Welcome to our next episode of Legal.io Community Spotlight, a series in which we highlight the careers and experiences of some of the most impressive legal and legal operations professionals working in-house.

In this episode, we explore the career journey of Chaia Odoms Morgan, Assistant General Counsel Labor & Employment at Peraton. Chaia talks about how allowing yourself to have a non-traditional approach to a legal career can inspire and cultivate a lot of useful experience. Pieter and Chaia cover:

• Chaia's career journey to date
• Key responsibilities in her role as Assistant General Counsel Labor & Employment
• Key challenges and lessons learned in her varying roles
• How law schools need to drill down on viable paths other than the currently accepted traditional and limiting career journey they teach graduates.   

Pieter Gunst

Hi everyone. It's my pleasure to be here today and to shine a spotlight on Chaia Odoms Morgan, the Assistant General Counsel Labor and Employment at Peraton - a US-based defense contractor in the technology space. Chaia, thank you so much for being here today.

Chaia Odoms Morgan

Pieter, thanks so much for having me. I'm glad to be here.

Pieter Gunst

So I want to dive right in. I haven't had a chance to talk to someone who is in the labor and employment space and I would love to learn a bit about your journey becoming the assistant GC at Peraton in that particular vertical.

Chaia Odoms Morgan

Sure. Well, I definitely had a non-traditional path to this role. Very circuitous, if you will. When I first graduated from law school I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I had heard that clerking was great. I actually clerked for a judge in the family law space which, I had no idea if I liked it or if I wanted to do it. But one thing that it did give me was a way to look at the law and how it affects people in real life. Law school does a great job of teaching you academically what the law is. It teaches you how to think, but it does not really teach you how the law works in a practical space, and I think that experience sort of informed my whole career.

After that, I worked at a small law firm where I got some experience in civil litigation and commercial business transactions. That's actually where I first got some employment law experience, worked on some non-compete agreements and things like that. But I still didn't make it to the labor and employment world. 

After that, I actually went to work at the Department of Defense. I went from a clerkship, to a small law firm, to the government. I moved to D.C. and of course when you move to D.C., you work for the government, right? I represented the government in habeas corpus cases brought by the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. How I think that informs my career is that there was actually no specific background to that position. They just wanted people who could think who had some litigation experience and could apply that to basically a new area of law that was emerging due to our country detaining people who are involved in 9/11. So, it was a great job but I also realized I did not want to stay in the intelligence and defense space.

After that, is actually when I went into the labor and employment field. I worked for my local government in D.C., and I thought it would be great because I had all these skills to be a generalist. I was Assistant General Counsel there, but I was put into the role of learning labor and employment from soup to nuts, and I found that it was an area of law that I really enjoyed. I worked there for quite a few years and got great experience which got me to Peraton. I went from giving advice and counsel in the labor and employment space for about 1,800 employees to Peraton who has 18,000 employees.

Pieter Gunst

That's a huge number and what an interesting trajectory going from family law to employment law in such a huge corporation. So that's a really large body of employees to shepherd through. So in this role then, what does your day to day look like and what are your key responsibilities?

Chaia Odoms Morgan

Every day I'm giving advice and counsel on what I would call the life cycle of the employee experience. From hiring, termination, compensation, discipline, leaves of absence and FMLA, disability and other reasonable accommodations. Anything you can think of that affects the employee, it comes across my desk. I give my internal client advice on all of these types of issues all day.

Pieter Gunst

How big a team do you need to handle such a large number of employees?

Chaia Odoms Morgan

I would always like more people, but I think to effectively handle it you probably need at least a handful of attorneys. I have a really great team and people I work with; I work really closely with HR and the VP there. We've been able to put together a team that responds quickly to hot issues and also looks at larger issues and try to think of how we can inform policies that make the company run better.

Pieter Gunst

Takes a village. Now, what are some of the key challenges that you encounter in a role like that? Or maybe one key challenge and what have you learned from it?

Chaia Odoms Morgan

One key challenge is really thinking about how a hard a decision might impact an employee. I mean, sometimes we have to terminate people. Sometimes we have to lay people off. And how are we going to approach this sensitively, appropriately and fairly? We often incorporate those types of thoughts to the decision instead of just, “we’re terminating this person and we're just done with it”. HR and I really do a good job of how we handle employees even when it's sad or otherwise hard. I think that's probably one of the most challenging parts of the job, just as a human.

Pieter Gunst

Do you learn how to navigate that over time? Because if you're continuously having these hard conversations you're trying to address that with empathy. Like, do you get kind of good at it and in a mode?

Chaia Odoms Morgan

I think so. I think as long as you're conscious of it, you get better at it. And sometimes people have to pull you in and talk about it especially if someone's getting terminated and they might not make a great salary. I mean, that's what the job pays. But still, what position does this put this person in? Can they be terminated next week instead of this week? Thinking about those things.

Pieter Gunst

Especially with some of the news recently in the tech industry I think it's the pertinent discussion. So, excited to hear you think about it like that because that feels like the right way for any organization to scale on the labor and employment side. Now, one thing that's interesting and you mentioned it at the beginning is you had a not-very-traditional career trajectory. You also started in family law, but even before that in law school you mentioned, “I was not prepared for this career track”. I firmly agree that there's not a lot of practical experience to be had in law school, but I'm very curious about your vision and what law school doesn't teach you about your career options and what you can do about that?

Chaia Odoms Morgan

Law school basically teaches you one path. You go to a law firm preferably a big law firm. You might pay off your loans, and then after that you can either stay there if you like it or you can go to the government or go to public interest. But you definitely have to start at a law firm first, because it is understood by many that it's maybe the only place where you can get good training.

Now, being an attorney for quite some time and knowing actual attorneys who have practiced for a long time you find that that’s just not true. People have all types of careers. They might start in a big law firm, they might not. They might start in government, they might go work in public interest. But what I have found is that people acquire skills and then they are able to use those skills to get whatever job they might want later. I mean, that's one thing that I always concentrated on. Like, “Okay, so I don't have this law firm job coming out of law school. What can I do?”. And I wanted to be prepared when I had the opportunities, because I knew they would come. That's not always apparent and you really have to stick with it.

I think that law school really needs to drill down on viable paths other than law firm to whatever other fields people go to. I don't have the answers for that. I would love to be a part of the solution to educate our law school graduates on this. But we really have to work on getting law students to understand that their career is just starting and it's not over if they don't get that big law firm job.

Pieter Gunst

Yeah, that's an exciting message. And I will say, like through the last years, I've seen some more initiatives to create paths for people to go in-house, skipping the traditional law school trajectory that you see. Hastings here in San Francisco has a program like that, too. We also saw some in-house departments and are doing very interesting legal assistance programs and onboarding people in the pipeline that way. It's exciting to think about how we present more options for people. I do think a lot of this is also maybe mentorship in my own personal experience - this is on the entrepreneurship side - I found that once I started seeing a lot of examples it all became much more tenable. So I think we need people like you share, Chaia, to push that message and then also to connect with people and present this as a potential path. I think that would make a huge difference.

Chaia Odoms Morgan

Yeah, those programs sound awesome. I'm glad that there are some law schools out there; thinking ahead and changing what they've normally done. That is very encouraging.

Pieter Gunst

I think it's the very beginning of something that has a lot of potential and it also shows the changes that I think in industry where the big law firm is not just the same default entry path or it doesn't have to be, more importantly, than it was before. Yes. So yeah, a very interesting angle on that. I think this is really the kind of stuff in terms of building people's career journey and learning a bit about yourself. It's important to [really] think about [finding] those connections and those additional opportunities. 

Chaia, thank you so much for spending some time with us today to share your trajectory and your insights. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Chaia Odoms Morgan

Thank you so much for having me, Pieter.

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