Some 20,000 undergraduate and graduate students populate Stanford University in Palo Alto, a place of swaying palms and red tile-roofed buildings. Stanford employs more than 20,000 people, making it the largest private employer in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley. With 8,000 acres of gently rolling land, it's the county's largest landowner. Jane and Leland Stanford ? a railroad baron, he served as governor of California and U.S. senator ? founded the university in 1885 in memory of their only child, Leland Jr., who died at age 15 of typhoid fever.
LEGAL TEAM
General Counsel Debra Zumwalt oversees a dozen lawyers and provides legal support to the university, Stanford Hospital and Clinics, the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the Stanford Management Co. and the university's police force and power plant. "We're like a little city in many ways," Zumwalt said. "It's one of the most diverse practices you can imagine for an in-house lawyer."
Stanford's legal department includes one attorney whose sole duty is to handle the complex government contracts that support U.S. Department of Energy funding for the linear accelerator. Stanford researchers there study particle physics and astrophysics.
Two lawyers oversee the legal issues affecting Stanford's two hospitals, which are slated for expansions worth $5 billion. The attorneys have been smoothing the path for the projects, which Zumwalt said have entailed "four years and 90 public hearings ... to get the entitlements to be able to [build] on our own land." The 150-bed children's hospital is scheduled to open in 2016. The expanded hospital and clinics will be completed in 2018.
Another attorney specializes in employment issues at the university, and one oversees such matters at the hospitals. Stanford's management company, created in 1991 to manage the university's $16.5 billion endowment and additional financial assets, has a dedicated lawyer as well. Other legal team members oversee faculty, copyright, medical school and general business matters.
OUTSIDE COUNSEL
The university outsources litigation, often to Sarah Flanagan in Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman's San Francisco office. Gordon & Rees handles employment issues. Bingham McCutchen provides advice on complex, long-term leasing issues involving Stanford's research park. Zumwalt relies on A.L. (Lorry) Spitzer in the Boston office of Ropes & Gray for advice on tax issues for nonprofits.
The legal department negotiates discounted hourly rates to keep its budget under control. "One of my mantras is that I don't like surprises," Zumwalt said. Her office negotiates flat fees with "success bonuses" for positive results. She expects her budget to remain relatively unchanged through next year. Any increases would be due to the addition of a new lawyer and higher legal costs relating to the hospitals' construction and the new health care law.
DAILY DUTIES
"A typical day is when the main thing I'm dealing with is something that wasn't on my schedule," Zumwalt said. She reports to university President John Hennessy and attends board meetings for the university's hospitals, their insurance board and Stanford's management company.
Following Pennsylvania State Univer?sity's sex abuse scandal, Zumwalt has been raising awareness about compliance issues. A grand jury has been investigating whether Penn State officials failed to act on a report that former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky had assaulted a boy. "What does it mean to have a culture of compliance, so that people feel responsible to speak up if they see something going on that's not right?" Zumwalt said.
Helping the legal staff connect with campus employees serves two purposes, she said: It ensures problems are solved and it familiarizes employees with the legal team. Zumwalt has been collaborating with other universities on an amicus curiae brief in a challenge before the U.S. Supreme Court to the University of Texas' affirmative action program, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin.
IN THE NEWS
Zumwalt was Stanford's lead negotiator last year in talks with New York City to build a state-of-the-art graduate technical campus. The university was seen as a leading contender but withdrew its bid in December, citing what it considered unreasonable demands by the city. Cornell University was chosen to build the $2 billion complex, now called CornellNYC Tech.
"Stanford was being asked to be responsible and be penalized significantly for things that weren't within our control and were in fact within the city's control," Zumwalt said. "There were changes that were contrary to what had been proposed in the [request for proposal] and things being changed that had been agreed to during the negotiations.
"It was very frustrating for us," she said. "It required a true partnership to make this very complicated [project] work ? not just to get through the gate, but over the long term. And in the end, we felt we wouldn't have that partnership with the city, so we reluctantly made the decision to withdraw."
ROUTE TO THE TOP
An Arizona native, Zumwalt graduated from Arizona State University in 1976 and received her law degree from Stanford Law School three years later. She joined Pillsbury as a litigator and then became a litigator for Chevron Chemical Co. She was recruited to join Stanford's legal department in 1987. Zumwalt returned to Pillsbury in 1993 to focus on complex litigation and higher education law. She was back at Stanford in 2001, this time as acting general counsel. Zumwalt was named to the permanent position one year later, replacing Michael Roster, the university's second GC.
PERSONAL
Zumwalt's daughter, Elizabeth, 22, is a Stanford student majoring in international relations and minoring in Arabic. Zumwalt is a past president of the local bar association, is active in legal aid efforts and is vice chairwoman of the board of the American University of Afghanistan, a co-educational, nonreligious liberal arts university that serves more than 900 Afghan students. In May, she traveled more than 15 hours by plane to watch the second graduating class of 49 students receive their diplomas. The university plans to launch a law school in the fall, in partnership with Stanford.
RECENT BOOK AND MOVIE
Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, and a slew of movies shown during several flights to and from Afghanistan. "Between San Francisco and Dubai, I watched three or four movies and forgot them all," she said.
This article originally appeared in?The National Law Journal.
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Source: http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1343552677077&rss=cc
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