Transitioning from a traditional legal role to a trusted business leader requires mastering high-stakes decision-making and executive acumen. Surviving the hot seat in the C-suite means moving beyond standard legal answers to provide proactive, high-impact guidance. In this episode, the host sits down with Chaka Patterson, founder and CEO of Chaka Strategy and former General Counsel at Adtalem Global Education. Drawing from his extensive leadership experience and his bestselling book, The Hot Seat: Mastering the Public Company General Counsel Role, Chaka shares actionable strategies for earning peer trust, building a versatile leadership toolkit, and thriving at the intersection of law and business.
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Surviving The Hot Seat: Making The Leap From Legal To Strategic Advisor With Chaka Patterson
From Litigator To General Counsel: Meet Chaka Patterson
My guest has sat in just about every seat on the path to the GC chair. Chaka Patterson has been a litigator, a law firm partner, a government lawyer, a public company treasurer, and head of investor relations, and was a public company general counsel for Adtalem Global Education. He is the founder and CEO of Chaka Strategy, a firm that helps lawyers turn their legal expertise into business impact.
He is also the author of the bestselling book, The Hot Seat Mastering the Public Company General Counsel Role. Chaka and I dig into how an unexpected detour into treasury and investor relations, a stretch assignment opening a campus in Barbados, and an MBA from the University of Chicago prepared him to step into the GC role in February 2020, one month before the world shut down.
We talk about why a lawyer’s real superpower is knowing how to learn, why lawyers belong in the kitchen with the chef instead of waiting in the dining room, and why every issue is a business issue. If you are an aspiring GC or a new GC finding your footing in the C-suite, you will hear practical strategies for moving from legal advice to strategic advice, earning your peers’ trust as an equal, and building a toolkit grounded in judgment and common sense that AI cannot replace. Let us get into my conversation with Chaka Patterson.
Chaka, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
I am super excited to dive into your story first. I want to spend a bunch of time on what you are doing now because you have written a book called The Hot Seat. It is available everywhere. I have read it. It is excellent. It is the book I wish I had had when I first became a public company GC back in the 1900s.
That is exactly what motivated me to write it. Thank you is exactly that. It was the book I wish I had had when I became a public company general counsel.
Many of us and probably most of the folks tuning in, we all think we have a book in us. I am going to want to ask you some questions about how you went from having a book in you to getting a book out there in the world. That is really impressive. Let us go back in time first, and what first inspired you to pursue a career in law?
My mom is a retired history professor from Northwestern University. I really had a strong interest in history when I was a kid, particularly Reconstruction and then subsequently the civil rights movement. In both of those, the through-line is lawyers and the legal process and getting people rights, protecting their rights, that kind of thing. That is what really drew me to wanting to be a lawyer in the first place.
Did that make you want to be a litigator?
It definitely did. I always knew I was going to be a litigator. One, because of how I got interested in law to begin with. I knew that I liked research, I liked writing, I liked speaking. I talked too much. It has got litigator written all over it.
Coming out of Harvard, you did a clerkship and then another clerkship. Tell us about that.
When I was in law school, I actually did not know about clerking. Somebody told me about it and the benefits of clerking because you really get to hone your legal research and writing skills, which is our stock and trade. You really get to see what great lawyering looks like, what bad lawyering looks like, and everything in between. You also get the opportunity to see what at least 1 or 2 federal judges think about when they are deciding cases. At the Court of Appeals, you get to talk to other law clerks, and so you get an opportunity to see how other judges think and decide cases. It is just an invaluable training ground that really gives you a tremendous foundation well beyond what the firm or even government can. You rely on it for the rest of your career.
When you clerk, you really get to hone your legal research and writing skills. You get to see what great lawyering looks like, what bad lawyering looks like, and everything in between. Share on XSpeaking of the firm and government, you go to Jenner & Block. Did you already have that lined up before you did the clerkships?
I did. I summered at Jenner right after my first year in law school. I had that lined up even when I went off to my clerkship.
I got it. Now, the clerkships were a year each? You come into Jenner & Block, and what kind of work do you start doing when you get there?
Building The Foundation: Rigor, High EQ, And Courtroom Mastery
Yes, so I was in the commercial litigation and white-collar criminal group. A lot of people in the group had been former Assistant United States Attorneys, federal prosecutors. I did a mix of commercial litigation and white-collar criminal defense.
Was it like Anton Valukas or something?
Tony Valukas and Tom Sullivan were the co-heads of my group, and they both had been the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.
Definitely a group of heavy hitters that you got to come into. Any stories that you want to share from that?
What I really learned was the rigor that is required to practice because the clerkship gives you a great foundation in terms of your toolkit. I walked into the firm with an awesome toolkit, and then Tony and Tom really taught me how to use those tools. This is the right tool for the right situation. They also taught me high EQ, which I think often goes underappreciated, but really understanding people and why they do the things they do.
I had another mentor, Bill Von Hoene, and one of the things he taught me along the lines of high EQ is that when you go to a courthouse, like I knew this, but because I had been in the judge’s chambers, it was a little bit different because I was on that side of the bench. Bill really taught me how to be a litigator in a courthouse. You walk in, you say hi to everybody. You make sure you know the names of the deputies in the courtroom and you make sure you know everybody on the first names of everybody on the judge’s staff and you always greet them.
You try to learn a little something about them, and you make sure that before the judge comes on the bench, that you have some chit-chat with them and you know, those kinds of things just because you build some rapport because they can they are the gatekeeper so they can make your life really easy or they can make it really hard. I took on a lot of pro bono cases when I was young, and that was one of the attractions to Jenner & Block.
You go up to the criminal courthouse, and I mean, they can call the cases in any order they want. Right. If you are pro bono counsel, you can be sitting up there for hours or for minutes. When I marked myself as the person who said, “How are you? How is your family? Did you see that Bears game yesterday?” Those kinds of things. Miraculously, my cases got called first.
Same thing up at the jail. The sheriff’s deputies could call your client first or call your client last. When you demonstrate that you appreciate who they are and what they do, and respect them, miraculously, my clients get pulled out first, handle my business, and I am in and out, and other private lawyers who are coming in there with attitude and I am special and all that. You can be special up there for eight hours.
I love it. You go to the government. Back to the government, different from being a judicial clerk.
The best lawyers in that group, Tony, Tom, Scott, Chuck Sklarsky, Mark Pollack, a lot of the best lawyers in the group had been federal prosecutors. After I made partner, I went and had a long conversation with Tony. I said, “I feel like I really am great.” I have got to get more first chair experience than private practice can really afford because now I am a partner. I am expensive. Clients are going to want you. They are going to want Tom. They are going to want Mark. They are going to want Chuck. I am going to be a great second and third chair.
I do not really know that I am going to be the first chair. Why that matters is because when you are first chair, you make the final call. Subject to any client input, you make the final call. Every strategy is going to live and die on your ability to make good final calls. I just did not have that final call experience. I had trial experience, but in the trial I was always second or third chair. Tony agreed. He thought that made a lot of sense, and he was very supportive, as was Tom.
I thought about going to the US Attorney’s Office. Pat Fitzgerald was the US Attorney at the time and was an Amherst guy. I had gotten to know Pat when he came to town. I was going to go do that. One of my partners, Ben Weinberg, had gone to the AG’s office, and he called me and said, “I hear you are thinking about going to the government. Talk to me about the AG’s office because I think you are going to, you are going to like this experience better.” He was right. The way he described it was that I would be able to start a unit from scratch.
We would be able to do civil and criminal trials and appeals. Given that I was already a partner, that appealed to me, the opportunity to start a unit from scratch, run it, lead it in civil and criminal, and do my own appeals in addition to the trials. A lot of the things that are compartmentalized in the US Attorney’s Office. That was attractive because right at the end of the day, those are the skills I was trying to get. That is why I ended up in the Attorney General’s Office.
Was the possibility of becoming a general counsel in your mind, at all, around that time?
Stepping In-House: Venturing Into Treasury And Investor Relations
I always thought what would happen is I would be a partner in a law firm. I would go to the government. I would go in-house, and I would start out in litigation because that just made sense. I would figure out how to get over to the business side, learn the business. I would then work my way back to general counsel.
Which I think you are going to tell us about what happened. You went in-house at Exelon. I did not have a treasurer or investor relations on my bingo card for you.
Yes, I did not either. I was in the legal department for about nine months. What I explain to people when they are thinking about going in-house is you really have to think about the type of company, number one. For me, going to a heavily regulated company as a lawyer made a lot of sense because a big part of the revenues were driven by getting the legal environment right, getting the regulatory piece right. I was like, “That is going to be a good spot for a lawyer.” Is the legal department respected?
A guy by the name of Randy Mehrberg, who had been my mentor, one of my mentors at Jenner. In fact, he had been my summer associate mentor. He became the general counsel and then ultimately chief administrative officer. Bill Von Hoene, by that time, had become the general counsel. There were a number of former Jenner partners at Exelon, so many of whom had switched over to the business side. I kind of went into Exelon knowing that there was a real possibility that I could switch over to the business side. I just did not know it would happen that fast. I had no idea what investor relations was or, quite frankly, what the treasurer does. That just fell into my lap.
Tell me then about your move back to private practice.
I had been at Exelon for five years and had a great run. At the time, being treasurer, I had a pretty good sense of what the long-term looked like. I was not clear that the long-term made financial sense to me relative to what was happening in private practice. I talked to a couple of friends who were partners at big firms, and I thought, “This makes sense for me to go back because I still have what I need to become a general counsel. Let me go back to private practice and wait for that opportunity to present itself.
That was at Skadden and then Jones Day. Now you are going to go back in the house, and this is the job you are going to wind up in the GC chair. Tell us about that.
One of my biggest clients and a very close friend, Stephen Beard, became the general counsel at Adtalem, which is now Colvista. They had a tremendous amount of litigation. They had just settled an FTC investigation for like a hundred million dollars and had to jump through a whole bunch of other hoops. Steve is really a hardcore transactions lawyer, M&A lawyer, securities lawyer. He was like, “Would you consider coming over and being my deputy and really getting your arms around all this litigation while I get my arms around the general counsel role?”
I said, “Yes, that is perfect. Steve, we had a conversation about how he really wanted to switch over to the business side,” which he did. He is now the CEO of the company. We had a conversation that if I came over as deputy, he would do everything in his power to make it very clear that I should be his successor when he switches over to the business side. That is how we always ran it in parallel. He gave me a lot of opportunities to present in the boardroom because the litigation was fierce and there was a lot. If you believe the plaintiffs, it far and away exceeded our D&O insurance.
The board was very focused on this. Was this in for-profit education? It was a for-profit education space. I had a lot of touches with the board. I had a lot of high-visibility opportunities, and then Steve threw me a curveball. He said, “We have got to open up some new schools, and we have got to do it in the Caribbean. I am going to need you to go and figure out how to do that. I am a litigator. I am not a real lawyer.
Embracing High-Stakes Stretch Assignments: Launching A School In Barbados
Now I do not know anything about foreign affairs. I do not know anything about anything. That was a real stretch opportunity that really put me on the map because we ended up opening up an enormous operation in Barbados. I had to go down there, not a terrible assignment, but I had to go down there and figure out how to set up a school, how to get dorms, how to get a bus service going, how to get a campus, how to get employees there.
How did you do that? What was your approach?
What I tell people all the time is that the real skill set of a litigator is that our superpower is that we know how to learn. I took the same approach to this that I took to becoming Treasurer of Exelon. I just did a lot of reading, did a lot of studying, talked to a lot of people.
The real skill set of a litigator is our superpower: we know how to learn. Share on XYou had to talk to a lot of people. Now someone might put it in ChatGPT, “How do I open a school in Barbados?”
You talked to a lot of people, and so I got to the contours of what needed to be done. Just got executed. It was a real stretch assignment. Again, the whole real estate piece was a big stretch assignment of real estate in a foreign country, dealing with the prime minister, the prime minister’s office, and the central bank. There was an issue during the tourist season, the low season. They wanted to keep dollars because, back then, 5 or 6 or 7 years ago, the dollar was still the reserve currency. They wanted to have dollars in their central bank, and our faculty and students wanted to be able to send dollars home. Negotiating the tax breaks, tax exemptions, those kinds of things. It was just a lot to learn.
Were you doing that while you were general counsel?
I was still a deputy. Got it. It was obviously just super high profile and demonstrated that I could do more than litigation because the board knew me as the guy who dealt with all this crazy litigation, but then they got to see me in my business chops. By then I had my MBA, and they got to see me doing all these business-side things. We did a bunch after that. We did a bunch of deals, and yes, I did not know a thing about M&A, but we bought a bunch of stuff, divested a bunch of stuff all over the world. I got to really learn M&A.
Steve really gave me those opportunities as well. By the time they promoted him to chief operating officer, I really was ready to be, at least from a holistic business and law perspective. Actually, I forgot that at some point in there, our head of investor relations just quit, like right near the earnings call, within weeks of the earnings call. I raised my hand and said, “I can step in and run Investor Relations because I had done it at Exelon.”
That gave me a chance to spend a lot of time with the CEO and the CFO. I did that for six months, much longer than I ever thought I would. I am deputy general counsel, and I am running Investor Relations. By the time the board is like, “Who should be, who should succeed Steve as GC?” The plan worked and it was they never, didn’t hire a search firm. Didn’t go outside. It was clear it was going to be me.
You were the natural choice. When did you get your MBA, and how did you get it? Were you working full time?
I was. I was a partner at Jones Day, and I got this brilliant idea that having an MBA would make me attractive in the marketplace for becoming a GC. As I tell people, I grossly underestimated the amount of work it would be. I grossly overestimated my ability to do it.
You made it through.
I made it through. I had great classmates at Booth in Chicago.
See, that was your mistake.
I was in-house at Baxter and decided to get my MBA in the evenings, and I was deciding between Booth and Kellogg, and I chose Kellogg.
It will be more fun. I had a good friend who went to Booth, and he was like, “It is a lot of work, isn’t it?” I am like, “Yes, it is a lot of work, but it is a lot of fun.”
It was. I would never say it was a lot of fun. That would never come out of my mouth. I really enjoyed my classmates, but Booth has a remarkable ability to quantify everything. When we walked into our marketing class, I was like, “Thank God. The leadership class.” I was like, “Cool. We are going to get a break from all this quant stuff.” No. Everything can be quantified. It is pretty.
I will say the Gleacher Center is very convenient and beautiful, right there on the river.
That is right.
That was a draw for sure. Tell me, you got the GC role, and what were you very prepared for, and what were you very unprepared for?
Navigating The GC Role And Leading Through The COVID Crisis
Yes, I was very prepared for the work. That was the easy part and presenting in the boardroom and all, and all those kinds of things. I was even a leader. It was the same team. I just went from deputy to general counsel. What I was unprepared for was the pivot that needed to be made in the boardroom in terms of, now that I am general counsel, they want just pure strategic advice from me, not legal advice. They do not want legal advice from me at all. I am the wrong person to be giving legal advice. That is what the deputy and all the subject matter experts are for.
I am there to talk about, now that we have the legal advice strategically, what are we going to do about it? That is one. For some reason, I just missed that piece. It took me a minute to get up to speed on that. The other thing is getting my now C-suite peers to see me as a peer, because they are used to seeing me as the deputy, as the subject matter expert. I am the guy you see for what the law is, what it says, what you can do. Now I am the strategy guy, and I am weighing in on their parts of the business, like everybody else in the executive leadership team.
It took people a minute to get comfortable with that. I did not do enough. Now, in fairness, this was literally right in the heart of COVID. I got promoted in February of 2020, and the world shut down in March of 2020. I did not have the same opportunities to, “Let us go grab coffee and let me get you comfortable that we are now peers.” Trying to do it over Zoom and people got little kids and right. You remember just the sheer insanity of COVID. It was hard to develop those relationships and get people to see me differently when we are only going to interact like this.
How did you overcome that?
It just took effort and time. The other thing I did, and I have always been very good at this in my career, is look for opportunities. What else can I do to show people what I can do? When COVID hit, I suggested to the CEO that, given all that needs to be done, we create a COVID task force and that I be the head of it. Obviously, it reports to her, but it frees her from having to be in the weeds on COVID and what we are going to do about it. The task force would do all the blocking and tackling and then make recommendations to her and to the board on what we should do next. That allowed me to kind of break out of he is the deputy, but now he has the general counsel hat on.
Now you are leading a cross-functional, most important project.
I purposely worked closely with the GC, with the CEO picking a cross-functional team. It had the business heads of the business units or their number two, the CFO, the CHRO, a couple other folks, the heads of all of our campuses. It really was a high-powered cross-functional team that I was leading.
I imagine every day you are standing at 8:00 AM every morning.
Yes. That really gave me, and by the way, I was effectively self-appointed the head of it. I was calling people, saying, “I am putting together this task force. At least the direction would like you to be on it.” People were like, “This guy, he is thinking of me.” It allowed me to break out of that. He is the deputy who has now been promoted to a GC role and really showed people what I could do from a business side perspective.
You find yourself back at a law firm. Tell me about that.
It is a long story. The short version is I will just stick to the SEC filings that I left. The CFO and the lead independent director all left at roughly the same time. Once that decision was made, I was not really sure what I wanted to do next. I had done a lot of work with Alston & Bird, really liked the people, really respected their legal work, and had a pretty good sense that I would fit in culturally. I went there as a partner and was there until I started Chaka Strategy.
Let us talk about your current company and what you are doing to help people like you and like me back in the day when in that first GC role.
Chaka Strategy: Turning Legal Expertise Into Business Impact
Really, the focus of the company is to help lawyers turn their legal expertise into business impact. One of the things that I realized early on with my team, and then both at Exelon and at Adtalem and then back in private practice talking to my clients, is that people tend to be heads-down, legal-focused. That is just that, as you know, that is not the job. The job is to help the business do whatever it is in business to do. Sell more widgets, sell more services, sell more stuff, and generally increase revenue and profits.
Oftentimes you see legal departments acting as if they are just a step removed from outside counsel. They sit outside the business and sort of lob advice at the business. What I remind people is that you are an employee. You work here. You are not outside of the business. You have to eat. I use the kitchen metaphor, like, you have to eat the cooking. You have an absolute right to go see how the chef is chefing. What ingredients is the chef using? Are they fresh? Are they safe? Is all the equipment clean? That is what your role is.
Your role is not to sit in the dining room and be like, “I wonder what the chef is doing now.” Only if somebody gets sick do you get involved. That is not the approach. The approach is to be omnipresent because you are a really smart person. If you make an effort to really know the business, you can actually really help the business because a lot of times they get invested in whatever the strategy is. If you are upstream enough, you have an opportunity to be just a really smart person in a room and say, “Why are we doing that again? Does it, and why, and why now?”
You can help them shape the decisions and not just from a legal perspective, that’s table stakes, but really help them shape these business decisions that drive revenue, drive profits, and, most importantly, let us keep all the upside that we have generated. That is what we are doing. That is really what the business is. I do that through workshops for legal departments. I do that through one-on-one coaching, principally with general counsel and deputy general counsel. I have a website that has 22 modules. Each module has an instructor-led video, me, a white paper, a PowerPoint, and then a toolkit so that they can actually customize the toolkit so they can actually put the lessons to work for their business.
People can go on there and subscribe as individuals and go through the lessons. They can hire you directly for coaching, or they can hire you to do a workshop for their team. Are those in person?
They are. They have all been in person.
Nice. How do you find those?
Man, fantastic. As the GCs have told me, there are a lot of a-ha moments, because, again, what I start off with is why is it important for us to translate our legal expertise into business impact? I am a litigator. I like to use analogies and metaphors. I explained to people, “Look, when you go to the doctor, and you have got back pain, and the doctor starts talking at you, you have got the third lumbar and the fourth vertebrae, and they are supposed to be fused, and you, we have got a laceration on the third whatever.” I do not speak that language. Now we will take a lecture. It is not a conversation.
Now you are in pain and confused. We do that sometimes as lawyers.
I do not know whether we are even having the conversation that I came here to have. I do not know what’s happening, honestly. I just know my back hurts, and I’m still waiting for his solution in plain English, like, “Am I going to physical therapy? Am I taking a pill? Am I getting a shot? Am I doing surgery? What are the pros and cons? What do you recommend based on all your years of experience?”
What would you do if it were your back?
We do the same thing. We roll into a room full of business people. We lead with the legal issue. We describe it in legalese. We are like, “It is a business decision.” We walk out. What just happened? What literally, what just happened? If you do that every time, it is almost downright disrespectful. You know for a fact they do not speak legalese. They do not really focus on the legal issues. You have talked in gobbledygook about something they do not even know is a problem. You said, “Good luck. You got five options. I wish you the best.”
You walk out as if whatever option they choose has no impact on you. Of course it does, because you work here. It absolutely impacts your paycheck. It impacts the reputation of the business you work for. How you can get comfortable being like that is a business decision. I wish you guys the best of luck with it. What I teach people is you walk into a room full of business people, you lead with the business issue, because every issue with this company is a business one. There are no legal issues. There are no operational issues. These are all business issues.
Every issue at this company is a business one. There are no legal issues. There are no operational issues. These are all business issues. Share on XYou just happen to bring a legal lens to a business issue. We talk to them about the issue in business language, which is typically the language of finance and accounting. We help them make a decision. “Based on my experience with this, there are three options. I would go with option two because,” and then they are like, “I got it,” and it is like the great doctor who says, “Look, real-world story so I was a runner in high school and in college, and I strained my knee. Thankfully, I did not tear it.” The orthopedic surgeon I saw explained the issue to me, “Look, you have strained the ligaments in your knee. Thankfully, you have not torn them. Here is your option.”
If you tell me you were training for the Olympics and you just need to get back in the game right away, then we are going to do surgery. It’s because surgery has the fastest recovery time. Now it is painful, and it is expensive, but it is going to get you where you need to go. Now, if you tell me, “Look, you run on the team, and you have enjoyed your time as a varsity athlete, but it is coming to a close because you are going to law school,” We are just going to do physical therapy. It is going to take longer, but it is going to be less painful, less expensive, and it will get you to where you want to go because, you know, time is your friend.
Totally. That is why I think it is so important. As what you said to give, to give both here are the options. Here is the recommendation. Many times, we as lawyers want to give options and then leave it to the business person. As you said, this is not a satisfactory way to do it when you are in-house counsel to the GC. You also do not just want to give the recommendation without the options because there may be other factors that you are not aware of or that you are not emphasizing in the same way that the CEO or your peers may be emphasizing. A perfect framework is to give the options in that way in business language and then give a recommendation.
They can say, “We appreciate that. Look, we can iterate.” We can jointly problem-solve. “If I told you X fact, would that change your recommendation? It would?” Here is how we change it, or no, I have already accounted for that. Even though I appreciate you sharing that with me, my recommendation is the same, whatever it is. The bottom line is, because we are now speaking the same language and we are looking at the same problem, we are now jointly problem-solving.
In the era of AI, and as AI gets better, the thing you will never be able to replace is great judgment and common sense. If we are going to be heads-down lawyers and we are just focused on giving legal advice in legal language, that is going to be really tricky in the age of AI, where a lot of our clients are going to say, “Man, I have had enough of this person coming in here doing that. I am going to go into AI and ask AI to figure it out.”
In the era of AI and as AI gets better, the thing you will never be able to replace is great judgment and common sense. Share on XWhich is not privileged, by the way. Be careful.
At the end of the day, I got the answer. I am not a lawyer. I do not really understand or care enough about the privilege. I care about getting the answer and getting this contract closed or getting this deal done or getting this money in the door. I am going to avoid the lawyers as much as possible versus good judgment and common sense. We love having the lawyers here. We love having them upstream because they really help us think better, problem solve better, and get to even better answers than we got to on our own.
That is what you are training people to do.
Yes.
Very good. Can we spend just a minute at the end here? I want to hear about the book. What was the genesis of the book?
Writing The Hot Seat And Essential Career Advice For Modern Lawyers
I had been thinking about it for a while. In the summer of 2025, I really got serious about it and said, “I have now had enough conversations with people. Your first-time GCs, people who want to become GCs, are frustrated.” Business people were like, “Man, I just do not understand why the legal department does things the way they do it.” I said, “I am going to write a book that I wish I had had when I became a first-time general counsel. I am going to write it like a field manual.” The book focuses on the critical relationships, the CEO, the board, the CHRO, the CFO.
It goes into your team, building your team, building a team that is built to last, that does not burn out, learning the business, with crises. We get the public company stuff, SEC, other kinds of filings, and then dealing with crises. Each chapter has five key takeaways and then scenarios at the end of each chapter. People can take the lessons from the chapter and run them through all these various scenarios to get comfortable and internalize the lessons. That is why I call it a field manual because it is designed to be able to go back to it whenever you come across particular issues.
I love the format. It is very pragmatic. Something that you read, you do not put it and leave on your shelf. You pull it off the shelf and reflect when you are in real-life scenarios. Congratulations.
Thank you. It is wonderful. Good stuff.
It has been well received. It is an Amazon bestseller, and it is gratifying to know that it is really helping people.
I am going to finish with this question. What would you tell your past self, let us say even all the way back to coming out of law school, what advice would you give yourself now based on everything you know and have learned since then other than read the book?
I would say really focus on building that toolkit. The toolkit is really your foundation and is the foundation upon which you are going to build your career. As you get more senior, you are going to want to have a variety of tools. When you get your first toolkit, it may have a hammer, a screwdriver, and a wrench. That is great. You live in an apartment. The handyman is around. This is for emergencies.
If it cannot be fixed with one of these three.
I got fixed on one of these three, so I called somebody. You get a family and a house, and you realize, “There are actually a few more screwdrivers. Never really. There are actually several kinds of wrenches.” You add to your toolkit to accommodate the situation you find yourself in. By the time that you are really seeing, you have got this robust toolkit, all kinds of screwdrivers, all kinds of hammers, all kinds of wrenches. You are basically prepared for any and every situation. Always look for opportunities to add to your toolkit.
I love it. That is great advice for anybody coming out of law school and anybody in any field, really. Especially in the age of AI, which is a tool as well. That is an important thing to have in your toolkit, but it is a part of a broader toolkit.
I tell my kids when they are younger, they are like, well, why do I need to learn math if we have calculators? I was like, “How do you know if the calculator did it right? How do you know? What if you fat-fingered it? What if you put in the wrong numbers? What if you hit the multiplication button instead of the division button? How will you know if the output is correct?”
AI is the same way. The reason why I still talk to law students all the time, the reason you still have to read the cases and struggle with the cases and fight with the cases and still have something, some version of Black’s Law Dictionary, is because you’ve got to know what the output is supposed to look like. You cannot just rely on some tool if you do not know what the outputs are supposed to look like.
Chaka, thank you so much for being on the show.
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Thanks for all those words of wisdom.
Absolutely.
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Thank you for tuning in to my interview with Chaka. Here are my three biggest takeaways from this episode. Number one, your real superpower is knowing how to learn. Chaka never planned to be a treasurer, run investor relations, or open a campus in Barbados, but each time a stretch assignment came his way, he raised his hand and approached it the way a litigator approaches a new case. Read, study, talk to a lot of people, and then execute.
Those unexpected assignments are what showed his board he could do more than litigation and made him the natural choice for GC. Do not wait to feel ready. Say yes to the assignment that stretches you. Number two, once you are in the GC chair, the job is strategic advice, not legal advice. Chaka’s biggest surprise as a new GC was that the board and his C-suite peers no longer wanted just legal advice from him. They wanted to know what the company should do about it.
It means leading with the business issue, speaking the language of finance instead of legalese, laying out the options, and then having the courage to make a recommendation. Number three, keep adding to your toolkit because judgment is what AI cannot replace. Chaka’s advice to his younger self is to always look for chances to add to your toolkit, starting with a hammer, a screwdriver, and a wrench and growing from there. As AI takes on more of the rote work, what sets great lawyers apart is judgment, common sense, and a deep enough foundation to know when the output is wrong.
As he tells his kids, you still need to learn math so you can know whether the calculator got it right. If you are on the path to the GC role, or you have just stepped into it, Chaka’s strategy is a great reminder that the leap from legal expert to strategic advisor is learnable. The Hot Seat is a field manual worth keeping within arm’s reach. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, rate, and share it with another lawyer who is serious about growing into a true business leader.
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About Chaka Patterson
Chaka M. Patterson is a former public-company General Counsel (Adtalem Global Education, NYSE: ATGE) and former VP of Treasury and Investor Relations at Exelon (NYSE: EXC). He now runs Chaka Strategy, working with sitting Chief Legal Officers and General Counsels at publicly traded companies, and has just published The Hot Seat: Mastering the Public Company General Counsel Role.