In this Office Hours discussion, Stacy Bratcher is joined by Leah Huddleston, Chief Legal Officer/Corporate Secretary at CBIZ, and Candace Jackson, Senior Vice President/General Counsel/Corporate Secretary of Silvaco. They share their journeys from associate general counsel and deputy GC to their current chairs, highlighting the most valuable lessons they learned along the way. Leah and Candace explain why a GC must truly know the business inside out and why they sometimes need to act as ethical supervisors. They also discuss how GCs can develop an executive presence and how they must handle the leadership development of their teams.
Important Links:
https://www.societycorpgov.org/certification-home
https://hbr.org/2024/01/the-new-rules-of-executive-presence
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Listen to the podcast here
Office Hours: How To Get Your First GC Job With Leah Huddleston And Candace Jackson [E81]
My name is Candace Jackson. I am Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of Silvaco Group, Inc. a fun fact about me is I am a Whitney Young Dolphin. I went to the same high school as Michelle Obama.
My name is Leah Huddleston. I am Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary at CBIZ Inc. A fun fact about me is that I wanted to be a violinist as a profession but I somehow landed in the legal profession.
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In this episode, I’m excited to welcome Leah Huddleston, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary of CBIZ, a financial advisory services firm and Candace Jackson, General Counsel of Silvaco, is back. You might remember her from our DGC episode. We are here to do an office hours episode answering your questions. I am just dying to jump into this conversation with Leah and Candace. Thanks for being here, ladies.
Thank you for inviting us.
Thanks for having us.
Introducing Leah Huddleston And Candace Jackson
This is an office hours episode, meaning that people have reached out to me in LinkedIn, email and through my website to tap our brains, get our collective feedback on their questions. These questions are mainly focused from people who are in associate general counsel or DGC roles who want to get into your chairs. I picked you ladies because you did like the impossible. I want to hear a little bit about the background for a couple minutes. Candace, I will do a shout out to your episode a little bit later, but you went from DGC at a public company and now, to general counsel of a public company. That is a steep climb. If you could just give a couple minutes about how you got there.
I started about a few years ago as the Deputy General Counsel at a publicly traded semiconductor company called Synaptics. I came on board as a succession higher. My then general counsel said, “I’m going to retire in a few years and I would love to hire my successor. I wanted to teach you how to do my job.” We were a two-person team. We worked closely together and worked well together. He threw me into the deep end. I was a security and incorporated governance lawyer by training. That was my primary responsibility when I came on board to this public company.
I also had an obligation to jump in and learn employment law, export control, how to manage litigation and how to settle litigation. I was going to mediations, arbitrations and getting matters resolved. It was a crash course in all of the things that I never thought I wanted to do, let alone could do and realize that I loved it.
When the time came for him to retire, the opportunity at Synaptics didn’t work out but about nine months later, I was offered the role at a very small newly public company called Silvaco and that’s where I am now. They were looking for someone who had all of that public company experience and brought GC ready experience, but someone who was going to be a first-time general counsel and is willing to take a chance on a small company. That’s how I ended up here.
I want to refer everyone to episode 61 where you go deep on how you did it because your mentor did get you ready but I think you were in the right place, right time. Your industry is pretty niche with the semiconductor industry, but you also did a lot to position yourself for that role. For folks who want to hear all of the twists and turns in how she did it, check out episode 61. Leah, I want to hear from you as well. You were AGC at Brown-Forman, which people may not know that company, but they certainly know a lot of those brands. Can you tell a little bit about that role?
Brown-Forman is a spirits company based out of Louisville, Kentucky. I think many of the readers would know it as the producer of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey as well as Woodford Reserve. I joined Brown-Forman in 2017 and worked there for about six years. I was hired at Brown-Forman to oversee all of their SEC governance and mergers and acquisitions work. It quickly expanded the scope of my responsibilities throughout my time there at Brown-Forman and ultimately oversaw tax at one point, privacy and IT. Before I left, I served as a regional general counsel for Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.
When did you sleep?
Very little sleep but lots of rich experience. I believe that those tools and the experiences that I had at Brown-Forman expanding from the SEC and governance work uniquely positioned me for the role that I’m in now at CBIZ.
You also did a lot to enhance your LinkedIn profile to show yourself as somebody who was GC ready if not already in the title. Can you talk a little bit about how you did that?
I hired someone to work on my resume to enhance it to help me to better tell my story about my capabilities. That was a big part of my journey and moving from an AGC role to achieve a legal officer role. She also took a close look at my LinkedIn profile again to enhance the way that I told my story around my experience. She even nitpicked the picture on my profile. She said, “Leah, I don’t care for that picture. You should use a picture that looks this way instead.” In addition to the experience, I had an advisor to support me and help me as I began to think about the next chapter in my career.
You didn’t just, “Someone’s going to find me. Here I am.” I like how you said tell the story because I think too often, we look at our resumes as an accomplishments list and not as an introduction to who we are. That’s great that you were able to frame yours that way.
I think the other specific guidance or the thing that she helped me with is understanding the things I had done. In our day-to-day work, we touched so many areas of an organization. There were literally significant projects that I thought were day-to-day but were meaningful as you think about positioning yourself from that. Having that third party view is helpful to make sure you are careful thinking about the scope of the work that you’ve done over the course of your career.
Journey From Deputy GC To GC
I couldn’t agree more. Candace, I can’t remember if you also had that revamp of your profile and your resume. How have you tried to tell your story as when you were DGC to get to the GC chair?
When I was interviewing for this role, I knew that they were a newly public company. I focused on the experience that I had in the past working with newly public companies, and the experience that I had in my then existing role of just counseling the business. I knew that newly public companies had a need for, I don’t want to call it hand holding, but they just need more support. They need more guidance.
Leah focused on telling that story. I’m positioning myself as someone who has had experience working with new public company directors who have a lot of questions about their roles and what is the non-govt committee chair? What do I do? I’ve had a newly public company non-govt committee chair call me and ask me that exact question and talk them through the role and what does it mean. I just worked to position my skillset and tailor it to the role that I was interviewing for.
Leah, do you have something to add there?
The one thing I think that Candace and I have in common is we both have deep corporate governance experience. Serving as the GC or a CLO for a publicly traded company, that skill I think is not important. To the extent that a person can develop those skills, I’m going to make a pitch or a plug for the society of corporate governance that does a wonderful job of providing lawyers with the essential skills that you need to function with the executive suite in the boardroom. I think that’s also a critical piece of my experience that made it a little easier for me to attain a GC role.
Leah, you have their corporate governance certification, don’t you? Weren’t you part of the pilot group that got the certification?
You have an excellent memory. I nearly forgot about that. They have a certification program that if you have no experience in the government space, you can study and get the nuts and bolts that you need. To the extent that you don’t get hands-on experience with governance day-to-day is a wonderful tool and program to position yourself to be a corporate secretary on top of the GC role.
Why GCs Must Learn The Ins And Outs Of The Business
That’s a very tangible takeaway. I made a note. Thank you, and thanks to your good friend Candace for giving you that shout out. That’s great. Candace’s comment leads me to our first reader’s question and I get this a lot. It is the mystery of in-house and I think the GC role. Being a business partner is not always a parent to folks who are at the AGC or if they’re new to in-house. This reader asks, “I’ve spoken with my boss, the GC about my desire to become a GC in the future. She told me that I need to develop business skills and that sometimes I’m “too much” of a lawyer. I found this feedback confusing because my job is to be a lawyer. What do you think she means?” Leah, can we start with you?
The role of a general counsel or even a lawyer for that matter, in my mind, it’s not one that only provides legal advice. I often tell my team, “You’re a business partner.” It’s imperative that you understand the business, how we make our money, how the business even operates and how it’s set up. To provide the best counsel, I think it is necessary that you understand the business and how the business units run, how IT runs and how sales runs. It’s not getting into the bows of all of it, but having a high level understanding of the company’s operations.
For GCs to provide the best counsel, they must have a high level of understanding of how their companies operate. Share on XSecond, I think it’s important to understand and to be financially literate to understand a balance sheet, income statement, and how that applies to the areas of the business. If your company is public, what do your investors care about? Are you listening to your company’s earnings calls? In understanding the business, you’re able to communicate to offer strategic advice but those are the few of the nuggets that I would give the reader in terms of unpacking what I believe his or her boss is trying to convey.
Candace, can you add anything to that?
I would. I tell my team our job is to facilitate business. I think it is important to remember that your company is a business first. First and foremost, they’re a business. The whole reason that everybody shows up there every day is to sell a product or a service and make money. Our job is not to get in the way of that. Our job is not to stand in between the team and the sale or the team and the making of the money. Our job is to help them figure out how to do that while minimizing risk. At the end of the day, it is their decision to take risk.
My job isn’t to say, “You can’t do this because it’s risky.” My job is to say, “Doing this is risky, but I understand the bigger picture. I understand the ultimate goal and perhaps there is a way that I can get you there with less risk.” At the end of the day, they have the right to decide whether they want to go the less risky way or the more risky way. It’s their choice and you have to understand the risk appetite of your business. You have to understand when it is necessary to say no.
As someone is going to go to jail, is the company’s reputation going to be at risk? Do you need to escalate this to someone to make a smarter decision about how much risk to take? At the end of the day, your job is not to get in the way of doing business. I think that’s something that lawyers have a hard time with because we’re like, “You’re not supposed to do that or the rules say, or the law says.” What’s the consequence? Is the risk outweighed by the business objectives? You have to be able to think about things like that. I think remembering first and foremost that this is a business is what her boss is probably trying to get her to understand.
I think you both had it right on that. The other thing that was striking me is that maybe it’s a communication style issue. I want us all to round tables about the GC role and how communicating in this role is different than other levels in an in-house department. I don’t know if you all feel this, but I feel like when I’m in a boardroom or a meeting, not that my opinion has greater weight but people listen to it in a different way.
A GC’s Role As A Company’s Ethical Monitor
They see lawyers or the GC is having this special book with all the answers in it. They hang on your opinions and what you say a little differently. The other thing is, a lot of times, the GC is seen as the ethical monitor or the ethics of the company. I want to talk about those two things together that we need to be business facilitators. At some point, people in the room look at the GC as a little bit of a referee or governor around what’s ethical. Candace, you’re shaking your head, so I’m going to start with you.
That’s why when I say, this is a business first and our jobs to facilitate business. Our job is to help the business make the best decisions that they can. Our job is to be able to say, “I view this as problematic, or I view this as risky.” Understanding that they may make decisions that you disagree with, they may make decisions that are risky decisions and they have the ability and the right to do that.
Being willing to raise your hand and say, “This is a risky thing to do or this straddles the line. This gets close to the line of crossing over into unethical territory.” You have to be able to raise your hand and say that. If it is an ethics issue, it’s your job to put your foot down and say, “This is something that we can’t do from an ethics standpoint.” Be willing to go to the map for that. As the chief legal officer, you are ultimately the sheriff.
You’re a nice sheriff.
How you use that power is important. If you use that power in a way that is not responsible, people will stop seeking your input. The important thing is being judicious about how you use your sheriff badge to say stop. You don’t want them to start circumventing you.
Chief legal officers also act as the company’s sheriff. They must use their power in a responsible way, or else people will stop seeking their input. Share on XCandace, earlier you mentioned it’s the business’s decision to decide whether they’re going to say yes or no. I wholeheartedly agree with that, but as the chief legal officer or general counsel, when something’s very risky and you see someone about to walk to the edge. You’re the conscience of the organization. As Candace said, you have to be so judicious, but even at times, business people may be closed or may get it wrong.
We weigh that risk in these very unique roles to say, “I know that’s where you want to go but let’s talk about this a little more. Have you thought about the reputation piece of what going into this market might be or turning this employee? I think we have this heightened level of responsibility to communicate and to do the right thing. As Candace mentioned, you do have to use that power very judiciously.
The second thing I’ll add is just about communicating at a GC level. There are very complex issues that come up in our organization. In our roles and as you become more senior within an organization, you have to take these complex concepts and distill them down to digestible bites for your board and for your executive leadership team. I often joke that I’m a translator. I’m taking regulations and policies and distilling them down into bite-sized nuggets that I can use to partner with my peers to inform the board. That is an important skill in the spirit of communication to learn to be in these roles.
I’ll add one more piece to that. As lawyers, we’re law nerds. The judicious people don’t care about the nerdiness of the regulations, the rules and the statutes. They don’t care. They want to know, what can I do? How does this impact the decision that I want to make? One catchphrase that my former CEO at my last company always had was, “Be crisp.” I think that is a very important skill for lawyers to learn how to be crisp because as soon as you start talking, eyes start glazing.
No question asked.
The quicker you can get to the point, the better because they will stop listening to you after the first couple of sentences. Be crisp is my motto and how to communicate with the business.
How GCs Can Develop Their Executive Presence
I love that. We’re circling around another reader question that I think goes largely to communication style. This person asks, “I hear a lot about ‘soft skills and executive presence,’ but I don’t know what it means or how to develop it. Do you have advice or resources to help?” I think starting with be crisp and Candace, your observation that lawyers are nerds and like to talk about a bunch of stuff that people don’t care about is one of I would say a foundational element of both of these things. I think law school doesn’t serve us because it teaches us we have to show how smart we are.
In the business, they already know you’re smart because you got the job. You already have that. Every day is not an audition. Every day is not first year contracts, where you’ve got to raise your hand and no present what was the holding of the case. Being crisp is a real go-to that people should take away from this, but what else? Leah, I’ll start with you. What advice do you have for somebody who is trying to develop this un-squishy thing called executive presence?
That’s an excellent question because you’re right. Many of us in law school don’t learn about soft skills. We are taught to be pretty transactional and I would say it’s more of the relational part of the work that we do. It’s how you do what you do? How do you work with others? How do you communicate? Are you building relationships within your organization? Not just providing the answer. Are you going to lunch with your co-workers? Are you popping in and out of offices? It’s about the way that you do the work when I think about soft skills.
I’m a little bit of a nerd and I read a lot of Harvard Business articles on emotional intelligence, and what it means to be a leader. It’s channeling your authenticity. Being a real self while doing the work in a way that people can relate to you. I would encourage readers to nerd out on emotional intelligence. I’m sure there are probably YouTube videos out there on this, but channeling your authenticity at the job is the best way that I can describe the way I’ve developed my soft skills at work.
I would add to that. One word that I think is very synonymous with executive presence is just maturity and I think that is underrated. The higher up you get in an organization, you tend to find that not everyone has a high degree of maturity. I’ll give a bit of an example. If you’ve been working hard on something and your CEO says, “I want this other person to take it over from here.” You don’t think it’s fair. How do you react to that?
Do you flip out? You make it difficult for the person who’s taking it over? Do you refuse to help them? How you react, how you carry yourself is executive presence. It’s your maturity level. How do you deal with adversity? How do you take instructions from your superiors? If your CEO says, “I don’t care. Give it to them.” Are you able to just say, “My CEO has spoken. He’s made a decision. I don’t like it. I don’t necessarily agree with it but this is my job. I’ve got to transition this and get it over onto this person’s plate in an orderly fashion with a smile on my face. That is executive presence. I will say a lot of it is just about maturity and being able to step out of your ego and be a professional.
Additionally, Candace, I would say confidence and having good judgment are important. You have to know what you’re talking about, but people have to feel it as well. How you present yourself is important, and I mean present both from a substance of verbal and written communication, as well as how you look. I know that we don’t like to talk about these sorts of things often.
I once heard when I was a younger person, “Dress for the job you want. Not the job you have.” That’s real. Being thoughtful about what you’re wearing to work. It may be taboo in this environment, but it’s a reality of corporate America. If you want to be a CLO or GC, you need to dress and look like a CLO and GC. They have services if you don’t know what that looks like to support you in that effort.
In Corporate America, you have to dress and look like a GC if you want to achieve that role. Share on XYou guys hit all of the high notes in that. Candace, back to your point about facilitating the business. As you’re giving advice, to give the framing in terms of what it means for the business. When someone asks you, can we do this? It’s not just a yes or no. It’s like, “I understand our business objectives are to do this. Here’s what I think you could do to accomplish that, or I know we have quarterly earnings coming up. We might want to time X, Y, and Z.”
How To Package Your Skills When Preparing For A GC Role
To add a business rationale around your legal advice I think also positions you as that leader. On the topic of positioning, we talked about this a little bit at the leadoff. First of all, people perceive that the GC rule is like all unicorns and rainbows. It’s a prestigious position. You get the hardware, the nice title, etc. As we were talking before we got on, the struggle is real. People do want to know how to do this, how to get into these seats. I want to get a little more granular. The reader asks, “I’m trying to position myself for a GC role and I’m overwhelmed by how to do this. Do you have any suggestions for how I can package my skills for a GC position when I have not been one before?” Leah, let’s start with you.
Everyone knows Jack Daniel’s and those big liquor brands, but you had not have a deputy title. You had an AGC title, which when I heard your portfolio there, as I said I was tired. You had a lot of responsibility at Brown-Forman. Did you have to overcome the AGC title to get to this GC spot where you were? I know you used ahead of third party at a consultant that helped you package, but what were the nuggets that they shared with you on how to package yourself?
First, I will talk about just my role. The role that I had there when I started. I think touching as many parts of the business and the legal department as you can is helpful to moving into that GC role. I started off at Brown-Forman as a SEC governance attorney, but I had no commercial experience, no labor and employment experience and no general commercial experience. I almost had like a list of boxes that I was looking to check on my journey. I think taking inventory of your specialization and the other areas that you might be able to touch and trying to expand on your role is helpful.
As a GC, you’re going to oversee the entire legal operation. That’s 0.1. You won’t be able to check all the boxes. None of us have checked all the boxes. The more expansive your experience I think it can support being a GC. Learning the governance space, I found for me was helpful at Brown-Forman, in addition to being the associate general counsel. I was the corporate secretary for our board. My leader Matt Hamill graciously gave me that title after a few years working there, but getting that experience, I believe, was helpful. Again, broadening out my experience.
In terms of telling the story, the advisor that I work with helped me look at all of my experience and translate that into the role of a GC. I might not have, for example, been a litigator or been to court, but I provided the summary of all the litigation at board meetings for our board. Trying to take the experience that you have and translate that into ways that a general council works and operates was a key part of that journey because I didn’t realize how much I had done.
I started all of that on the call, but she helped me to understand that I was ready and I had touched a lot of boxes. Even if they aren’t the exact same boxes, because sometimes we feel like we have to have every box checked. They were the same tools, the skills and the analytical capabilities that you need to be a GC.
Candace, as you were talking early or it sounds like you are able to match up the needs of the company you were approaching and what you would have. Anything else to add to that?
I was say, I would also focus less on your title and more on your position. Instead of saying, “I’m an AGC or I’m a DGC.” I’m a member of the senior legal leadership team. I report to the general counsel. I am responsible for entire areas of the legal department. I manage a team. Focusing on things like management experience and budgeting. Are you responsible for a portion of the legal department budget and managing it and staying with them?
Businesses care that they’re legal department knows how to manage a budget and not overspend on legal. You want to focus on things like managing outside counsel spend, managing the team beneath you and reporting into a senior executive and understanding what that means to be able to report and provide counsel and advice to senior leadership. I will just focus on what you do and not what it’s called.
To piggyback off on that a little bit Candace, any strategic projects that you led that have driven value for the organization. Did you implement some tool that would result in cost savings? Did you partner with the business to help with strategy? Showing those big strategic wins is another call out and to the extent that you have experience presenting to the executive leadership team or the board. I think companies want general councils that have that experience. Is it positive if you haven’t had it, but I think to the extent that you have presentation experience. That would bode well as well and I would highlight that.
How Much Leadership Development Does GCs Usually Handle
I think so, too. I think that goes to the soft skills and being crisp. If you are used to presenting to leadership or to boards. There’s a suspicion that how to do that in a quick crisp way. We’re circling around how the GC role is different. Candace a couple times mentioned budget and management. I want to pull back the curtain a little bit for folks because again, I feel that there is this perception that glamorous is the wrong word but let’s just say. Let’s go with it. It’s a glamorous high-profile prestige position.
Sometimes, I call myself head janitor because you are doing everything possible for this department and sometimes out of your even legal lane. I’m curious how much legal work do you folks still do as compared to your management, leadership or business advising. You have a friend Deborah Seymore, who says she’s a therapist at work as well. Candace, do you want to lead off with what the balance is for your service mix there?
I’m probably not representative of most GC roles because my team is so small. I only have one other lawyer on my team who manages our commercial work. I do a lot of our actual legal work. I do utilize outside counsel quite a bit because there are things that they cannot help me do and then there are things that they can help me do. I need to lean on them when I can because I can’t do everything. I still do quite a bit of legal work. I would say 60% of my time, I’m doing legal work.
It sounds like you need more headcount. Leah, what about you?
I would say I’m probably spending about 30% of my time doing legal work. I lead a team of about 45 legal risk and compliance professionals. That was the biggest adjustment I had to make with this job. I started doing and I realized that being in this role, leading a team of 45 professionals required me to do more leading, being the therapist, the advisor or the coach.
I use the coach analogy a lot because my job is to unlock the value and empower the people on my team to provide value to our organization. I spend a lot of time coaching and one-on-one, trying to ensure that all the people are connected to the right people in a department and the business. It’s become a smaller part of my practice and that’s been a big adjustment because I missed doing the things sometimes.
It’s hard to say what the percentage of legal work is because I do legal, compliance, internal audit and government relations. That’s a pretty broad spread of duties, but I try to take the stuff that I like that I have a unique skill set for. Leading the team I think is something that we as lawyers are not set up for. Back to the law school analogy, where we’re trying to show we’re the smartest and give our answers first. That’s not training that lens itself to being a great coach.
I will say depending on how much time you spend in a law firm setting. As you become a senior associate, you are the coach for the associate team or the team captain, so to speak. I do think you can tap into that delegation, advice and coaching of the junior lawyers below you to build up those leadership skills in an in-house environment. I agree, we’re not taught how to do it. Hopefully, if your company does have leadership development, leadership training programs, you can take advantage of those because it is a very important skill set to have once you are the manager of the department.
If a company has leadership development programs, GCs can take advantage of them. It is an important skill to have once they are the manager of a legal department. Share on XI agree, Candace. I have to say, leadership is one of the most important parts of my job. Both of you went to law school. I had a unique journey in that. One of my primary employers asked me to go through an Executive MBA program and so I did. As part of the program, they had us work with a coach. I’m like, “Why do I have to work with the coach? I don’t need anyone to coach me. I know what I’m doing.”
I learned about these soft skills and started to think about channeling my authenticity. I realize I wasn’t showing up as my authentic self at work. To the extent as Candace mentioned, you can lean into those leadership coaches or programs, or there’s tools on YouTube. I know because I’ve watched them. I think there is something to taking a deeper dive in reading about leadership.
Leah’s And Candace’s Pump-Up Songs
I think you guys are right on and appreciate, in particular the investment that you made in developing those skills when recognizing that you needed some support. I’m a huge advocate of coaching. I’ve had 6 or 7 coaches on the show trying to highlight why lawyers in particular can use that as a tool to level up. We are rounding the bin here and I always like to end with a fun question. I get pumped up. Before the show, I always listen to some music. I’ve been stuck on Destiny’s Child, Independent Woman quite a bit. That’s what I did, but Candace, let’s ask you what your pump up song is?
I have a new one this time. I would say I’m into Daft Punk. My pump up song is currently Get Lucky with Pharrell and Neil Rogers. I love the tempo and the beat. It keeps me going.
Leah?
First, I want to say I don’t want to be judged with my selection. We listen and we don’t judge. It’s Stronger by Kanye West, because every day, I’m trying to be stronger, physically, mentally, spiritually and emotionally. That song pumps me up.
I think we can like music and just like it. Enjoy it and not have to think more about why that is and who. Thank you, guys, so much for being here. I feel like this is going to help a lot of people. At least the three readers that answered their questions. Thanks for being on office hours. If people have questions that they’d like us to cover on the show, please reach out to me at Hello@LegalDepartmentPod.com. Thanks to my sponsor Filejet for supporting the office hours series. Thanks for being here, ladies.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Important Links
- Candace Jackson on LinkedIn
- Leah Huddleston on LinkedIn
- CBIZ
- Silvaco
- Synaptics
- Deputies: From DGC To GC + Office Hours With Candace Jackson, SVP And General Counsel, Silvaco – Previous Episode
- Brown-Forman Corporation
- Jack Daniel’s
- Woodford Reserve
- Hello@LegalDepartmentPod.com
- Certification – Society for Corporate Governance
- The New Rules of Executive Presence
About Leah Huddleston
Jaileah (Leah) Huddleston joined CBIZ in 2023 from Brown-Forman Corporation, a publicly traded Fortune 1000 company based in Louisville, Kentucky, where she served as Vice President – Associate General Counsel – Regional, Securities and Governance, and Corporate Secretary.
Leah has more than 20 years of business and legal experience, including board advisement and governance, complex M&A, international law, debt and equity financings, public company securities law, ESG, executive compensation, real estate, and compliance. Prior to her position with Brown-Forman, Leah spent over seven years as Assistant Secretary and Corporate Counsel, Securities, and Finance at Evergy, Inc., a publicly traded energy company based in Kansas City, Missouri.
About Candace Jackson
Candace Jackson has served as Silvaco’s Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary since September 2024. Prior to joining Silvaco, she was Deputy General Counsel of global fabless semiconductor design company Synaptics Incorporated. Ms. Jackson began her career as a securities and corporate governance lawyer at financial services firm Primerica, Inc. where she served as Senior Attorney following its spin-out from Citigroup, and as an Associate at law firm Husch Blackwell LLP. In June 2015, Ms. Jackson joined the law firm of Mayer Brown LLP where she served as securities and corporate governance counsel and led capital raising transactions for public companies of all sizes. She left Mayer Brown from April 2016 through June 2018 to serve as Assistant General Counsel at US Foods Holding Corp. There, she led the company’s IPO and the exit of its controlling stockholders and established its securities and corporate governance function. She returned to Mayer Brown in September 2018 where she helped to build what eventually became the firm’s Public Companies and Corporate Governance practice. Ms. Jackson has a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Michigan, and a J.D. from the Emory University School of Law.
