For a while there, there was a little streak (not quite enough to call it a trend) of lawyers going from GC to CEO. Two years ago, Legal Week investigated the new career path when Peter Kurer (who started out at Baker & McKenzie) was promoted to the top spot at UBS.
Other lawyers turned leaders include Chuck Prince (whole career inhouse) at Citi (whose reign was called a “disaster”), and Jeff Kindler (Williams & Connolly) at Pfizer. Most recently, of course, we have Brian Moynihan (Edwards & Angell) who took over the helm of Bank of America. He did a brief stint as interim GC after Tim Mayopolous was forced out.
Those guys all had decades of experience.
We just found out about a 35-year old former BigLaw associate (twice over), who has become CEO of a public company.
Details after the jump.
The young man is Scott Paul (UCLA BA, Santa Clara JD ’98), and he was just promoted from COO to President and CEO of Hoku Scientific (NASDAQ: HOKU), a polysilicon manufacturer.
According to his company bio (not yet updated to reflect his promotion)
Scott has been Chief Operating Officer of Hoku Scientific since November 2008. From July 2003 until November 2008, Scott was Hoku’s VP, Business Development & General Counsel. Prior to joining Hoku Scientific, Scott worked as Director of Business Development and Associate General Counsel at Read-Rite Corporation, a publicly-traded multi-national company. Previously, Scott worked as an attorney at Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison LLP representing high tech emerging growth and large-cap public companies on financing and M&A transactions.
Brobeck (RIP) is one of three firms he worked at. He started out at Ropers, Majeski, Kohn & Bentley (never heard of it) for a year, then went to what is now Reed Smith in October 1999. He went to Brobeck in April 2000 – which by our count means he spent just four months at Reed Smith. Normally we’d say he must have started interviewing on his first day in the new job, but that was the tail end of the days when it was possible to get a job in a week.
Presumably he’ll be getting a raise, but he didn’t do too badly in 2008 (the most-recent year on file). While his base salary was just $90,000, he got a $180,000 bonus, resulting in $276,587 in total comp last year (and he might want to beef up the securities team – the company’s 2008 proxy doesn’t seem to be on Edgar, although it is available from the company’s IR site). His base for 2009 was $120,000 and his bonus target was $240,000 – a nice raise in trying times.
Paul also has stock and exercisable options on 170,496 shares – unfortunately, the stock isn’t doing so well lately ($2.25 as we write this), so that’s “only” $383,616.
Another nice perk: the company’s headquarters are in Hawaii.
Ho’omaika’i!
Related posts:
