Interviewer Donna Gerson (donna@donna gerson.com) speaks at law schools and writes on legal career issues. She is author of Building Career Connections: Networking Tools for Law Students and New Lawyers (NALP, 2007).

Dana, why did you choose to attend law school?
If you’re interested in understanding how the world operates, studying law makes sense, and it seemed like a natural extension of my undergraduate studies. In college, I double majored in economics and comparative literature. Studying law dovetailed with my interests in text analysis, literary interpretation, economic analysis, and critical reasoning.

Did you enjoy law school?
I did, very much. It may be a cliché, but really the thing I enjoyed most about law school was my fellow classmates. I had the fortune of being in a class of very intelligent, very interesting people from all different backgrounds and with different goals in mind.

You worked on two legal journals during law school. Can you tell the readers about your publication experience?
During my first year of law school, I was interested in international law so I got involved with the Yale Journal of International Law, which was open to first-year students. It was a good opportunity to get involved in legal reading, writing, and publishing and a vehicle for understanding that side of the profession while working with a subject that interested me. In my second year, I also got involved in the main law journal, which was broader in terms of subject mat-ter but similar in terms of the process and the people involved.

Did you find having published scholarly articles was a plus for you when searching for a job?
I think publishing when you are in law school can be very important, particularly if you want to teach or clerk. It’s also an opportunity to get in depth in some subject areas that might interest you. And if you want to publish yourself, it’s helpful to be on the other side and see how the articles are edited, how they are published, and what makes a good article.

You studied German in Austria during high school. Do you find that foreign language skills are helpful in your career?
I think you are always well served by learning another language. Obviously, how useful it is career-wise depends on the language. I speak German, which isn’t particularly useful from a professional standpoint because most Germans and Austrians speak English, especially those involved in international business and legal communities. My friends who speak Spanish, Chinese, or Japanese have found those languages have given them even more of a leg up professionally. In general, every type of legal practice these days is global or at least has international aspects to it, and knowing another language, being familiar with another culture, or just having the perspective that studying another language or culture gives you is helpful.

After graduating from law school, you clerked for a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Cir-cuit. Did you find clerking a valuable experience?
Yes, I think clerking is a tremendously valuable experience. In some ways, it’s like a fourth year of law school in the sense that you’re still studying the law and haven’t really gone out there and started practicing yet. But you are getting exposed to the practice at a high level. Particularly if you want to do litigation or appellate work, working closely with a judge is a tremendously valuable experience because it shows you how things appear and how cases are analyzed from the other side of the bench. Another advantage is if you are fortunate enough to have a judge take a personal interest in you, which I was, you gain a mentor within the legal profession. Most of us, going into the profession, don’t have a lot of information about or experience with how the system works, so having someone who has been very successful in the field who can take an interest in you and help with your professional development is extremely valuable.

You are currently the competition counsel for Google. Can you describe the core business of the company?
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. We have a widespread business. For instance, we are best known for our search engine and for free online services like e-mail and maps, but we also offer a suite of productivity applications that include word processing and spreadsheet programs that allow people to work collaboratively online. Google is a big proponent of “cloud computing,” in which users’ comput-ing resources and files are stored on the Internet rather than on their desks or hard drives. Finally, Google is, to a large extent, an advertising company that helps advertisers connect with consumers.

In your work as competition counsel, what legal issues do you handle primarily?
I primarily handle antitrust issues. I also handle other forms of competition law, such as unfair trade law, which in-volves competition but is not strictly antitrust law. There is also a lot of crossover between antitrust law and other areas such as copyright, patent, and trademark laws. These issues tend to intersect in various ways, so I work closely with our intellectual property lawyers, as well as many other members of our legal team.

Can you give a concrete example of a case or issue that necessitated your antitrust expertise?
To take a very public and fairly recent example, last year Microsoft announced it was making an unsolicited and a hos-tile effort to buy Yahoo. Shortly thereafter, Yahoo approached Google about entering into a search advertising partner-ship. As soon as that happened, I was talking with our management team about how regulators were likely to view the proposed deal, what kind of issues it would raise for the structure of our industry, and how we ought to respond. I was very involved in counseling the company on what this meant both from a legal and a policy perspective, and on what our options were.

Can you describe a typical work day as competition counsel?
There isn’t really a typical day. I work on a lot of different projects, and my day can easily get hijacked by unforeseen events. In general, I provide advice to my company to help it navigate the various competition laws both in the U.S. and abroad. I am very involved in our mergers and acquisitions because any major merger, joint venture, or acquisition will be reviewed by competition authorities. Also, in general, our business practices, our major partnerships, and our in-volvement with other companies can all implicate competition law in one way or another.

Silicon Valley is an odd place in that you have a lot of companies that you are competitors with and that you’re coop-erating with at the same time. For instance, eBay is a very large advertising partner for Google. They also have a PayPal product that competes with our Checkout product. So, if we are interacting with them, we need to make sure we’re in compliance with competition laws and that our business needs are being met in a way that’s not going to create issues for us or anyone else.
I also provide training on an ongoing basis to ensure that our employees understand the competition laws, know that I am here as a resource for them, and understand what the rules are so that they don’t inadvertently do anything that would be improper.

How is the legal department organized?
Google is hard to draw a flowchart for. We could try to create one, but it’s sort of organizationally flat and chaotic by design. We have a senior vice president and chief legal officer, David Drummond, who is the highest ranking lawyer in the company. Our general counsel, Kent Walker, manages the day-to-day work of the department. There are issues on which I work directly with our general counsel, others where I am working more closely with the deputy general counsel, and still others where I’m working in parallel with members of the legal department without a lot of senior involve-ment—it really depends.

Do you travel for your work?
I travel a great deal. I am often in Brussels and Washington, D.C. When there is a regulatory issue—for instance, a deal like the DoubleClick acquisition or our recent partnership with Yahoo—I will go where the regulators are because we need to meet with them. I attend conferences and meetings all over the world, but the place I go to the most these days is D.C.

After you clerked, you went to work in the U.S. Department of Justice in the Antitrust Division. Tell me about your work there.
As an attorney coming out of a clerkship, I felt I would be better served going to the government, where I would have more responsibility and be involved in more interesting work right at the outset, plus the public service component was very appealing to me. The judge for whom I clerked had worked in the Justice Department as well, and he encouraged me to take that path. It was a great opportunity. I could work for the federal government, live in San Francisco, which is a beautiful city, and do both criminal and civil enforcement in this area of the law that was really becoming very active and interesting.

From the Department of Justice, you went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco?
That was an easy move to make in some ways and also a natural progression. For years I had been doing antitrust work, and increasingly, for a variety of reasons, I focused on criminal antitrust work. Once I got involved in that, it seemed like going to the U.S. Attorney’s Office was a logical next step. I wouldn’t just be doing antitrust crimes any-more but all sorts of federal crimes. The job involved more autonomy in terms of running my own cases than I had in the Antitrust Division. That was attractive to me, and I was also interested in having more time in court and doing more jury trials.

How did you make the jump from the U.S. Attorney’s Office to Google?
I was very happy at the U.S. Attorney’s Office and wasn’t looking to make a move. It sort of came to me through the grapevine. I think my name was out there as a young attorney in the Bay Area who had an antitrust background, so I was a natural person for them to look at. I was happy where I was, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to know what my options were and that it might be interesting to talk to Google. I didn’t really expect anything to come of it, but I ended up liking them a lot more than I thought I would and they liked me a lot more than I thought they would. It all worked out.

Did you ever imagine working in-house?
Going in-house had never really been an option I thought about, but Google seemed to be a very unique company that was doing a lot of exciting things and had its heart in the right place. In many ways, Google offered the same attractions that public service offered and seemed compatible with my values. Plus, the idea of coming into a company like this, which is involved in so many exciting projects, and being their first attorney focused on competition affairs in North America was very exciting.

Do you have any advice for law students seeking jobs in a very difficult economy?
While grades are important and how you choose to spend your summers is going to be important to you down the road, my primary advice would be to be creative. In this economy, it’s getting tough to get jobs. Law firms are hiring fewer associates and are more constrained. When you are in law school, it is very easy to learn about the opportunities firms provide because they affirmatively come to you and show you the opportunities they have. And if that’s what you want to do, and you can get a job with them, that’s fantastic. That’s how I spent one of my summers.

But there are other opportunities out there in the legal profession, and knowing about them is especially important when jobs at firms become scarce. There are think tanks, public interest organizations, and private entities doing interest-ing legal work. There are law firms, particularly smaller firms, that don’t come to recruit on campus. I think people have a lot more options than they think they do when they are in law school because with a lot of those options, you need to take initiative and uncover them yourself. Get online, talk to your professors, and talk to your career services office. In-vest the time in research and networking.

What is the process of finding a legal job at Google? What’s the hiring process and what credentials are valued?
Like most companies that have in-house positions, I think it’s very unusual for Google to hire people directly out of law school. I can’t think of a recent example of us doing that. Most companies, and Google is no exception, want people to gain experience before coming in-house, in part because we don’t have a formal training program. I worked for the government for about seven years before I went in-house with Google. Most people I work with here have worked at other companies, at law firms, or both.

Google doesn’t hire for summer legal department jobs?
We don’t have a formal summer job program in the legal department. We have had interns from time to time, but it’s rare.

Beyond the legal department, do you find there are JDs working in different capacities at Google?
Absolutely. We have people with law degrees doing business development work, law graduates in our policy group and our communications team, and many more elsewhere in the company. I regularly run into people at Google who are not strictly doing legal work but who have legal backgrounds.

How can law students explore employment opportunities at Google?
You can go to our website, see what positions we have open, and apply online. It can be a leg up if you know someone at the company who can submit your résumé with a positive endorsement. That definitely helps, but it’s certainly not necessary. There are plenty of people like myself who didn’t know anyone at Google and still managed to get a good job here.

Where do you see yourself in five years?
It’s hard to predict based on my experiences so far. If you had asked me five years ago if I would be working at Google, I would have laughed. And if you had asked me before I became an Assistant U.S. Attorney whether I would be a federal criminal prosecutor in San Francisco, that would have seemed unlikely because I had been more involved in civil law. I had no particular interest in criminal law in law school. So I don’t really know where I’m going to be in five years. I think I’d be a little afraid if I did know. I think what’s important is that I am happy where I am now.

Silicon Valley is a volatile place. My company just turned 10 years old—10 years ago, Google didn’t even exist. Who knows what the company is going to be in five years and what role I’ll have with it if I’m still here at all? I really like what I am doing and will continue doing it as long as that remains the case, and I hope that continues for a long time to come.

But I also think it’s important to be open to new opportunities. I was a federal prosecutor and almost didn’t pursue the Google opportunity when it came across my desk. I’m really glad I did. I’m going to keep my eyes open, and at the end of the day what’s important is that I look forward to going to work and that I’m happy with my job and my work/life bal-ance in general.

HOME