On Thursday, June 5, AABANY together with NAPABA held a welcome dinner at Pampano to help inaugurate the first In-House Counsel Summit. The evening included a cocktail reception followed by a delicious dinner. The event was held in conjunction with the AABANY Advisory Committee’s first meeting of FY 2014.

The meeting included remarks from Simone Wu and Alan Tse, Co-Chairs of NAPABA’s In-House Counsel Committee. Clara Ohr, AABANY President, spoke about the status of 2014 initiatives and activities, Gurinder Singh, AABANY Vice President of Programs and Operations, discussed upcoming AABANY events, and Don Liu asked for support for the Don Liu Scholarship fund, designed to seek out and cultivate future APA leaders in the legal profession.

The In-House Counsel Summit was held the next day on Friday, June 6. The Summit was by invitation only and invitees had to have 5 lawyers who reported to them either directly or in a total reporting line. If not, they had to be a General Counsel or a Deputy General Counsel of a public company. There were a couple of exceptions for people who manage an entire department who didn’t have direct reports or were chief compliance officers.

The purpose of the Summit is to promote APAs to Fortune 500 General Counsel positions, to develop a pipeline and potentially fill the gap we have in the Fortune 500 space. Three recruiters from the top 5 nationally recognized executive recruiting firms were present (Russell Reynolds, Heidrick & Struggles and Korn Ferry) along with a fourth, Major Lindsay Africa, which places attorneys at every level. There were 6 General Counsel faculty members and 24 participants.

During the morning sessions the participants worked with faculty on how to have difficult conversations with Boards and other C-suite executives. Then they were given feedback by the faculty and participants. The afternoon sessions covered General Counsel basics and how to land a General Counsel job at a Fortune 500 company with recruiters.

Both the dinner and the summit were a great success, thanks to the hard work of Jean Lee, AABANY Past President. We hope to have the opportunity to host similar summits in the future.

(And thanks to AABANY summer interns Christina Nguyen and Kevin Wong, both from St John’s School of Law, for their assistance on Thursday night. Christina provided this summary and Kevin took the photos at the dinner.)