Stacy Bratcher on In-House Leadership, Career Growth, and the Road to General Counsel
Dean Austen Parrish interviews Stacy Bratcher, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer of Cottage Health, host of The Legal Department podcast, and member of the inaugural faculty for UC Irvine Law's new in-house counsel certificate program, "From Lawyer to Leader: The Road to the General Counsel Seat," launching August 2026.
Stacy reflects on her path from government service and private practice to leadership roles in healthcare and higher education. She discusses relationship-building, networking, professional development and public service, while offering advice for law students, young lawyers and aspiring in-house counsel.
(Listen on Spotify, Soundcloud or Apple Podcast)
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Austen Parrish
Dean and Chancellor’s Professor of Law
University of California, Irvine School of LawDean Parrish is a recognized expert in transnational law, civil procedure, constitutional law, and federal courts. He has written extensively on these topics, publishing numerous scholarly articles and co-authoring three books. His teaching spans a wide array of subjects, including Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Federal Courts, Transnational Law, International Environmental Law, and Public International Law. A prominent leader in legal education, he currently serves as president of the Association of American Law Schools, sits on the board of the AccessLex Institute, and is co-editor of the Journal of Legal Education. He is also an elected member of the American Law Institute and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation.
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Stacy Bratcher
Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer
Cottage Health
Stacy Bratcher has spent more than two decades practicing law in the healthcare and higher education sectors and is the creator and host of The Legal Department podcast, which focuses on professional development and leadership for lawyers. Stacy also serves on the inaugural faculty of UC Irvine Law's new in-house counsel certificate program, "From Lawyer to Leader: The Road to the General Counsel Seat," launching August 2026.
Featuring:
Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Welcome to UCI Law Talks from the University of California Irvine School of Law. For all our latest news, follow UCI Law on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
[00:00:20] Austen Parrish: Thank you for joining us. My name is Austen Parrish. I'm the dean and a chancellor's professor at the University of California Irvine School of Law. This is UCI Law Talk, the podcast where we learn more about the amazing Anteater community that is UC Irvine School of Law, and hear from leaders and lawyers of Southern California.
[00:00:35] Austen Parrish: Today, I'm extremely pleased that Stacy Bratcher is joining us. Stacy is a senior vice president and the chief legal officer of Cottage Health, a one billion dollar health system. She also serves as a trustee of an over eight hundred million workers' compensation fund. Before Cottage Health, she spent 15 years at the University of Southern California, including serving as managing general counsel and corporate secretary, Keck Medicine of USC.
[00:00:59] Austen Parrish: She also served 14 years as a commissioner on the Los Angeles County Hospitals and Healthcare Delivery Commission. She's a frequent writer and speaker who hosts the Legal Department podcast, a really just terrific place for advice and guidance about professional development for lawyers. And we're very pleased that Stacy is part of the inaugural faculty of the UCI Law School's new in-house counsel program that is launching this August, and we'll talk about that in a second.
[00:01:23] Austen Parrish: Hey, Stacy, it's absolutely fabulous to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining me.
[00:01:27] Stacy Bratcher: Thanks. It's great to see you again, and I- thanks for reading my bio with such gusto.
[00:01:33] Austen Parrish: The caffeine's kicked in, and I'm ready to go, so yeah, it's nice to see you again too. And hey, Stacy, I want to jump right in and ask you about your career.
[00:01:40] Austen Parrish: Many of our listeners are students or younger lawyers, and you've had an enviable and, and really spectacular career in the healthcare and higher education sectors. I've got to ask, when you were in law school, did you imagine your career would take this path and you would become general counsel, and how did you get started?
[00:01:56] Stacy Bratcher: Law school, I don't know that I had any destination in mind. I knew I was gonna be a lawyer. I don't think any of us really know what that means. I had come from a state government background. I worked in a policy role in the State of Missouri, which I was fascinated by, and I ended up going to law school because pretty much everyone around was a lawyer.
[00:02:20] Stacy Bratcher: And I thought, "If I'm gonna do this, I really need to have the street cred." So I went to law school, and I had worked on, uh, in health policy issues in that government role, and so my law school had a healthcare program and I decided to do that, which, you know, just love to talk about you and your experience with students about they get in thinking one thing and then you take a right turn into something else because the academic program shows you a whole new area of the world you didn't even know about, and that's what happened to me.
[00:02:52] Austen Parrish: I think that's pretty common. That certainly was my experience, that I thought I had an inkling about what I wanted to do, and then once I got to law school it opened up new possibilities. Although I have to say deaning was not on- ... not on the big card back then. If we jump forward a little bit, you've now worked for some really large organizations really at the highest levels of legal practice. Are, are there particular experiences when you look over your career that, that have either left their mark or that you've particularly loved?
[00:03:17] Stacy Bratcher: There's a lot. I've been doing this for a long time. I, I have to say one of the things that just stands out is, and I carry this every day, which is how much trust- these big places and important people have put on me, and like I said, I carry that everywhere, thinking about, we think about our ethical obligations and doing the best by the client.
[00:03:39] Stacy Bratcher: But it's really different when you're in the room where someone is actually entrusting you. So one memory I have, so it, it was 2009, and USC was buying hospitals. There were two hospitals on campus that were owned by a for-profit company, and we were purchasing them, and there was strategic litigation that led up to that sale.
[00:04:02] Stacy Bratcher: And my boss, who at that time was, I think she was the managing general counsel at the time, and I was, I was just a university counsel, and she was out of town, and I had to deliver the deal documents to the president of the university at the president's home, like the university residence. And I remember it was raining.
[00:04:24] Stacy Bratcher: I had this Redwell with documents. We didn't have DocuSign 2009. I just remember I couldn't believe they'd entrusted me, I'm there maybe four years at that time, to go meet with the president to do this $300 million transaction, bringing the documents in my car. It was just a very, like I said, just feeling that sense of, wow, they really trust me.
[00:04:49] Stacy Bratcher: So that's just an example of kind of the things that you don't really think about when you're starting out.
[00:04:55] Austen Parrish: I think it's certainly true how quickly as a lawyer you do get in that position of responsibility where people are relying on you. Geez, I have good and bad memories of Redwells. I'm glad that we don't use them quite as much as we used to.
[00:05:07] Austen Parrish: You talked about trust and maybe that's a great segue into kind of what you're currently doing. Currently as the senior vice president and chief legal officer of just a really large health system, that's gotta be a big job. Describe a little bit what it entails and give a sense of what the day-to-day aspects of the jobs look like.
[00:05:22] Stacy Bratcher: I'll say for any in-house job, in my experience, each day is different, and that's one of the things that I like about it is that there's a tremendous amount of variety. We're a small but mighty team, so I supervise a team of about nine people. There's three lawyers. I've got some administrative support, a legal ops professional, and a compliance department.
[00:05:43] Stacy Bratcher: We have series of big projects that we deal with, but largely we're an inbound office, so get emails about security issues, privacy issues. We have a search warrant for issues. Things happen every day, so you really don't know where you're gonna go. I support our board, so that's some long-range planning, helping our company achieve top goals each year, transactions.
[00:06:12] Stacy Bratcher: It's really hard to describe any particular sort of typical day.
[00:06:17] Austen Parrish: And was that true also when you were at USC?
[00:06:19] Stacy Bratcher: Oh my God, even more so. USC, and any university I'm sure you can relate, in Irvine, it's like a little city. 28,000 employees. There's about 40,000 students. There's a police force, a fire department, museums, athletic facilities.
[00:06:35] Stacy Bratcher: There's visitors and it's tremendous, so anything can happen at any day of the week there, so definitely not typical.
[00:06:44] Austen Parrish: No, I really like that little city kind of comparison. I, I was talking to somebody and they had, they were asking something that occurred by some student in undergraduate and why the university wasn't aware of it.
[00:06:54] Austen Parrish: And I was like, "Because of how many people there are." And it really is. When you look in middle of America, a lot of the universities are larger than the towns that they're next to or in, so it's pr- it's a pretty big enterprise.
[00:07:04] Stacy Bratcher: Yeah, it really is a city. And, and I don't know about the UC, but USC is very federated.
[00:07:11] Stacy Bratcher: What happened in a school wouldn't necessarily make its way up through the administrative channels. So you could, things could be going on for a long time and you wouldn't know.
[00:07:19] Austen Parrish: Yeah, I used to teach federal courts, and I always thought the federalism lessons there actually played out fairly well with the university structure.
[00:07:25] Stacy Bratcher: Yes. Yeah. So fun stuff. Always an interesting day.
[00:07:29] Austen Parrish: What are the favorite and least favorite parts of the job then? If it, if it's a new job every day, what are the things you enjoy most about it for those of our listeners who maybe think that being a general counsel or in-house counsel might be in their future?
[00:07:41] Stacy Bratcher: One thing as compared to law firm life, which I did for almost six years, in a law firm you're working on a project, you're giving advice, and you throw it over the wall, and you hope they do something with it. In-house, and this is, cuts both ways, it's a double-edged sword, you work on a project and then you can see it to that conclusion.
[00:08:02] Stacy Bratcher: And you can nag, you can follow up, you can, have you thrown that advice over or teed an issue up for one of your colleagues? You can check in, "Hey, how's that going?" So there is more of a sense of ownership, and you really do see the fruits of your labor, but that cuts both ways. Sometimes if it's something you don't like or it's messy or, oh, people aren't gonna follow up, then it kind of weighs on you or you're like, "Oh God, now we've gotta go to that meeting" or, "I've gotta deal with this hairy project," and, "Ugh, I'd rather be doing anything else."
[00:08:36] Stacy Bratcher: Or maybe you have a difficult client and, gosh, I really don't wanna work with Dean Parrish anymore. And you don't get to, in a law firm there's a lot of different clients. You could get staffed on something else. You could change your mind or wh- whatever, so- You're married is how I'd describe it.
[00:08:55] Austen Parrish: No, that makes sense. I was looking at your background. Many of UCI Irvine School of Law students are first-generation college students, and each year it's usually 25 to 30% of our in class, and almost 70, 80% are gonna be first-generation law students, which is pretty, pretty large. What was your path? Did you have exposure to general counsel before you got into it or...?
[00:09:17] Stacy Bratcher: So funny, I... It didn't occur to me until you asked this question, but I am a first-gen law student. My second cousin's husband is a lawyer, but I didn't grow up... It's not like a blood relative or anything. So I did not have a lot of exposure to people in a in-house legal role. We had a family friend who had a law firm and did personal injury, and then I think one of my childhood friend's dads worked at Monsanto in the legal department.
[00:09:46] Stacy Bratcher: But I had no... This was not on the dance card, as you say. I just did not have a sense of it. And so I think I learned more about What an in-house role was when I was at a law firm, thinking like, "Oh, I don't know if I wanna bill hours forever. What else is there? Oh, and I work with these really cool people who are lawyers and they're in house counsels."
[00:10:08] Stacy Bratcher: So yeah.
[00:10:09] Austen Parrish: My experience is there's a lot of discussion these days about first-gen or whatnot, but, but yeah, when I was in law school, like most people were actually first-generation law and many people were first-generation college. And it's interesting 'cause as a law school we wanna make sure that everybody has the same foundation, and so try to bring people up to speed regardless of what their family backgrounds are.
[00:10:29] Austen Parrish: But I've always actually believed that it actually gives you a little bit of maybe a benefit if you're first in your family, makes you maybe a little more hungry, a little more open to explore- Yeah, maybe ... other ideas and... Hard to say.
[00:10:39] Stacy Bratcher: Maybe.
[00:10:39] Austen Parrish: Pretty sure that if it's your second cousin husband, that you're still first-gen.
[00:10:43] Stacy Bratcher: Yeah, let's count it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's kinda cool, though. I was, I, I was excited about that.
[00:10:49] Austen Parrish: I mentioned you host the Legal Department podcast and- I appreciate that, by the way.
[00:10:52] Stacy Bratcher: Thank you.
[00:10:53] Austen Parrish: Yeah, I, it was a great podca- I enjoyed being on there. I appreciate you interviewing me. But can you introduce the podcast?
[00:10:58] Austen Parrish: What is it and what does it do?
[00:11:00] Stacy Bratcher: Sure. No offense to present company, I think that in the legal industry we do a great job of technical education for folks. I think law school teaches you a lot how to think, how to issue spot, how to research, et cetera. I think there's a lot of CLE out there for folks, but there is not a ton of resources.
[00:11:22] Stacy Bratcher: There are not a ton of resources available for professional development, in that how to develop the interpersonal skills, the EQ, how to set and achieve professional goals, how to lead a team. And when I decided to do a podcast, I wanted it to focus on professional development, and so that's what we talk about.
[00:11:41] Stacy Bratcher: So you and I had a great conversation about can you have a career in academics after you've been at big law, which I think is a great question. Like, how do people do that? I have a lot of executive coaches on. We've talked about networking and leading teams, how to run great meetings, how to set expectations.
[00:12:03] Stacy Bratcher: All kinds of different topics that are of interest to me and, and again, I think are kinda neglected for lawyer development.
[00:12:10] Austen Parrish: Also these days, I think the length of the career and things change. They talk about how you have to be a lifelong learner if you really wanna be- Mm ... top of your game. And I don't know if this is your experience, but CLE generally has a very negative connotation, something I remember forcing myself to have to get the tapes to listen through in the back-
[00:12:27] Stacy Bratcher: Yeah.
[00:12:27] Austen Parrish: -To meet something. Podcasts are a lot more accessible and easy.
[00:12:31] Stacy Bratcher: Yeah. The CLEs feel dusty. I don't know. They feel, ugh. I've gotta do that. So yeah, we try to have a fun conversation about a topic, and I also have the goal of the listener gets practical, tangible f- tips or feedback at the end of it. We do talk a little bit about people's career, but it's not a career journey show.
[00:12:53] Stacy Bratcher: We're really, like, focusing in on a specific topic. So again, it's selfish because I, there are things I wanna learn about.
[00:12:59] Austen Parrish: No, that's great, though. That seems to be the purpose behind it. But practically, how did you get started?
[00:13:05] Stacy Bratcher: So I was on a podcast, I think this was 2022, 2021. So it was coming out of COVID.
[00:13:12] Stacy Bratcher: My family and I moved to Santa Barbara from Los Angeles, and it was during COVID and there was no... You didn't get together with people. There weren't happy hours. There weren't going out to restaurants or anything. And being in LA for so long, I had really deep professional network, and I would every week go to breakfast, go to coffee, go to an event.
[00:13:35] Stacy Bratcher: I'd have a lot of professional activity. And when I got up here, it was very quiet. But also, Santa Barbara is a place that people come after they've made it. There are a lot of retired people. There's a lot of very interesting people. But I say everyone wears flip-flops, so how do you see the lawyers? And so when I was on this podcast, it was just such...
[00:13:56] Stacy Bratcher: It was like this electric connection. I just... It had such a cool conversation and connection with the host. And I asked her, like, "Hey, how'd you do this?" And she made it seem easier than it is. So she hooked me up with her production company, and I got into researching, putting together a podcast, as lawyers do, right?
[00:14:16] Stacy Bratcher: I learned what I needed to do and hired a producer. And almost three years later, here we are. Wow. Little aside, like I have to say, I think Santa Barbara is probably one of the most beautiful places to be. It's lovely. Yeah, it's a great place. Do you... Does your staff get to come in with flip-flops, or do you have a- No.
[00:14:32] Stacy Bratcher: We're cl- healthcare is pretty buttoned up. Just if, if folks are interested, not health tech necessarily, but healthcare consulting. Healthcare is pretty buttoned up, so no flip-flops at our hospital.
[00:14:43] Austen Parrish: That's a shame. If somebody wanted to dive in and get a good taste of the, The Legal Department's podcast, are there a couple episodes you'd recommend somebody dip their toe into, or things to start with?
[00:14:54] Stacy Bratcher: I think the back catalog's really interesting. I did an episode... I've done two or three episodes with recruiters which were everything you want to know about getting ready for an interview, how to do your LinkedIn, how to make sure you have a photo, questions you need to be ready for in interviews. So there's several with recruiters that I would draw people to, 'cause people are always interested in jobs and their next job.
[00:15:19] Stacy Bratcher: And then I've done two episodes with this author, Michael Melcher, who I sound like I'm a groupie 'cause I talk about him all the time. But he wrote this book called Your Invisible Network, which is a very practical, tactical book on how to approach building and cultivating your professional network. So I've done two episodes with him that I would recommend.
[00:15:43] Austen Parrish: Those are great ways to get started. I was looking at your, at some of the archives. It looks like you've done a, almost 100 episodes, and-
[00:15:50] Stacy Bratcher: Yeah, getting close ...
[00:15:51] Austen Parrish: congratulations, and- Thanks ... that's a big milestone. When you look back, have you learned, other than the specifics, have you learned something more broadly about hosting a podcast as in your own professional identity?
[00:16:02] Stacy Bratcher: What I've learned is I'm a really hard boss. It's crazy, Austen. I work myself really hard in a professional hobby, and it makes... I'm scratching my head like, "What are you doing this for?" I am not getting a grade. I'm not getting paid. I always say there's no hardware for this, right? So I just, I want it to be high quality, I want it to be interesting to people, and so that's what I've, that's what I've learned is that I drive myself pretty hard even for fun.
[00:16:30] Austen Parrish: If you ever need a grade, I'll send you an A and we'll-
[00:16:32] Stacy Bratcher: Okay. There you are. Love to get o- order of the Coif in- In podcasting ... podcasting. Yes.
[00:16:37] Austen Parrish: It's all about the resume.
[00:16:39] Stacy Bratcher: Yeah, it's all about the resume.
[00:16:41] Austen Parrish: That's also a nice transition. Many of our listeners, as I said, are law students or fairly junior lawyers.
[00:16:47] Austen Parrish: Do you have specific advice for them that you would, given the people you've talked to and things that you'd be thinking about if you were a law student or a fairly junior lawyer?
[00:16:54] Stacy Bratcher: One of the things that I always tell law students, and maybe it's too late, is don't borrow too much money. And you and I talked about that, 'cause I know that was part of you making your transition into academics.
[00:17:05] Stacy Bratcher: At our law school, like during orientation, you had to do this financial aid kind of required session. And I remember the presenter said, "Don't live like a lawyer when you're a law student or you'll live like a law student when you're a lawyer." And I was like, "Yeah, whatever, but they have all this money, and all you have to do is apply for it," right?
[00:17:26] Stacy Bratcher: And that student loan debt, which in today's dollars sounds small, but I had six figures of law school debt, and that debt burden set my career a certain direction, right? Because I'm living in a very expensive metropolitan area, and rent was expensive. My husband was a teacher, and I brought this debt into the relationship, into the family.
[00:17:54] Stacy Bratcher: And so a lot of my early career decisions were built around serving that debt. And had I lived at home instead of having an apartment or not taken trips- I didn't live like I do now, like a SVP, but I didn't quite heed the advice of that financial aid counselor. So if I had advice to give to law students, it would be, like, try to minimize that debt load so you have more freedom in your future.
[00:18:22] Austen Parrish: Yeah, I think that's really good advice. I certainly kind of living leanly I think is smart for students, and sometimes it's hard because your student's best friend might be in a different financial sort of situation based on their family, and so they're, th- they're living it up and- Well, the other thing I noticed, and I don't know if it's, again, you s- I didn't go to law school in California, but I noticed just the vibe of the law school class was like, "Oh, we go out to sushi, and we take a spring break trip."
[00:18:49] Austen Parrish: And it was an el- more elevated lifestyle than I had when I worked in government or when I was in college. And so again, for me it was I was getting swept up in the wave of, "Oh, we're l- we're lawyers. We're..." Yeah, my, my sense is it varies dramatically both in the school and the locations I was a dean at, in the Midwest for about nine years, and everybody wore sweatshirts.
[00:19:13] Austen Parrish: There wasn't a lot of that, and frankly, here at UC Irvine, I think the students are fairly conscientious. I have friends at other schools where that's not the case. Mm-hmm. Just, again, it's a different level. I also think students have a more difficult choice these days because I think when we went to law school, the general consensus was go to the best school you can, and that was basically the only thing you were thinking about.
[00:19:32] Austen Parrish: I think you now have to trade off location and perceived prestige and cost and- Yeah ... that doesn't mean that you're not making an investment, so I think you wanna... It's not bad to say you're investing in yourself, but there's a difference investing $150,000, investing $350,000.
[00:19:47] Stacy Bratcher: I can't imagine. I can't imagine.
[00:19:50] Stacy Bratcher: That's a house in some parts of the country. Not California, but in some parts of the country.
[00:19:54] Austen Parrish: No, I, so I think that's really good advice. If young lawyers are, or law students are thinking about in-house positions as a career path, what's your advice for them?
[00:20:02] Stacy Bratcher: It's not just young lawyers, but for anyone interested in in-house, you have to, again, pardon me, but check that legal training at the door because it's almost like men are from Mars, women are from Venus when you get into a corporate culture.
[00:20:17] Stacy Bratcher: So the lawyer is the odd person out. Nobody else has had your training about issue spotting and calling things in a risk profile and, "Oh my God," and, "Oh, we can't," and all these seeing all the problems ahead. So you have to learn, you have to unlearn that training. You observe the issues and you can issue spot, but you have to really adjust your communication style and how you're presenting issues, if that makes sense.
[00:20:48] Stacy Bratcher: You have to try to be more of a layperson. And also really the, the best in-house lawyers view themselves as business enablers. I'm here to help you make the sale, close the deal, make your quarter results. That's really the best way to approach an in-house job. So it's not apples to apples from either coming out of law school or a law firm position
[00:21:14] Austen Parrish: It seems to me in the law firm positions that sometimes your job is to dig down until you get the very precise answer, the best case, the best sort of analysis on a particular issue.
[00:21:23] Austen Parrish: And it seems to me, people I know who are in-house, you've got to be much more comfortable with sort of a range of-
[00:21:29] Stacy Bratcher: Good enough ...
[00:21:30] Austen Parrish: good enough. Yes.
[00:21:30] Stacy Bratcher: Yes. Yeah. Just get by. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect is the enemy of the good. And I assume part of that is just the amount of work coming across the desk and the need to get things out.
[00:21:38] Stacy Bratcher: For sure, and also I feel like law firms are operating in like with a malpractice mindset. If our associate did not tell you about every possible scenario that could go wrong, then we've malpractice risk, and in-house you really don't have that. In-house your, your risk is missing the deal, missing the earnings call, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:22:01] Stacy Bratcher: And so your imperative is to get the business done and not over-lawyer it.
[00:22:06] Austen Parrish: Yeah, I really like that mindset kind of approach of being a business enabler. That sounds right to me. Is there other advice that you'd have for people who are thinking about making the transition in-house, things that they should be thinking about other than that sort of broad mindset approach?
[00:22:19] Stacy Bratcher: My experience of law school is that it was a very competitive environment, and then that competitive vibe continued into the law firm where everybody knows what hours everybody's billing and there's just more of an atmosphere of competition. In-house, you are a team player, so you don't win in each meeting when you raise your hand and you've got the best answer and you make your colleague look dumb.
[00:22:43] Stacy Bratcher: It doesn't work like that. You've got to be seen as, "I'm here to help you," and just being more collaborative. And maybe again, things have changed, but it's just a different mindset. That makes a lot of sense. I think there's more emphasis these days on that sort of teamwork kind of approach, but certainly in law school that's hard to teach sometimes.
[00:23:00] Stacy Bratcher: You've got to do it through more experiential than just talking about it. Yeah. That's complicated. I noticed you do quite a bit of pro bono and volunteer work, particularly- Mm-hmm ... with Legal Aid of Santa Barbara. Mm-hmm. But what do you see the role of pro bono for in-house attorneys? I actually did an episode about that with Michelle Johnson-Tajani, who is now chief administrative officer of Common Spirit Health.
[00:23:18] Stacy Bratcher: I think a lot of people view pro bono work is, I've got to go represent the Innocence Project or I've got to go to take on a case for free. And there are so many other ways to get engaged in pro bono work that is totally achievable for in-house folks. So some examples of things that I've done through Legal Aid, poor people get exploited all the time in little ways that those of us who are fortunate enough to have well-paying jobs and infrastructure don't.
[00:23:53] Stacy Bratcher: So for example, I had a client who doesn't have a bank, and so paid their bills, they would get paid in cash, and then they would take the cash and they'd buy gift cards and use those gift cards to pay bills that they had to have a credit card for. Two of those gift cards worth $500 were duds, and she called the issuer, she was blown off, and that f- $500 represented about- 4% of her annual income.
[00:24:23] Stacy Bratcher: So what I did was go on LinkedIn, see if I knew anybody that was at the issuer in the in- like could I make a connection to somebody at that issuer, and sent three emails and got her money back in two weeks, plus a little bit extra. And I probably could have gotten more, but she really needed the money quickly.
[00:24:43] Stacy Bratcher: And so it wasn't anything that required me to go to court, to leave my office. All I needed was a smartphone and the willingness to do a little bit of digging. It maybe took me, I don't know, hour and a half, two hours, and got this m- woman's money back. It was a tremendous... A little thing, but it had a tremendous impact.
[00:25:03] Stacy Bratcher: So I'd encourage folks to reach out and build connections with your local legal aid. The Association of Corporate Counsel, especially the Southern California division, has a really strong pro bono committee that they do pop-up events and partnerships with other organizations. I really encourage it.
[00:25:21] Austen Parrish: Yeah, I think it's also a great way for people to learn skills, right?
[00:25:25] Austen Parrish: Problem-solving skills, and if they do any of the sort of legal work, you can often get much more real experience early on in your career doing pro bono work for the local- Mm-hmm ... legal aids and nonprofits. And so I think it's, even from a selfish perspective, it's positive, I think, in building. Mm. You, you mentioned networking there.
[00:25:40] Austen Parrish: Maybe I asked you that question too. You were long involved with the Women's Lawyers Association of Los Angeles. Mm-hmm. How did you v- view those sort of bar associations playing into your career path and your success?
[00:25:52] Stacy Bratcher: We're gonna bookmark Women Lawyers of Los Angeles, 'cause it's gonna loop back to something that we're doing together.
[00:25:56] Stacy Bratcher: But so just a little bit about why I got involved with Women Lawyers, I moved from St. Louis to Los Angeles not knowing anyone in the legal field at all. Gone to law school, I worked in Missouri State Government, I knew everybody. I knew judges and agency heads and all kinds of people. And when I got to LA, it's a city of 11 million people, ton of them are lawyers, but I didn't know any of them, right?
[00:26:22] Stacy Bratcher: And so where did... I tried to look for places where I could fold in and have an aggregate of other people like me. So Women Lawyers turned out to be a really good option for that. And then it's, you get out of things what you put into it. So I could have just signed up, paid my fee, got the emails, and said I was a member.
[00:26:44] Stacy Bratcher: But going to events, I got active in committees, and just building relationships over time led me into board positions in the organization and eventually meeting great connections like the one that put us together.
[00:27:00] Austen Parrish: Yeah, and it, it's amazing how those connections can make a difference over time. You don't even realize it until- Yeah
[00:27:04] Austen Parrish: much later on and you realize that people, and maybe even goes back to your story about Legal Aid and your connection-
[00:27:10] Stacy Bratcher: Yes ...
[00:27:10] Austen Parrish: how it got to somebody. Yeah. Let, let's transition to the program. I mentioned at the start that you're part of our inaugural faculty for this new 12-week course being offered at UC Irvine at the law school titled From Lawyer to Leader: Road to the General Counsel Seat.
[00:27:24] Austen Parrish: Can you describe what that is and how did you get involved?
[00:27:26] Stacy Bratcher: I got involved, I'm gonna start there, 'cause I did a teaser just now. So we have a mutual connection, Lisa Hadden Harrington, and Lisa and I served on the Women Lawyers board together a million years ago. We weren't- Super close. We did a couple programs there, but we stayed in touch.
[00:27:45] Stacy Bratcher: And she reached out to me last year around this time and said, "Hey, I'm putting together this course for Dean Parrish at UCI Law School. He's really great. They wanna develop a program for people who wanna be in-house." And I said, "Oh, great. I'd do anything that Lisa asks me." She's also aggregated a few others, and it's amazing, Austen.
[00:28:08] Stacy Bratcher: You think you know your job, and then when you are putting it together into a curriculum and having to site check or just, "Why do I know this?" Or, "How will I teach this?" I'm plenty of panels and talk about being in-house, but haven't taught it before. So it's been a real joy and, we talked about being a lifelong learner.
[00:28:30] Stacy Bratcher: It's been really fulfilling to have to sharpen those skills again and actually put more stake to the sizzle as it is.
[00:28:38] Austen Parrish: Yeah, I always felt that when I started teaching that if I went back, I would be a much more effective lawyer because having to teach it, I got to see the forest much more than the trees.
[00:28:47] Austen Parrish: And in practice, I was very much putting out fires on a day-to-day basis, and teaching allowed me to step back a little bit, and it's nice actually to be able to take that broader view-
[00:28:55] Stacy Bratcher: Yeah ... of what you're doing. Yeah. And actually think about, like, how am I going to... How are people gonna receive this information?
[00:29:01] Stacy Bratcher: How are they gonna learn it? So it's exciting. It's, I think it's a h- a combo hybrid where there's a lot of online, but then there's gonna be a couple in-person opportunities, and we're gonna try to help people land an in-house role if they want one.
[00:29:16] Austen Parrish: Lisa's done a fabulous job of bringing this program together.
[00:29:19] Austen Parrish: And maybe you could talk a little, just briefly, about the sessions that you're gonna be teaching within that 12-week program. What are your sessions gonna focus on?
[00:29:27] Stacy Bratcher: I think I'm the lead off. I'm kicking off with what is in-house practice, and a, a little bit of what we talked about earlier about being a business partner.
[00:29:36] Stacy Bratcher: I have a great case study that's gonna frame the whole curriculum that I'm delivering about showing somebody in an in-house role and helping people pick that apart and learn about what this, what the person in the case study's doing well and what they can do differently. We're gonna talk about relationship building, which is probably my number one superpower, and how to do that in-house.
[00:30:00] Stacy Bratcher: And then the wrap-up is around how to show that you're delivering value, how to develop metrics. I think that's something that people don't realize when they go into an in-house role, is that, yes, you're doing the legal work, but the business actually wants to have some way of quantifying the value that you deliver.
[00:30:19] Stacy Bratcher: So how do you do that and how do you... And again, something I love is setting and achieving goals, so that's what we're gonna be talking about in my sessions. Yeah, that sounds fabulous. From your perspective, who should consider enrolling this, in this course? I think if you're somebody who has an inkling that you might want to be an in-house lawyer and in particular a general counsel, this is a great way to get exposure with very low friction.
[00:30:47] Stacy Bratcher: You don't have to go to out of state or anything. You can sign on and you'll learn from people who have been in-house. Lisa's been in-house at two... She's been general counsel of two public companies. She's a board member. We have other former GCs, compliance officers, so it's a really great way just to get exposure to the content.
[00:31:07] Stacy Bratcher: And one of the worst things you can do is jump into something without knowing what it is, and so this is a great way to just get a little s- exposure, a little splash of in-house practice.
[00:31:18] Austen Parrish: Yeah, I'm excited. A- as you say, there's some fabulous people, faculty associated with this. We'll include a link in the show notes so that people can easily click to it.
[00:31:25] Austen Parrish: But looking back when I was a young lawyer, I think I would have found this valuable even if I wasn't thinking of going in-house. As I proceeded and got more senior, I realized having a better understanding about what the client's needs are and what most of the, the in-house lawyers that we're hiring as an outside lawyer in large law firm, what their pain points were and how they viewed things, it would have made me a more effective lawyer in-house or even-
[00:31:48] Stacy Bratcher: For sure, yeah. For sure. Yeah. And you don't really know. If you get to develop a relationship with an in-house lawyer when you're at a firm, you can get an idea. But I think that, as you said, this is a good way just to peek behind the curtain. Yeah, get a better sense of that mindset that you were talking about earlier on.
[00:32:04] Austen Parrish: Stacy, on your podcast, you end by asking everyone their pump-up song, which I love. That sounds like a great way. So I've got to ask you, what gets you moving?
[00:32:12] Stacy Bratcher: I have to say, back to me being my hardest boss, building content, building resources for other lawyers really gets me going. Before we got on, we talked about I work out three days a week.
[00:32:25] Stacy Bratcher: The other three days a week I'm up at 5:30 or 6 in my home office either thinking about content for the legal department, writing my Substack TLD Goal Getter, or other way- thinking of other ways that I can help other lawyers level up in their career. So that's what I do to get pumped up.
[00:32:44] Austen Parrish: No, that makes sense.
[00:32:45] Austen Parrish: Stacy, it's been terrific. Really appreciate you joining us- and being a guest on UCI Law Talks. And thank you again for being part of inaugural faculty. That's, that program's starting this August, and I'm looking forward to seeing who takes it and the reception when it begins. So thank you so much.
[00:32:59] Stacy Bratcher: Thank you, and thanks for calling me faculty. That's exciting. I'm gonna put that on the wall.
[00:33:04] Austen Parrish: You can add that on the wall, and then I'll send you a transcript giving you an A on the podcast.
[00:33:08] Stacy Bratcher: Okay. Thank you. Thank you.
[00:33:10] Austen Parrish: Thanks, Stacy.
[00:33:16] Austen Parrish: Thank you for listening to UCI Law Talks. For all our latest news, follow UCI Law on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn
