How did Cooley persuade you to return to work after a full career and a large stock package from eBay? It’s been about 10 months and, quite frankly, that’s about how much idleness I can stand. I’m not coming back for the money; I’m coming back because there are three or four things that I really like to do that I wasn’t doing, and that I think I can do working here. One is, I get huge amounts of satisfaction from being confronted with gritty, difficult problems and figuring out solutions and having those solutions work. I got a pretty steady stream of those at eBay, and I suspect there are plenty of clients here who have the same kinds of challenging problems, and I hope to be able to be successful helping them as well. Second, I was part of a team, mentoring younger people, younger attorneys, and I’ll have a chance to do that. I’m really proud of two legacies from my days at eBay. One is, we ran a very successful company that was also a very good company, from a legal point of view. We now have two successors that are off and doing well. That’s one legacy. The other legacy I have is all the people that I worked with, many of whom are either still with eBay or PayPal, but many of whom have gone off on their own. Last time I counted I had 15, 16 general counsel who I had worked with, ranging from companies that are actually larger than eBay to tiny startups. I think in some ways that’s likely to be the more enduring legacy.
What will you be doing at Cooley? This is my second week so it’s hard for me to be certain. I suspect that I’ll end up doing three or four different things. One, I will actually do a little substantive counseling. Not so much in the pure, “Here’s a legal issues, write a memorandum.” I’m not going to be very good at that. It’s probably been 10 years since I last did a purely legal analysis. But, if a client comes to me—and they will, some have, already—says, “Here’s the issue we have, here’s the way we’re thinking about it, what do you think?” That, I’m really good at. I think that, as part of a large team though, one of the things I’m really good at is translating legal issues into business speak and business speak into, “Here’s what they’re really telling you.” Lawyers who have never been in a corporate setting don’t always get that, so I think I can be a helpful intermediary in many circumstances. Sometimes that will be helping the business to understand, truly understand, what advice they’re getting, and sometimes that will be the other way around. “This piece of litigation really isn’t bet-the-company litigation, so maybe we should approach it this way as opposed to that way.”
