My Chicago Law Moment: Debra Snider, '79, Learned to Step Back and See What Others Didn’t
My Chicago Law Moment is a new series highlighting the Law School ideas, experiences, and approaches that have impacted our students and alumni.
Before Debra Snider, ’79, was a law firm partner, a general counsel, an author, a speaker, or an executive focused on restructuring the law and corporate services departments of a multibillion-dollar company, she was a student at the Law School. And it was here that she honed powerful skills: the ability to see solutions that weren’t always apparent to others, and the ability to consider and incorporate outside perspectives without giving up her own position.
“The Law School taught me how to look at all of the angles of a situation, a problem, or an environment dispassionately without losing my natural passion for my own view,” said Snider, the author of three books, as well as the former executive vice president, general counsel, and chief administrative officer of Heller Financial and a former partner at what was then Katten Muchin & Zavis. “That, when you think about it, is extraordinary. At the Law School, the Socratic Method caused me to realize that very, very bright people can differ violently on how they see something—and none of them is wholly right or wrong. All of the pieces add up to what we choose to call objective reality. This realization was woven through my entire business and writing career, and I can see what a huge gift it was.”
Over the years, this thinking grew into an ability to look at a strategy, a vision, or even an organizational design and “reverse engineer it down to its components before rebuilding it” into something that was more efficient and effective. Creative problem-solving, fueled by an ability to divorce herself from the status quo, became the cornerstone of Snider’s management style. She grew accustomed to hearing, “We’ve never done it that way before.”
As an in-house counsel several years after law school, she remembers raising questions about her company’s pre-computer strategy for dispersing checks and paperwork during a recission offer. It was a small moment—but one that remains vivid in Snider’s mind because it represented, in the simplest of terms, the difference between critical thinking and rote execution.
“Someone would call out a name from an unsorted list and then 10 people would shuffle through their stack of checks until they found the name—and that looked as wrong to me as if the conference room had been filled with rabbits instead of people,” she said, chuckling at the memory. “I immediately suggested they alphabetize one of the lists. They looked at me and said, ‘But we’re in a huge rush.’ These were smart, competent people, but they had been given a task and told to complete it lickety-split, and they didn’t take one second to stop and think, ‘What’s the best and fastest way to do this?’ Of course, once they alphabetized one of the lists, which took maybe 20 minutes, it was the easiest thing in the world.”
Years later, at Heller—the financial services company later acquired by General Electric Capital Corp.— she applied deep, creative, all-angles thinking to restructuring the law department, realizing that she had the ability to not only improve productivity but to deeply impact the lives of 35 lawyers and the paralegals and administrative staff who supported them. Most were incredibly smart men and women doing high-level legal work, but they were underappreciated and many were unhappy, she said. She needed to figure out what wasn’t working and why; she needed Law School thinking.
“I took what the department did down to its fundamentals and tried to clear my own mind about how I thought internal departments ought to operate,” she said. “Then my team and I rebuilt it so it operated perfectly—using outside counsel properly, using inside counsel properly, making sure my people had jobs that fit their salaries and their intelligence. We realized, for instance, that it made no sense to have internal lawyers drafting documents when outside lawyers could be hired to do that more efficiently. Plus, outside lawyers had other clients, so they could bring best practices to the party. It made much more sense to have inside lawyers doing strategic work for their business units. It was much more interesting for experienced lawyers, much more deserving of multi-six-figure salaries, and so much more valuable for the company.”
Instead of coming in with a vision she wanted to impose, Snider came in determined to “make Heller’s law department great”—a goal that required her to remain open, flexible, and attuned to other viewpoints.
“There were numerous times when I felt strongly that we should go one way, and then wound up having to go a different way because the group wasn’t ready or the clients couldn’t accept it. We would have to get where we needed to go in three steps instead of going directly,” she said. “Recognizing that is something I wouldn’t have been able to do, given my general personality, if I hadn’t had that Law School experience of learning that if you want the best, most complete result, you have to take other people’s perspectives into account. And often in an environment that isn’t your natural environment, other perspectives are better.”
When she retired in 2001 to focus on writing—she is the author of two nonfiction books, Working Easier: A Toolkit for Staff and Board Members of Nonprofit Arts Organizations and The Productive Culture Blueprint for Corporate Law Departments and Their Outside Counsel, as well as a novel, A Merger of Equals—she took a similar approach. She learned to think the way a reader might, even if that meant pushing past her own perspective and intuition.
As a speaker and mentor, she has counseled young professionals to step back, too. “Get out of your own head,” she said. “Think about where the other person is coming from. Not because it will make you a nicer person—though it will—but because it will make you a better thinker.”