Jennifer Lum, GC, Caltech.

The California Institute of Technology is promoting its next general counsel from within—a deputy who worked as a federal prosecutor and member of the federal judiciary before going in-house at the Pasadena, California, university.

Effective Sept. 1, Jennifer Lum is taking the legal reins from Victoria Stratman, who is retiring after 24 years at Caltech.

Lum, who could not be reached for comment, joined the Caltech legal department as deputy GC in 2010 and said in a news release announcing her promotion that she is “honored” to continue to support the school's “excellence in everything that it does.”

“I look forward to working with the leadership and the wonderful community that makes Caltech so unique and one of the most respected research universities in the world,” she said.

Prior to joining Caltech, Lum served for eight years as a U.S. magistrate judge for the Central District of California, handling both civil and criminal matters. Prior to that, she was an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles for 12 years, during which time she was chief of the major frauds section and oversaw the investigation and prosecution of cases involving bank fraud, securities fraud and insurance fraud, according to the university statement. Lum is a graduate of Cornell Law School.

Lum's predecessor, Stratman, could not be reached for comment about her next moves or her time at Caltech. In 2016, the school won praise from attorney and mediator Lorene Schaefer, a former General Electric Co. division GC and founder of the 33-lawyer Workplace Investigations Group, for its legal handling of a harassment charge against a tenured professor—both for the openness of its investigation and the scope of its far-reaching results.