Career Track: High Fidelity

For the past 10 years, Lena Goldberg has overseen an enormous growth of the legal department at Fidelity. Her team grew from 30 lawyers to 140 in that time, matching the growth and diversity of Fidelity’s various business units.
This rapid expansion of her staff posed a challenge: How to motivate and train successful, smart, experienced lawyers so they all were working together toward the common goal of providing cost-effective legal and business advice to the company.
“We needed to ensure that growth within legal added value to the company,” Goldberg says. “We weren’t just throwing people at problems, but were taking a considered and intelligent approach to helping to resolve issues and support the company’s growth.”
Goldberg – who joined Fidelity in 1996 following a successful practice as a corporate bankruptcy attorney at Boston’s Sullivan & Worcester – recently left the general counsel position to take on a business role with Fidelity.
Goldberg took a few moments to reflect on her tenure as GC, including the intense demands she faced as general counsel in a large legal department, and the succession process for replacing a leader of a legal department.

Career Track: Lena, what were the best parts of being general counsel?
Goldberg: Being part of an extraordinary company during a time of tremendous growth and expansion, as well as during an era of intense regulatory scrutiny and heightened attention to compliance. Also, managing a large group of highly skilled, talented, experienced people, and helping to develop their talents and abilities has also been rewarding. Managing that kind of group can, however, be somewhat like herding cats! I’ve enjoyed working with people in our legal group to develop them into – to use a term now in vogue – “persuasive counselors to senior management.” It’s been particularly satisfying that everyone has worked extremely hard to anticipate challenges, stay current with both legal and business developments, form effective networks within the company, and develop a rapport with and provide effective counsel to our businesses. We also challenge ourselves to use simple declarative sentences no matter how complicated the concept!
Career Track: What were your initial challenges as general counsel?
Goldberg: The biggest challenges grew out of the explosive growth in Fidelity’s businesses and the need for the legal department to grow to support that business growth. In 1996, Fidelity did not engage in many of the activities that today comprise major business initiatives. When I joined, there were 30 lawyers in Fidelity’s legal department. Now there are 140. Despite that growth, we still staff leanly in comparison with our peers.
Other challenges included maintaining a proper balance between inside and outside counsel, determining how to benchmark our department against competitors, and ensuring that growth within legal added value to the company.
Career Track: What’s the most difficult part about being a general counsel?
Goldberg: A company turns to a general counsel for thoughtful analysis, judgment, experience, and independent, but informed, advice on questions to which there is no easy answer. It goes without saying that one also has to bring a moral compass to the table. Even with all these attributes, every general counsel has to make calls with less than full information, and she and the company have be able to live with the consequences. My biggest concern was always whether I had enough and the right sort of information on which to base the advice being asked for and given. We worked very hard to ensure systems and procedures were in place to provide the information needed. The right information doesn’t always ensure the right advice but it does help avoid stupid mistakes.
Career Track: What are your thoughts about succession to general counsel in a large legal department?
Goldberg: Succession planning is an ongoing process that’s taken very seriously. Fidelity has many initiatives on leadership and succession planning. In the legal department, we used these tools successfully in filling many positions. Marc Gary, our new general counsel, was hired from the outside. Bringing in someone from the outside can accelerate the pace of positive change and new leadership can bring a fresh perspective. Groups frequently become acclimated to certain ways of doing things. They can easily become hide-bound and start believing that the way something is being done is the only way to do it. When people come in from the outside and ask why, that simple question can be a breath of fresh air. Organizations need to be shaken up from time to time. People should embrace this.
Career Track: But then the other side of hiring from the outside is – how do you motivate people and not lose your best people?
Goldberg: I always tried to make certain that there were opportunities to develop in a variety of ways. People want to learn and grow, to have stimulating work, to be appreciated and to have a great work environment. We have not had a lot of attrition in Fidelity’s Legal department. By cultivating a positive climate, building the right team and providing development opportunities in various areas – as group heads, team leaders, subject matter experts and individual contributors – retention issues can be managed. It’s important to remember that not every inside lawyer wants to be general counsel, and sometimes someone may think she wants it and upon reflection change her mind. I gave several people who thought they might want the general counsel position opportunities to step into my shoes on certain matters, and several decided it really wasn’t for them.
Career Track: Other than judgment, a moral compass, legal expertise and experience, what are some of the attributes a general counsel should have?
Goldberg: A general counsel has to develop a rapport and relationship of trust and confidence with executive management and, in most companies, with the board. You also should provide advice that facilitates decision-making. You need to anticipate and manage change, thrive on stress, have a very thick skin, a highly developed emotional intelligence and understand the company’s objectives, business and competitive environment. You also need professional courage and persuasiveness. Sometimes as general counsel, you must tell people things they don’t necessarily want to hear. Good advice isn’t always welcome advice, at least not initially, but a general counsel still has to call it the way she sees it. And she has to have the stature and give advice in a way that maximizes the likelihood the advice is taken seriously.
Career Track: How did you come to Fidelity?
Goldberg: In 1995, Tim Hilton, then a partner of mine at Sullivan & Worcester and now a Fidelity executive, suggested I speak with Bob Pozen, then Fidelity’s general counsel, about the chief corporate counsel position which was open. I had done some legal work for Fidelity, but not much. I must have hit it off with Bob because I was offered the position.
Career Track: Any hesitations about the move?
Goldberg: Yes. I was quite happy with my practice and not looking for a job. The tipping point for me was that there are very few companies like Fidelity. Fidelity has a visionary leader in Ned Johnson, a proud and successful history, a commitment to continuous improvement, and to being the best at whatever it undertakes, and the means and appetite to try new things. There’s tremendous energy and excitement here and the quality of people is superb. These factors outweighed all my concerns.
Career Track: Did you think you might be in line to be general counsel when you took the chief corporate counsel position?
Goldberg: I thought it was a distinct possibility but there were no guarantees. A year after I joined, Bob became president of FMR Co., and I was promoted to general counsel.
Career Track: Why do you think you were chosen over others in the department?
Goldberg: There were other extremely talented and accomplished potential successors in the legal department. What may have tipped the balance in my favor was that during the year I worked with Bob, I also developed a good relationship with the [board of directors] chairman in connection with several very large transactions we worked on together. I had an opportunity to demonstrate how I think and work.
Career Track: You have an unusually wide range of legal and management skills – any thoughts on how that came to be for you?
Goldberg: That’s a hard question to answer. I don’t think my career path has been so unusual. Other general counsel I know are curious, energetic, like to analyze, strategize and manage, enjoy facilitating a company’s growth and working with a team to devise and implement solutions – and are not easily intimidated. A legal career can present a variety of opportunities. I’ve been fortunate enough to have recognized and taken advantage of the opportunities presented to me.
Jane Sender is president of Sender Legal Search, which specializes in high level in-house placements in New England. She can be reached at www.jslegalsearch.com.