The first time Susan considered the legal industry was in elementary school, when her parents said she should be a lawyer and go to court—“they thought I was bossy and argumentative, which I think are poor qualities for the profession, actually,” she says, laughing. “I feel like I’m not the only person with this story.”

Now, she practices a very different kind of law but remembers seeing all the courtroom dramas on television growing up in Southern California. “I’m the only person in my immediate family who is a lawyer and there was really no model for corporate attorneys in popular media back then, so I feel really lucky that I found something I really enjoy,” Susan says. 

With that path in mind, she had her sights set on New York for college but ultimately decided it was too far, enrolling instead as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. Susan went through much of the same thought process for law school when she applied to NYU: she was accepted, put down her deposit and learned of her roommate assignment before deciding, at the very last minute, to attend Stanford Law School instead. 

“After two false starts, when it came time to choose what I wanted to do as a young professional—where to spend my summers and work afterward—I said, I’m definitely getting to New York this time,” she shares. “I wanted to have a different experience, and I believed that the rigor, the pace and the sophistication of the transactions in the city made it the best possible place for me.”

Susan spent her summer at a different law firm in the city but had a classmate who did summer at Cravath suggest that she apply for a job there after graduation, noting how the rotation system seemed like a good fit for Susan’s personality and interests. On the basis of that comment alone, she applied as a third-year law student for a full-time job at Cravath after graduation. She started at the Firm in 2005, after completing an appellate clerkship. 

She noted that, in a funny coincidence, the same friend didn’t return to Cravath because she had decided to stay in California. “I don’t know why specifically she thought it would be such a good fit for me, but she ended up being right,” Susan adds. 

She does recall her friend describing the rotation system and how that distinguished Cravath in her own mind. “It was so different from where I spent my summer, in which I was sort of a free agent with work swirling around and landing on my desk,” Susan says. “The idea of being tied to a group of people was appealing to me, though the prospect of continually learning something new every couple of years also sounded intimidating!”

On reflection, though, Susan admits it was one of the things she appreciated most about her time at the Firm. “The training made me comfortable being uncomfortable, and that has served me well throughout my career,” she notes. “Being thrown into situations I didn’t think I personally was ready for, but somebody had confidence that I was.” 

She adds: “Being able to deal with ambiguity and new situations is routine for me now, but I wouldn’t have said that going into my time at Cravath at all.”

After several years rotating through the Corporate Department, Susan knew she enjoyed transactional work and wanted to explore going someplace she could make it her whole job. Specifically, she wanted to find a company doing enough M&A to support an in-house person covering that function full time. Beyond that, she also wanted to be at a place where there would be at least one peer with the same function. 

As it turned out, someone in her Cravath network had the answer: a former associate who had taken a job at Amazon said they were hiring for an M&A role that could be a good fit for her. She trusted the recommendation, interviewed, and took the job. 

“No day at Amazon is ever the same, which I think is a good thing,” Susan says. “At no point have I been bored here because of the things that have been thrown at me, as well as how the company has changed in the time I’ve been here.”

Until recently, most of her time has been spent on transactional work: helping Amazon invest in and acquire other companies, including advising Amazon’s senior leadership on the largest acquisitions in the company’s history. Now, Susan stays busy trying to learn the new parts of her job: “There’s been so much in flux in the three months that I've been thrust into the corporate governance and SEC reporting space. Coming into it, I envisioned these quarterly events that we need to hit and have deliverables for, and all the things you work backward from—but the space is not nearly as fixed as I thought.”

One constant throughout Susan’s years at Amazon are her mentors, whom she can talk to “about anything,” she says. “I’m not even sure we have a ton in common outside work, but having these people with distinct viewpoints who I can go to keeps me sane and helps me get to better decisions.” 

For her, part of that effort involves building and maintaining professional relationships. Susan says the people she came up with at Cravath have gone on to do a number of different things, and keeping up with their trajectories has been a lot of fun.

If another alumna or alumnus reaches out, Susan does her best to respond to that email or take that call. “We sort of have this bond, even if we never worked together,” she explains. “I owe a big part of my own career to having maintained my network over the years and trusting the advice of the people in my life.”

She adds: “The legal world is a small community. Having familiar faces and familiar backgrounds makes things a little bit easier. If I see someone from Cravath across the table, I already know it's going to be a better discussion or a better negotiation because while we may have taken different roads, we both started from a common place.”