni News - Winter 2019

MoForever Winter 2019 | 10 What’s your view for young lawyers: generalist or specialist? I don’t know—the legal world has changed so much that I’m not in a good position to give career advice. All I can say is that I feel like I benefited greatly from having many different types of opportunities, and doing a lot of different kinds of cases, particularly early in my career. It’s true, I was mostly on the IP side of the Litigation Department—patents and later trade-secrets cases—but in a wide range of industries and areas. And I also did a lot of commercial disputes and even some securities work. All of that gave me a fair amount of flexibility—and confidence that when a new opportunity came up I would be able to jump in. What is one of your favorite MoFo memories? We’re talking about 20 years’ worth so that’s really hard. The Palo Alto office had a robust practical-joke culture in the early years, so there are quite a few great memories from those days. And I had the opportunity to go to trial a few times with Harold McElhinny, and with Michael Jacobs, Bryan Wilson, and Ken Kuwayti. Those were all memorable and intense experiences—with highs and lows. But I’ll tell you one of my favorite specific memories—this is from back in the day when reviewing documents meant pulling Xerox copies out of a banker’s box and putting sticky notes on them. We had gotten a bunch of boxes after a motion to compel—they had apparently been sitting in the defendant’s garage and were supposedly irrelevant. Or so we had been told. But I was sitting in my office one day when I heard Bryan Wilson yell, “I found it, I found it!” —just like on TV. The smoking-gun document was buried in the middle of a bunch of invoices. I don’t think anybody gets that experience anymore because it’s not the same when you’re clicking through documents on a computer.