Sandy Paik – The Tower Companies

Sandy Paik didn’t set out to become a guardian of democracy. She set out to understand history. Armed with an undergraduate degree in the subject, she arrived at Georgetown Law with a sense that the past held lessons the present desperately needed. What she couldn’t have predicted was that those lessons would feel so urgently relevant decades later — not in a law school seminar, but in the daily work of a general counsel navigating one of the most consequential moments in modern American legal history.

Sandy Paik | The Tower Companies | General Counsel

Paik is the General Counsel for Tower Companies, a nearly 80-year-old, family-owned real estate development firm headquartered in the National Capital Region. Tower develops, owns, and manages commercial and multifamily residential properties with a long-standing commitment to sustainability, community, and the human experience of place. It is a company that envisions a world where buildings inspire and enrich the lives of their occupants and create positive social change. In this world, people seek out buildings that better their health and well-being, connect them to thriving communities, and help to sustain the environment.

Building infrastructure, building purpose

Paik joined Tower in 2022, bringing with her a career that had taken her from a paralegal role at a big law firm in New York City to in-house positions at InSite Wireless Group, Willco, and Freddie Mac, and then to a general counsel role at DC Green Bank before landing at Tower. She leads a lean operation — three attorneys including herself and two legal professionals (a paralegal/legal operations manager and a contract manager each of whom have been with the company for more than twenty-five years). She describes the team as a mighty five.

“My role at Tower Companies involves a lot of problem-solving and building infrastructure for the future. I touch many different parts of the organization, so I look to weave those insights into solutions,” she says.

With almost 80 years of family business history, that means a great deal of institutional memory lives in people rather than in documents. Paik has made it her mission to change that — to convert what exists in the minds of long-tenured employees into documented policy and practice amidst digital transformation. It is rewarding work. People are accustomed to doing things their own way, and formalizing those habits requires both diplomatic skill and patience. But Paik sees it as essential preparation for the company’s future.

She strives to bring to her work what she calls an invitational mindset — a philosophy of leadership rooted in dimensionality, meeting people where they are, and approaching professional relationships from a place of genuine curiosity and care. The acronym she uses to anchor it is CALL (context, action, language and love), with the understanding that fulfillment at work involves loving the who, what, why, and how of our work. It guides how she interacts with her colleagues, and it reflects a broader belief that ethical leadership is not only a soft skill but a strategic one.

Where people live and work

One of the things Paik values most about Tower is what the company’s work represents. Real estate, she argues, is fundamentally about the human experience. A park, an office building, a residential community — these are the places where life actually happens. In an era of increasing digital abstraction, she finds meaning in being part of a company that nurtures the physical environments people share.

“The other thing about being at this company that I love about real estate is its commitment to the sense of community. We’re fortunate in that we can nurture the environments where people work and live,” she explains.

Tower’s commitment to sustainability and well-being is a point of particular pride. One of the company’s leaders became interested in sustainable development in the late 1990s, putting Tower on a path that predates many of its competitors and leading to third-party certification starting in 2010 as carbon neutral in its operating portfolio. The company composts across its entire portfolio, operates solar panels on most of its buildings, purchases green power to offset emissions, and has recently published its first Corporate Sustainability Report since before the pandemic. These are not marketing gestures — they reflect a culture in which environmental responsibility is woven into how the business operates day to day.

A profession at the crossroads

Beyond her work at Tower, Paik is animated by something larger. She grew up reading about injustice — a college book called Savage Inequalities ignited a passion for education equity that has never fully left her and led her to pursue a graduate degree in policy and evaluation and ongoing volunteer board service with community serving nonprofits (currently Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food & Agriculture, Community Opportunity Fund, and The Carbon League). Her early career at a law firm introduced her to the Skadden Fellowship Foundation, which deepened her commitment to serving the public interest through the law. And now, watching law firm commitments to serving their communities and fulfilling pro bono commitments under their legal ethics obligations come under political pressure, along with the broader assault on the independence of lawyers, law firms and the judiciary itself, she feels a responsibility she cannot set aside.

Paik is collaborating with Lawyers for Good Government on the National Law Day of Action initiative, which brings together the legal community in reaffirmation of their oaths as officers of the court on Law Day (May 1^st of every year). She is also one of more than 850 current and former general counsels who have joined General Counsels United, a coalition that recently filed an amicus brief in the federal DC Circuit Court of Appeals in defense of the rule of law. She sees this moment as a defining one — not just for her profession, but for civil society.

“We are at an inflection point,” Paik says. “Lawyers must coalesce around the purpose of the legal profession. It could be a devolutionary moment for our legal institutions, and if attorneys can unify around some core legal principles about what we do in moments like this, this could be a massive transformation for the legal profession.”

The stakes feel both personal and professional. Paik is Korean American; her parents immigrated to the United States in 1968 and 1969 from a region of Korea marked by the student uprising of 1980— an uprising in which her grandfather played an active role. She is preparing to bring her parents back to visit their hometown, a journey she expects to be both emotional and deeply clarifying. The rule of law, she understands, is not an abstraction. It is what stands between civil society and something far more fragile.

She has been working on a book, started during the COVID pandemic, focused on lawyers as stewards of civil society and on the legal profession’s responsibility to function as ethical leaders in public life. The project captures something she believes has been lost—the understanding that lawyers are not merely risk managers, but moral anchors.

Stewards of what endures

Paik is clear-eyed about the challenge. Ethical leadership, she notes, is not always the strongest muscle in corporate America. Companies and trade associations alike have a history of minimizing ethical values when they conflict with other business priorities. But she also sees reasons for optimism. New lawyers, fresh from law school and closer in time to taking their oath and studying our Constitution, are entering the profession with energy and conviction. Coalitions are forming. Lawsuits and amicus briefs are being filed. Law schools, professors, former judges, former prosecutors, former judge advocate generals of the military branches, AmLaw100 law firm partners, law firms, bar associations across the nation and the globe, and general counsels across the country are finding a common voice.

“I’m optimistic that the profession will emerge stronger and reclaim its space in civil society,” she says.

That optimism is grounded in something Paik returns to often: the belief that being a nation of laws remains the best available version of organized human society. The courts are slow, she acknowledges, but they are still functioning. Their independence must be protected at all costs — not as a matter of ideology, but as a matter of civic infrastructure. And the legal profession, she believes, is uniquely positioned to make that case, not just in courtrooms and briefs, but in communities, in corporate boardrooms, and in the conversations that shape public understanding of what the rule of law actually means and why it matters.

For Paik, that responsibility doesn’t feel like a burden so much as a calling — one that connects her history degree, her Georgetown training, her decades of in-house experience, and her work at Tower into a single, coherent purpose. The details change daily. The mission does not.