Adam Tachner: Becoming a trusted advisor to Silicon Valley

Alum Adam Tachner traces his path from junior IP associate to a senior business and legal role at AI chipmaker Groq Inc. Adam shares how his unrelenting curiosity about his clients’ businesses, and cultivation of a deep professional network in the tech community, have contributed to his ability to “see around corners” at the leading edge of tech across a 30-year career.

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Transcript:

Intro: Welcome to the Reed Smith podcast, Career Footprints. In each episode of Career Footprints, we'll ask our guest for Reed Smith alum to share their career story, how their time at Reed Smith set them up for success and their advice for early career lawyers. Our goal is to surface insights from inspiring professionals careers that will help you find your professional success however you define that. 

Alicia: Welcome back to Career Footprints, our podcast series at Reed Smith, looking at or listening to the incredible career stories, the career footpaths of our amazing alumni. I'm Alicia Millar and I am delighted to welcome my next guest that is Adam Tachner with the most impressive job title I have to say that possibly the largest uh business card you'll ever find. So VP Corporate Development, Finance and Chief Legal Officer over at Groq. Adam, welcome.

Adam: Thank you so much. You know, they say that the shorter your title, the greater the power. So don't be impressed. 

Alicia: Well, I still am, but thank you. I still am. Welcome. Absolutely, Welcome to our podcast. I can't wait to share your career journey uh with our listeners and especially the times that you're going to be talking about your experiences at Reed Smith or actually Crosby Heafey, as I understand. So, not necessarily full on Reed Smith, but don't let me talk about it. I'd love to hear more about you. Talk us through it. 

Adam: Sure. It's, uh, so, first of all, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. It's, uh, it's a little humbling to realize I've reached that stage in my career where I have to spend some time reflecting uh backwards. Uh I tend to focus more on what's next and what's come to pass. So I appreciate the moment to take a breather and look back. I, I actually grew up around the law in a sense, not big law, but my father was a, was a patent attorney uh who came to it relatively late in his own career. He went to night school in the seventies. He had been an engineer on the Apollo program in the sixties and, and then became a patent attorney because he was an engineer who could write. And um and so he had this great solo practice that he really enjoyed and probably wanted me to follow in his footsteps. But, but when I went to law school and saw what was going on in Silicon Valley, I was really inspired after leaving University of Oregon or even before I finished, actually, I did my third year at what was then the Hastings College of Law, uh the UC Law School in San Francisco. And uh got a 2L job which extended into a full year internship at a little patent boutique in San Francisco. And they knew uh an attorney at Crosby Heafey and they referred me over and he brought me into this kind of nascent intellectual property team and I was really uh honored and privileged to be kind of a, a co founding member of that group. There were maybe three or four of us. They had maybe a year or two under their belts thus far and, and then had some opportunities to help bring in clients and sort of build practice 

Alicia: Amazing. And that sort of first time in, um, in Crosby Heafey, what was it like, sort of walking in? What was your sort of first year or two? Like, what was that sort of moment of, you know? Oh, my goodness I'm here, I'm a patent attorney, New practice. Ok. Where's the deep end? Am I jumping in? 

Adam: Yeah. Well, you know, joining Crosby Heafey at that time was actually a wonderfully, uh, stimulating set of circumstances because it was a, a good size firm as they went. Uh, at the time, we were not a boutique, but, you know, a specialist California firm we probably had on the order of a couple of 100 attorneys up and down the coast and the heart of it was in the Oakland area in the Lake Merritt area of Oakland. I don't even know if the firm still has an office there. And uh Ed Heafey had started that firm somehow related to the fact that his father was one of the founders of Farmers Insurance. And so there was an arrangement whereby the Crosby Heafey team would have a kind of a no settlement policy on any litigation that they launched. And so it was this wonderful place to learn how to be a litigator at a very practical level. And often the stakes were not particularly high for farmers and they would just go for it even on a case that was only worth thousands of dollars. And so you had an opportunity to, you know, to really get in there, understand the case uh and, and make mistakes if, if, if that was unavoidable um kind of on the clock. And there was a formal litigation training program and there was just a lot of super capable people. I remember the firm had a full time editor, uh and sort of writing instructor who would work with you. We had an amazing appellate department and it was just a very high quality large boutique firm. And, and in, in, in, inside of that middle, we had this small group, Scott Baker, Ed Lynch, Mal Wittenberg, Morgan Tovey. These are names that will probably be uh I mean, other than Scott, of course, I'm sure as well still well known at the firm, many of them have already moved on. Of course, but it was a great place to learn all aspects of the trade at the same time, though, none of them was particularly technical. Certainly not in my field, which was electrical engineering. And so you had this kind of strong base of support and folks that knew intellectual property was something that was really important to their clients, but also, you know, weren't fully familiar with how to service it. And, uh, and, and basically, just to sort of background that a little bit because I think there's intellectual property has changed so much. It's probably worth spending just a couple of minutes to overlay that sort of broader economic history in that around 1981 or ’82 Ronald Reagan, as president had signed on to the formation of the CAFC, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. And before that, patent law had just been one of, you know, many fields that would go to any of the numbered Federal Circuit courts of appeal in the United States. And so you had often a, a venue uh determination, a race to the courthouse to figure out who would actually win the case. And so, you know, you had absurd situations like in Kansas City, if you filed in Kansas City, Kansas, you'd effectively pursue your case under one perhaps defense favoring a set of laws. And in Kansas City, Missouri, a completely other set, right. And so, uh it was kind of an untenable situation. This new court quickly consolidated all of that law as a matter of law and then really added more value to patents because there was, you know, the key to value in business in a lot of ways, a key value to value in business is um predictability, right? And now patents were a little more predictably enforceable, a little more predictably uh valuable. And a book came out. I remember, uh late eighties, early nineties called Rembrandts in the Attic. And it was about sort of finding these patents and really exploiting them. And in effect, that gave birth to the what became known as the patent trolling industry where they would enforce patents as a means of building profits independent of whether you are actually the innovator. And so all of that was going on and that was overlaid, of course, with the birth of the internet, the mosaic operating system, which became Netscape came out in 1994 the summer I graduated law school, I actually still have the issue of Wired Magazine that I was using when I should have been studying for the bar exam, I was instead reading Wired. And so it was just a really fun time to join the practice and a really great uh context in which to, to sort of bring this something new. I wasn't just another cog in an existing machine. I had an opportunity to sort of entrepreneurially build something new. And that was very, very exciting. 

Alicia: It sounds it. 

Adam: Yeah, yeah. And so, so one of the senior associates actually came to me just weeks after I joined the firm, I still hadn't even gotten my bar results. And he said, uh, so, uh, I have news, uh I'm leaving the firm, uh, and he was like the, there were two senior associates, so half of them had quit. And he said, I'm, I'm taking a job at Apple, which I thought was very cool. But by the way, I have this, I have this meeting set up with a tech company and um I want to bring you now because, you know, I can't do the pitch. It's, it's on Monday, this is probably Thursday or Friday and it's called Xilinks and figure it out. And so I didn't know what the heck to do. And so I called, I called my father uh of blessed memory, Leonard. And uh and I said, dad, I, I got this opportunity, I don't know what to do and remember this is before there were, there was really much in the way of the internet. Certainly there weren't accessible web browsers in every library um let alone in every home. And so uh he said, hey, look, you go to the engineering library and you do some research and you figure out what these guys are all about. I didn't know the first thing. And so I did that and uh and I found some sort of thematically, there was one particular guy, uh, who had published a ton of articles, uh, for that company in, in different technical journals. And I, I read up and I did my best to understand what was going on just to be conversant. And then, uh, and then drove down on Monday, I think, I didn't know how to get down there. I was probably 20 minutes late to the meeting. I mean, it was a tragedy in the making. And I met these two lovely ladies who were running the patent department there and they were sort of taking in the shock of having this, you know, first year associate pitching them instead of a very senior attorney. And I told them about the reading I had been doing and how fascinated I was by their FPGAs Field Programmable Gate Arrays. And that there was this one inventor, a guy named Steve Trimberger that I was especially interested in reading more about what could they give me any information? And they both laughed and they said, oh, Steve come in, and and it was actually that guy was literally sitting outside their office waiting to meet his new patent attorney. So I, I uh through it just a tremendous stroke of luck, I was able to sort of land, Xilinks as a first customer and a first client and uh probably unfairly therefore developed a reputation uh as being like a rain maker because here it was September of my, of my 1L my first year and I already had landed a, a significant Silicon Valley customer. But that just, just, you know, put me off on the right right foot, gave me the opportunity to start to um get more opportunities like that to cross sell, especially, which is a big piece of being part of a big firm and, and really building the practice. In ’97 we opened the San Francisco office and things kept accelerating from there. So it was a wonderful place to start my career. I feel incredibly fortunate. 

Alicia: It sounds it. And, and what a time and what a time when so much is going on in the world around you, you know, maybe before we even knew it, this sort of such fundamental change with something like the internet and what that means and think about even now, fast forward a few years and are overwhelming reliance on all things internet, all things, browser, all things being connected. So I'm thinking you're what sort of coming up to mid level, maybe senior associate time is that when you went in house? Talk us through that, that sort of moment in which you said, OK, I've done amazing things here at Crosby Heafey. It's time for something new. What, what was that, what went on for you? 

Adam: Yeah. So uh that's right. The first five or six years were really this combination of of landing uh my own clients um bringing in a lot of start ups watching, a lot of them get very rich watching a lot of them crash and burn. I just sort of getting a sense for the overall entrepreneurial experience from the safety of my uh of my Embarcadero center office. And then I got approached it was, I was coming up on my, on my sixth summer. So, yeah, senior associate, first time I would have been eligible for partnership and I got a call from, um and I had a, I had a nicely balanced practice. I was sort of a, a backroom guy on litigation and then did patent drafting and had three or four associates with whom I worked uh on different accounts and a lot of counseling and letters and opinion drafting. And I got a call from a uh from a recruiter and a VC who had just sort of uh been working together to launch this spin out from Stanford. It was called T-Span. That was kind of a working title. And T-Span had had come up with the idea of doing high frequency radio on CMOS technology. In other words, using the same sort of chip technology that was used to make uh memory and CPUs like Intel, you know, uh Pentium CPUs were the big brand back then. And instead use that to make high frequency radio, which previously had been much more complicated and difficult to fabricate and expensive to manufacture. And I was like, this sounds pretty cool. But what's, you know, what's the application that you have in mind? Are you going cellular? And they had this cool new idea that no one had heard of yet called Wi-Fi. And, and, and I had been trying to, I had been trying to network. I lived in this little Berkeley bungalow and would take the BART train to commute into the city and uh had been trying to network to gateway computers and was tearing my hair out with all the difficulties. And I just thought the idea of sort of being able to have that connected presence in this new internet era without having to find an Ethernet cable or drill a hole in the wall was just the, the best idea. And uh I, I just found myself sort of drawn to the big opportunity that that represented. And so, uh I found out after I gave notice that I had been on the cusp of being offered partnership. And so it was, it was probably viewed by my, my peers as an incredibly uh reckless move. I, I think in hindsight, it was probably a very low risk move in that, you know, the firm had decided they wanted me to be partner. And I'm guessing that if I had, you know, my start up had crashed and burned, they might have invited me back. But who knows, but I was, I was, I was super happy to become a client and, and work with the team after that, because the day that I started at T-Span, which became Altheros Communications, there were literally two patents that were in risk sitting on my chair. And so I think the first phone call I made was to Scott Baker to say, hey, you know, we're gonna have to do some defense work on this and we got, and we sort of got to work him and Jonah Mitchell and that whole thing. So it was, and Bovich John Bovich, so it was, it was a terrific next phase of my career and, and, and, and one in which uh I was able to begin to sort of indulge that desire to be a member of the executive team. It just kind of indulging this desire to not be the person that got the call when the crisis arose, but rather could sort of see around the corner, could understand the function of the law in the broader context of business. Um And that was, that was wonderful. And it my eyes to how much I didn't know to how much I didn't understand about the different functions in a tech company. I began learning about the operations side of it. We, we were what's called a fabless semiconductor company. And what did it mean to actually design a chip but not actually build it. And what was what were the sort of elements of trust? Why is it that every NDA gets negotiated? Why isn't there just a standard for this? All these questions that were new to me? And unfortunately, still haven't been answered, uh I think, universally, but, but you can come up with sort of your own processes for, for, for dealing with them. Uh And so it was a wonderful first in-house experience and it turned out to be a terrific career move. Wi-Fi was a great opportunity, but also just from a team and process perspective, it ended up being uh a really wonderful team to be a part of really the fabless semiconductor business had started in the, in the late seventies and early eighties. And then these, these sort of dedicated foundry companies like TSMC. And uh now we've heard of companies like GlobalFoundries, of course, Samsung is now in that industry that was kind of a new industry in the eighties and nineties. Before that, there was a, there was an adage that, you know, quote real men owned their own fabs and companies like Intel and AMD, you know, were fully vertically integrated from sort of silicon or from, from sand chips, right? And then there was this notion that no, you shouldn't have to build your own fab in order to build your own product. There's someone who specialized in that who can then, you know, amortize that investment over many more customers and that was working out very well. And, and so we had a bunch of folks in the team that were really veterans uh in building that industry and understood it really well. And I was able to sort of learn the industry from uh some incredible talent and more and more questions for more and more of a desire on my part to sort of better understand their functions led to me actually enrolling in a, in a, in an executive MBA program. At the time, UC Berkeley, the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley had teamed up with the Columbia University Business School. And so they had a, a 19-month MBA program and I started in 2007. Um by this time Groq had gone public, so I was learning about, you know, securities and such and I had been able to build a small team. Uh and when I started business school, uh I was still working, but I announced to the company and to my team that I would be stepping back to half time. That was actually the best management move I've ever made in my whole career because since I had been the only lawyer in the company for a long time, everything had sort of come to me and then it would push it down to my, to my team and I ended up becoming the bottleneck, I think for a lot of stuff. And by getting out of the way and saying, hey, instead of emailing me, you'll email the team and they'll let me know if there's an issue and they'll keep me informed. I just reversed the polarity of the workflow through, through legal. And that, that alone kind of allowed me not to have to worry about being caught up on things. I could focus on school and learning about these other functions and working on projects and it just uh it just played really nicely. And I think my, my team members were, were happier for it, like they had more autonomy and more of an ability to build independent relationships with, with their clients internally. Uh And the company just kept, just kept growing. We did a lot of acquisitions. I think we did on the order of a dozen M&A transactions during my tenure with the company, which was from 2000 until we sold it in 2011. And then in the two years after that uh uh as part of Qualcomm, um we did private acquisitions, we did some public acquisitions, we diversified our business and it was an incredible laboratory for learning again, uh that broader sort of function of law uh in business. 

Alicia: I’m loving the concept of the laboratory for learning. It's sort of, I hear as, as you're, as you're talking about your career, that this sort of continuous development is not only about the law uh that you obviously need to maintain your, your um your knowledge or what your awareness, your experience, your capability. But this breadth of understanding the business, understanding the commercial functions, understanding what you the guys down the corridor are doing and how to sort of integrate into that to be more than just the lawyer and as you say, sort of the bottleneck or, you know, part of the cogs in the wheel. And allowing others to step in and be the ones that are going to solve the solutions quicker rather than sort of, perhaps as you said, sort of standing in the way when there are so many other things that, that, that you are um focusing on that you're being asked to do and also allowing them to shine just as much. That's what I'm getting, that's what I'm getting from the conversation so far. 

Adam: Yeah, I think that's, I think that's an astute observation. I think that I think the opportunity for that kind of learning in-house is actually in many ways more accessible than it is in a law firm because in a law firm, even if you, as you know, as I did right out of law school, right? Even if you have direct access to your clients, you're still really only having that direct access typically to the legal department, the in-house legal department. And, you know, and they're working, they're, they're not a profit center, they're a cost center generally speaking. And so you're seeing things within a particular lens and not really getting access to the broader business context in which the issues are being brought to you. And typically also not having access to whatever transpired over the year or two that led up to the issue, whether it was the invention of something new, you know, some employee leaving and stealing trade secrets, uh when they took off and so on and so forth or even the sort of board level interaction, there are partners, of course, uh at law firms who have that level of access. But I think it's rare for the young associate to get that. Uh I do see tremendous value in both paths though. There's no question because what I missed when I went in house was especially when I was alone in house until I started hiring other lawyers uh to join the firm, which didn't happen for a few years. What you miss is the camaraderie, this sort of operation at the kind of the pinnacle from a quality perspective of the practice of law. You know, we had amazing attorneys at Crosby Heafey, I remember there was someone who was an expert in legal ethics, like he had defended law firms against malpractice claims and, and, and remember this issue came up with a client, they were going public, the underwriters had a concern about something and the client came to me and he was looking for a way out of this underwriter issue and I was actually able to confer with these ethics experts and get them to get the underwriters to admit that the particular opinion letter or whatever that, that was causing the hang up was actually outside the bounds that they should have reviewed in their underwriting effort. And, you know, I was, uh, uh, as my mother would say, a little pisher, I, you know, I think I had been out of law school. I had been out of law school for more than nine months when I made this observation. And there's no way there's no way even in the chat GPT era that I would have spotted this issue uh independently or through research, it was only by being able to sit down probably over lunch with, you know, with a senior attorney who had 30 years of experience and sort of just harvest that insight that I was able to solve a really a fundamental issue that was preventing a client from going public. So I, I missed that. Uh, I miss it a lot and, and you never really get that back when you go in-house. What you have instead though, uh is the opportunity to learn from any number of those sorts of teams if you have the discipline to always continue to have those sorts of lunches and take the time with all the different attorneys, because now I didn't have just one firm that I could call upon, but I had several and all of them had MCLE sessions and they all wanted me to participate. And so now I had more of a smorgasbord of, of different opportunities available, especially at the end of every MCLE year in January, February, when you have all those hours that are available, you can continue to learn, but you have to be a little more self disciplined about it. You also lose the network. You know, when you're in a law firm, you have uh you have all these colleagues, but you also have a professional network that you're always building because everybody feels obligated to put bread on the table and to win new clients and uh and you lose that when you go in house. But I really made a point of continuing to meet people to have lunches and to not just sort of sit and eat at my desk every day. And I would imagine that that at big law firms right now, that's something that you have to even remind folks of in the, in the post-COVID era where so much work is happening from home. I think it's really easy to sort of feed on your seed corn and not kind of continue to build out your network. 

Alicia: And it's, it's a curious reflection as well because, you know, it's something that we are trying to encourage, we are reinforcing and that's on the sort of learning side as well as you know, I, I hear our partners saying it just as much to our, uh, associate attorneys get out there, meet your client, they will want to have a coffee, they will want to have lunch. And by the sound of it you did, you know, this is something that you, you actually relish, you take the time for it is helpful to you. Yes, of course. You get to eat, fantastic. But you get to maintain that network. You get to find out actually this guy knows something. This girl knows that. That's, that's the expert. I'm going to bring you in when I need you. 

Adam: Absolutely. And, uh, I, it was, I think it was Benjamin Franklin who observed that whenever he wanted to get closer to someone, he would ask them a favor, you know, if there was someone who he respected but feared he would ask to borrow a book from the library, you know, something like that. 

Alicia: Yeah. 

Adam: And I, and I think that it's through that sort of exchange of information that, that actual exchange of favors as well. That's how Silicon Valley works. That's how I think in a lot of ways business works ultimately. And if you want to sort of break through and become a valued counselor, not just an attorney, but a valued counselor to your clients at the, even the most senior level, then they're gonna assume that you have that level of connection because when they come to you for, with a problem, they're not asking you for the, for the solution in the moment. They're asking me to think about this and to reach out to your network and, and then sort of build the right response, whether that response is, is a written response or is a process that's initiated, you know, by your efforts. 

Alicia: And, you know, it's, it's curious on that. I'm, I'm hearing a few things about, you know, your opinion and my question, I guess is that that's coming, is what is it that makes a terrific attorney in your eyes, given your experience? You know, I'm hearing, not necessarily the solution in the moment but actually using the platform finding out where the, the level of expertise is from that breadth of network that will sit in the firm around you. What else is it in your opinion that makes a good attorney? 

Adam: Yeah, that's a great question. So I, I think the theme, but we should sort of pursue it because it manifests itself differently in each, in each of the different branches of business. I think that if you look at the bar exam in California anyway, it's a three day torture test in which, and, and sort of one of those days is spent on what we, we used to be called, uh this was 30 years ago, practical, I think they were called practical sessions or something like that. And they weren't, they weren't testing your knowledge of the law at all. In fact, it was intended to be an area that you probably didn't study uh unless you happen to choose an elective and they actually cautioned, you don't call upon your knowledge of the law because what they wanted you to do is look at this, this sort of portfolio, this, they gave you this little stack of paper. It was good, good half inch of uh of, of materials, two sided and you had three or four hours to synthesize, you know, from those materials which were both facts and law, um memos and discovered information of some sort and then actual regulations and other relevant areas of law, it might have been something like landlord tenant or something like that. And in four hours you had to just kind of answer the sort of key memo question that came from a senior partner in a law firm or something like that. And to me that I think ended up best capturing what it meant to be a good attorney. Not that that's what a good lawyer does. They sit and write memos for a living, but your issue spotting, right? And you're doing that sort of constantly almost as a matter of habit. I didn't even think about it. Right. One of the hardest times I've been having as a, I mean, the reason I have such a long title, right? Corporate development and finance and CLO is that I've taken on more than just legal, more and more through throughout my career to the point where now in terms of the real time I spend on the law, it's maybe 10 or 15% maybe in a really heavy sort of potential litigation heavy week. I might spend 25% of my time on the law. But that is kind of a misrepresentation because I'm thinking about this stuff all the time. And if you were to kind of, you know, if, if I came up with an avatar that represents what I do for a living, it's probably like those um, the agents in the matrix. If you remember the early matrix where they're dodging bullets, I mean, you're, what you're trying to do is just kind of see around the corner what's coming next and how can we as a company sort of best take advantage of or avoid that particular situation with the least amount of energy and money and, and just stay focused on what we really want to do for a living. And so I, I've had a hard time actually fully empowering my, my, even my, my general counsel, right? The woman Cheryl Savage is an incredible attorney and she's, you know, really good at everything I just described. And then she's also, of course, dealing with everything else that comes up. The other 90% of her time is spent actually solving all these problems that I keep making. And, and so, but it's hard because I'm the one who's in so many of these business meetings, constantly spotting these issues. And I have to make sure that she gets the benefit of all those experiences from a legal perspective and sort of is able to evolve at the leading edge of the business in a way that, that, you know, compliments her depth and capabilities. So that's, I think what you're, what a great attorney is, is, is looking for you're looking for, for someone at least in-house that can kind of organically mix that sort of issue spotting and, and practical business perspective into a whole package. Uh And who understands that there's always this imperative to have that network available to always be on the lookout for the best thinkers in a particular space and have them on speed dial of the most relevant. Uh because, you know, time is always against you. 

Alicia: Isn't it just. In our, in our sort of closing moments, Adam, what, what advice would you give to our young attorneys? What is it that you would offer to them even if, you know, I think the, the phrase that we hear a lot is, you know, the, the advice to my younger self. But what is it that you would say to them, you know, given the potential longevity of this incredible career in this industry? 

Adam: Well, I, I do think that training in the law is just a wonderful basis for a career in business. I mean, you know, I, we haven't really given any time or credit, of course to other fields of the law. I've been completely focused on the, on commercial and business law, uh, because that's, that's always what I've done as an intellectual property attorney at first and then sort of more broadly as a general counsel. If you're gonna pursue, you know, public interest law, of course, or a criminal prosecution or defense, I mean, these all have their own sort of mission and vision behind them. And I don't claim to speak to those uh in any way. But if your interest is in, is in commercial law, then I think, always do your best to be mindful of the fundamental business interests. That's, that's really at issue because it's, it's probably not captured in your memo or your, you know, the way you're talking to your clients and your phone call, right? And the more I think you can prepare yourself to understand that context and to have a network that's available to help you with that. Um And to, you know, kind of quickly up to speed on what matters most to the client. Then I think the sort of higher that quality of service you're gonna offer also don't have lunch at your desk, like get out there and meet people and build a network. Um And really perhaps most importantly, because the one thing you'll miss if you go in house is, you won't have that just phenomenal network of, uh, senior peers, um, who have spent their whole careers doing exactly that. Right. Not having lunch at their desk and, and kind of getting out there and meeting people and, um, and, and want nothing more, uh, typically than to, uh, than to share the, the benefit of all that time and energy with you. That's why they're part of a firm. And so just kind of fully take advantage of that. I think people worry too much about making a fool of themselves. I, I'd make a career out of making a fool of myself and it's, it's working out great so far. I'm really enjoying it. 

Alicia: Absolutely is. It really, really is. And Adam, thank you so much for giving us a glimpse of your career journey of your career thus far. And I can't wait to see what new tech innovation is coming around the corner that you're going to be helping lead the way on. It's been absolutely fascinating. Thank you. 

Adam: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. 

Alicia: And thank you to everybody else for joining the podcast. We look forward to welcoming you next time. 

Outro: Career Footprints is a Reed Smith production. Our producer is Ali McCardell. This podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcast, Podbean and reedsmith.com. To learn more about Reed Smith's Alumni Network or if you're an alum of the firm who wants to share your career story, contact me, Reed Smith's Global Senior Director of Alumni Relations, Laura Karmatz at alumni@reedsmith.com. 

Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for educational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice and is not intended to establish an attorney-client relationship, nor is it intended to suggest or establish standards of care applicable to particular lawyers in any given situation. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Any views, opinions, or comments made by any external guest speaker are not to be attributed to Reed Smith LLP or its individual lawyers. 

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