Features Region: West

The customer is always right and, for well over a year, that customer has been demanding a remote mortgage. Post-pandemic, that’s likely to be the new normal. So notes Chris Weinstock, who’s long taken the pulse of prospective home buyers. During the late 1990s, he aided their cause as a deputy general counsel at Countrywide […]

At the age of 19, Matthew Bagley was up for just about anything—even flying to Hong Kong and learning Cantonese. It was a wild ride for this boy from Utah. Actually, Bagley had no idea he’d be heading to Asia. As a soon-to-be missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, you don’t […]

For almost a decade, Nima Seyedali spent hours analyzing aircraft as a mechanical engineer for Boeing Commercial Airplanes. Day in and day out, he immersed himself in damage tolerance and structural fatigue analysis. By 1997, he was understandably ready for a change. After shifting to Boeing’s Customer Division, he worked as a client liaison, handling […]

While working as an attorney at Perkins Coie in Portland, Oregon, Ellen Sheedy would often take quick breaks to walk around the neighborhood. During these jaunts, she says she probably passed the global headquarters of footwear company KEEN 1,000 times. Sheedy knew that the company had a long-standing connection to making the outdoors accessible, a passion […]

The monthly utility bills in and around Anchorage, Alaska, have been at least a few dollars less since January, tangible proof that there can be cost savings when neighboring energy producers combine. That’s what happened last October, when Chugach Electric Association acquired a smaller, neighboring utility, Anchorage Municipal Light & Power. The nearly $1 billion […]

So, what’s in the container? For Steven Garcia, it’s a fulfilling in-house legal role that’s touched on everything from M&A and maritime law to corporate finance and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission compliance. Now the chief legal officer and corporate secretary for CAI International Inc., Garcia manages legal affairs for one of the three publicly […]

“Did you see this?” That was the question posed to Plaza Home Mortgage General Counsel Lynde Selden by the CEO’s assistant in early March. Both were puzzled by the printout of an “Equitable Remittance Coupon”—supposedly valued at $250,000. The person who’d sent the CEO this “voucher” was using it to pay a $150,000 home loan. […]

Jennifer Burdman is no stranger to high-stakes patent litigation. Representing LifeNet Health in 2014 she won a tissue graft patent case when a jury awarded the company $34.7 million in damages. After that, she was on a trial team in 2011 that secured a jury verdict of $919 million in favor of DuPont against a […]

Remember when a woman sued Coca-Cola after being hit in the eye with a Sprite bottle cap after she dropped the drink on the ground? Tim Schade certainly does. Specifically, he remembers thinking it wasn’t the company’s fault—that the bottled dropped and became pressurized, or that the cap shot off and struck the woman when […]

In both his career and personal life, Ron Zollman has found that small things can have a big impact. For instance, as a lawyer and as a nonprofit volunteer, he’s discovered that lots can be accomplished by small teams dedicated to whom they’re serving. Whether growing a company or supporting his community, he relies on […]