For the fourth annual Women in Leadership Awards, Virginia Business hosted a photo shoot at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where eight of this year’s winners struck poses for Richmond photographer James Lee.
Given the surroundings, Lee took inspiration from the museum’s collection and other artwork in staging the photos. The results display a different side of these powerful and accomplished leaders.
Over the past four years, Virginia Business has introduced readers to many outstanding executives through the Women in Leadership Awards, including 2024’s impressive cohort of 38 women, chosen from a pool of more than 250 nominees.
All winners work in Virginia and hold C-suite or equivalent positions. They also have demonstrated extraordinary professional achievements, including breaking glass ceilings, mentoring others, engaging in civic work and bringing their leadership skills to nonprofit and company boards.
Most also have been willing to take risks in their careers. It takes guts, after all, to be a woman leader. Women still run just 10.4% of Fortune 500 companies, and, astoundingly, 2023 was the first year that there were more women CEOs of S&P 500 companies than S&P CEOs named John.
In the pages ahead, you’ll read about the fascinating journeys that this year’s cohort of Virginia executives took to leadership and success. Please join us in congratulating the 2024 winners of the Virginia Business Women in Leadership Awards!
LARGE EMPLOYER
YVONNE ALLMOND Executive vice president and community financial engagement officer, TowneBank, Norfolk
MELODY BARNES Executive director, University ofVirginia Karsh Institute of Democracy, Charlottesville
SAGE BOLTE President and chief philanthropy officer, Inova Health Foundation, Fairfax
CAPRICE BRAGG Chief strategy officer and deputy director for strategic planning, government and board relations, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
ERICA CARTER Regional leader and principal, Kimley-Horn, Reston
RUTH ANN CLARK Managing director, mid-Atlantic region and aerospace, defense and government services industry manager, JPMorgan Chase, McLean
PAT DAVIS-HAGENS Market president, Bon Secours Mercy Health Hampton Roads, Suffolk
MELODY DICKERSON Senior vice president for hospital operations and chief nursing officer, VHC Health, Arlington County
MELISSA FRYE Senior program director, General Dynamics Information Technology, Reston
CANDICE LING Federal sector leader, Microsoft Federal, Arlington County
LYN McDERMID Secretary of administration, Commonwealth ofVirginia, Richmond
PAULA PANDO President, Reynolds Community College, Richmond
FRAN RANDALL
Partner, Richmond market leader and national tax practice leader for international tax services, Forvis Mazars, Richmond
MONICA SCHMUDE Virginia president, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Richmond
AMY SEBRING Executive vice president and chief operating officer, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg
SARAH STRASSHEIM Chief financial officer, data and technology, Dentsu, Keswick
NICOLE STUART President, Top Guard Security, Norfolk
DANA WESTON GRAVES
President, Sentara Princess Anne Hospital, Virginia Beach
For lawyers, time has always been money, which has made the billable hour standard practice for the profession since the 1960s. But with the rise of artificial intelligence, which already can cut the time required to complete rote tasks from days or hours down to seconds, a once-inconceivable event just might come to pass — the supremacy of the billable hour could come to an end.
Results — not time spent on a project — are being touted as the new metric for evaluating the services that a lawyer can offer, and more firms are at least considering if not experimenting with different payment arrangements, including retainers and flat fees, which could become the norm someday.
That day’s not here yet, though. The billable hour’s death will be a slow one, because the legal profession is ultra-cautious about taking risks.
Lawyers are like teenagers at a school dance, says Susan Hackett, an attorney and CEO with a law practice management consultancy in Bethesda, Maryland. They line the walls of the gym and wait for someone else to hit the dance floor first before they make any moves themselves.
“Lawyers like to be the first to be second,” she says. Hackett, whose Legal Executive Leadership firm has advised big corporate clients such as Mars and Hilton Worldwide Holdings on their legal departments’ business practices, is no fan of the billable hour — particularly from the client’s perspective.
“Does anyone buy anything else this way?” she asks. “Sure, go ahead and build the house, and we’ll figure out the cost and how many bedrooms it should have after the work gets started. Lawyers have been paid to do their jobs dysfunctionally for a long time. Why not incentivize by giving more money for resolving a case rather than more money for continuing it?”
But looking at the issue from a law firm’s point of view, why would they change a payment system that saw an average national $370 hourly rate for associate lawyers and a $604 average rate for partners in 2023, according to a National Law Journal survey? That sounds like fixing something that isn’t broken, at least for law firms billing by the hour, and there wasn’t a good reason to change the practice until AI arrived on the legal scene with the threat of disrupting how fast legal services and advice could be delivered.
Even without AI in the mix, there have been rumblings of discontent about the prevalent legal billing model, including from in-house corporate legal departments that have expressed frustration over how expensive and unpredictable the costs of outside counsel can be, mainly because of the billable hour, according to a 2023 joint survey of corporate legal departments conducted by the Association of Corporate Counsel and Everlaw. Just 38% reported being satisfied with the ability to predict
the costs of outsourced legal work.
And yet, in-house legal departments also are reluctant to try something new, the survey showed. Only 28% of survey respondents said that they were pursuing alternative fee agreements with outside law firms as a cost-cutting strategy, while just 33% were considering tapping into AI technology for legal work.
“Billable hours is all they know,” Ken Callander, managing principal of Value Strategies, a legal consulting firm that promotes alternative fee agreements, told Law.com in November 2023. “To move toward something other than that, it’s really foreign to them.”
Colleen Quinn, founder of Richmond’s Quinn Law Centers, says not calculating hourly billing saves her a lot of time. Photo by Matthew R.O. Brown
Dipping their toes in
Williams Mullen Chairman, President and CEO Calvin W. “Woody” Fowler Jr. has seen it all in his nearly 40 years practicing law.
“Every 10 years, we hear that the billable hour is dead, but it is very resilient,” he says. His Richmond-based law firm — the state’s third largest — has 250 lawyers, 196 of them based in Virginia, and bills most of its clients by the hour.
Fowler expects that it will take five years or even a decade before the profession sees a significant shift away from the billable hour. First will come the early adopters, he says, who are like those teenagers brave enough to get out on the dance floor first. Then, Fowler expects that most of those hanging out by the gym wall will gradually take to the floor, although a few probably will remain wallflowers and “watch all the way to the end,” he says. Those firms “might look like geniuses — or be left behind.”
Using AI for legal work is another big leap for law firms, many of which have reservations about its security and reliability.
For now, Williams Mullen is staying off the AI dance floor for the most part. The firm has begun using large language model-based generative AI programs like ChatGPT that can create text for marketing and internal development purposes, and leaders of various practice areas have been reading and studying up on other uses of the technology.
But right now, AI presents too many proprietary and confidentiality issues to be applied to legal matters, Fowler says. “It’s not ready for prime time yet.”
Iria Giuffrida, assistant dean for academic and faculty affairs at William & Mary Law School, finds such prudence appropriate.
Although Giuffrida thinks that in-house LLM-based tools probably can be trusted with client information, she is less confident about the ability of public AI platforms like ChatGPT to guarantee confidentiality — and “confidentiality is sacrosanct,” she says.
AI’s liability rests with the lawyer, Giuffrida points out, and some attorneys have made well-publicized AI-related errors and paid the price.
Last year, for example, two New York attorneys were sanctioned for filing a brief with AI-generated case citations that turned out to be fake, and in February, a Massachusetts attorney was fined $2,000 for producing a document that also included fake citations caused by an AI tool’s “hallucinations.”
“AI is not a barred attorney,” Giuffrida says, so any malpractice that results from its use is the lawyer’s responsibility — and problem. At the same time, the “incredible efficiencies” that AI offers can’t be ignored, she says, and some attorneys undoubtedly will turn to AI to increase their productivity. That, in turn, will lead clients to question why they should pay a billable hour for a service, such as creating a legal document, that can be performed in less than a minute with AI’s assistance.
Giuffrida expects that small and medium-sized firms that specialize in areas of the law that are fairly predictable, such as adoptions or real estate, will be among the first to use AI tools like ChatGPT in large numbers because AI is good at repetitive tasks.
By employing the new technology, they could punch above their weight when competing with larger firms for clients, she says. AI can take the place of a paralegal or first-year associate — whom small firms may not be able to afford — and do a lot of the grunt work involved in building some legal cases.
James K. Cowan Jr. is chairman of CowanPerry, a small Blacksburg commercial law firm that performs work for flat fees, monthly retainers and other alternatives to hourly billing. Photo by Don Petersen
Excitement and caution
Three small Virginia law firms contacted for this story all bear out Giuffrida’s predictions concerning AI. They’re enthusiastic about the technology’s potential, but, just like Fowler at Williams Mullen, they are also in wait-and-see mode.
James K. Cowan Jr. is chairman of CowanPerry, a six-lawyer Blacksburg-based firm that performs mostly corporate and real estate work for flat fees, monthly retainers and other alternatives to hourly billing. “We do so much work on fee that any efficiencies are great for us,” Cowan says, which is why he expects that his firm will be among the first in Virginia to employ AI technology in legal work.
“In 10 years, CowanPerry has developed a tremendous amount of work product, but the hardest thing is to find it,” he says. “AI can help. It gives you suggestions and analysis and allows you to focus on the things that matter. You can think more about strategy, the human side.”
Colleen M. Quinn, founder of Richmond’s Quinn Law Centers, which specializes in personal injury, employment law, estate planning and adoption and surrogacy, uses alternative fee agreements for her more straightforward cases, and she says it’s popular with clients.
“The younger generation really likes to have a set amount,” she says, and it’s a time-saver for her two-attorney firm to not have to calculate hourly billing.
She also views AI as a potentially huge time-saver for estate planning and other legal areas with recurrent procedures and documentation, although AI tools are less useful for litigation, due to their unpredictability. “Ethically, there still has to be fact-checking behind it,” she says.
Dunlap Law, a firm based in Richmond and Monterey that serves mostly small businesses, has jettisoned billable hours, says managing partner Tricia Dunlap.
Her five-attorney, all-female practice offers its clients varying levels of service at different price points that are “clear, precise and transparent,” Dunlap says. “We put clients in charge of their budgets, and a level of trust begins to develop.” Like Quinn, she notes that not tracking billable minutes saves her firm time.
Dunlap expects that what she calls “the superpower of AI” will shift focus away from time spent on tasks at many law firms, and that the demise of the billable hour could benefit clients in many ways, including some that are not purely financial. “The time we don’t spend drafting a contract,” she says, “we can spend learning a client’s business and helping them avoid mistakes.”
Although the Virginia State Bar declined to comment on any trends concerning billing practices or the use of AI tools among its members, the marketplace is usually an accurate barometer of change — and the market for AI legal services is hot.
“I get five calls a day from people trying to sell me AI,” Fowler notes.
The future of law?
One of those calls might have been from a firm like Henchman. An international legal services company based in New York and Ghent, Belgium, Henchman furnishes AI-assisted contract drafting services to hundreds of law firms in 35 countries, including many in the United States. For a subscription fee, Henchman provides clients “instant access to their previously written clauses and definitions,” making work accessible in seconds.
Michiel Denis, Henchman’s head of growth, says his company experienced 1,300% revenue growth in the past year and a half, and it now counts among its clients the multinational Boston-based law firm of Goodwin Procter, which has 1,800-plus attorneys. Most of its business, though, as Giuffrida predicted, comes from small and mid-sized law firms.
“It comes as no surprise that the rollout of a technology platform is slower for bigger firms, as they typically have more practice groups leveraging new technologies,” Denis explains. Key to his company’s success has been what he calls the “bespoke” training it offers on the use of its systems. “Next to privacy and reliability, we notice user-friendliness is a key sticking point for Henchman clients,” he says.
Hackett would second that. She has seen too many law firms “jump in from doing nothing with technology to the highest level,” she says, dooming such enterprises from the get-go. Firms end up with systems that no one wants to use, which only enforces the profession’s general embrace of continuing to do things the way they’ve always been done.
However, law firms don’t operate in a vacuum, and many have clients who are already using AI in their own businesses, Hackett notes. These corporate clients likely will expect their legal counsel to make use of similar tools that can increase efficiency and, most consequentially, lead to a revamp of how they are billed and how much those services cost.
“You can’t have one hand clapping,” Hackett says. “You have to do it together. Yes, law firms are slow to change, but market changes are fast, and technology is fast. Law is unpredictable. So is business. Get over it.”
As more students and their families question which colleges present the best return on their big investments, many are choosing to play it safe. That often means starting at community college or public universities while living at home, with others postponing post-secondary education or considering other options.
The impact of college loan debt and soaring tuitions have put more pressure on four-year schools — especially private institutions, which are widely viewed as serving the rich, even when most offer extensive financial aid that doesn’t involve high-interest loans.
The Sallie Mae 2023 “How America Pays for College” report found that 78% of the families eliminated certain colleges based on cost, an indication that many people are not aware of the amount of available financial aid.
“Everyone knows that when you go to a car dealership, the sticker price isn’t what you pay, but not everyone realizes that the same applies to college tuitions,” says Roanoke College President Frank Shushok Jr.
To clarify the real cost of a Roanoke education, his school did a tuition reset in 2022, dropping its list price from $46,510 to $33,510. “It’s not truly a reduction,” Shushok says. “Just a more transparent price.”
The University of Lynchburg, Randolph College, Virginia Union University and Bridgewater College all have instituted similar resets, although the jury is still out on its long-term impact on enrollment.
But Roanoke had its largest ever number of applications last fall, Shushok says, and its enrollment was up 5%. That was a bit better than the 3% overall enrollment increase at Virginia’s public and private schools, as reported by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), and a lot better than the 1.2% increase nationwide reported by the National Student Clearinghouse.
Other schools are coming up with different solutions, all with the aim of remaining competitive in the changing higher education environment.
In Winchester, 80% of Shenandoah University students receive financial assistance for the $35,000 annual tuition, says President Tracy Fitzsimmons. (The average non-need-based scholarship or grant awarded to SU first-year students is $28,242, according to U.S. News & World Report.)
At Hampton University, the average aid package of $17,162 helps offset the $29,162 tuition. And at the University of Richmond, need-based aid packages average $60,740 toward the roughly $80,000 annual costs for tuition and room and board. President Kevin F. Hallock also says that his school gives $5,000 to students who undertake paid or unpaid internships.
Several of Virginia’s private colleges and universities, including UR, Mary Baldwin University and Washington and Lee University, go even further with financial aid through incentives known as “Promise Programs.” The exact criteria for eligibility varies, but some of these programs offer a tuition-free education to qualifying low-income students.
Overall, the commonwealth’s private schools doled out $900,000 in financial aid and scholarships last year, while raising tuition by an average of just 1.1%. Meanwhile, tuition at their public counterparts went up an average of 3.9%.
Christopher K. Peace, president of the Council of Independent Colleges in Virginia, says that the commonwealth’s private institutions offer an abundance of financial assistance and are more affordable than people realize.
“When you provide scholarships and grants, plus the state’s $5,000 yearly Tuition Assistance Grants, you can get to the point of being almost as affordable as going to a public university,” says Matthew D. Shank, president of the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges.1 TAGs are yearly grants that the state offers to all full-time, in-state private college and university students. For HBCUs like Hampton University, the TAG is $7,500.
Overall, the headcount of college students in Virginia grew by 15,372 in 2023, with 8,409 of those new students opting for a private school education, according to SCHEV. That may seem balanced, but SCHEV Policy Analytics Director Tod Massa notes that much of that private school growth is attributable to Liberty University.
In fall 2023, the Lynchburg private evangelical university’s undergraduate and graduate enrollment reached 98,000, up from 92,000 in 2022 and 89,000 in 2020. Liberty was responsible for 5,255 of those 8,409 new private school students, Massa says. “Those kinds of numbers skew any discussion of private universities.”
Fewer traditional students
Another issue affecting public and private colleges is the smaller number of younger people in the United States. As of 2020’s Census, 22.2% of the population is under 18, down from 24% in 2010 and 26% in 2000. That diminishes the pool of traditionally aged students entering college. Some of these students go straight from high school into the workforce, especially if they earn professional certification during high school.
That means colleges are looking beyond traditional students, including veterans or people changing careers. Many schools are also working to recruit students from underserved backgrounds, particularly students of color. Roanoke College has reached a goal of 40% enrollment of underrepresented minorities and otherwise underserved students among its undergraduates.
Marymount University’s enrollment is more than a quarter Latino, leading to its federal designation in 2020 as a Hispanic-Serving Institution, which makes the Arlington school eligible for more federal grants and $7,500 TAGs.
Virginia’s private schools graduate half of the state’s working degreed nurses and 30% of all its four-year students, Peace says, yet TAGs represent less than 3.4% of the commonwealth’s $100.3 million higher education budget for fiscal 2024. What’s more, he says, if private school students were instead educated at any one of Virginia’s public colleges and universities, it would cost the state double the TAG costs in subsidies.
With more diverse student bodies, schools offer different and broader curricula — less ivory tower and more pragmatic.
“Parents want to be assured that their kids will have jobs when they graduate,” says Irma Becerra, Marymount’s president. To that end, she has been augmenting the school’s already strong nursing and science programs with new degrees in fields such as biomedical engineering and neuroscience.
The state’s other private higher education institutions are doing the same. “We are going to where there is a societal need, with a focus on professional preparation and training,” says Shenandoah’s Fitzsimmons. Among her university’s recent additions are degrees in aviation, biochemistry and speech pathology.
“Private universities are a really good deal for the state,” says UR’s president, Hallock, “but more support from [the state] would provide exponential benefits.”
Private research
On several Virginia private colleges’ wish lists for becoming more attractive to students is boosting their research classifications.
The United States has 146 Research 1, or R1-rated, research colleges and universities — schools that spend at least $50 million on research and produce at least 70 doctorates annually with research components. R1 is the top research ranking awarded by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.
Virginia has five R1 universities, all of which are public: George Mason University, the University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia Tech and Old Dominion University.
James Madison University and William & Mary, also public institutions, are among the nation’s 133 R2 institutions, with at least $5 million invested in research and 20 annual doctorates. Hampton University was the state’s only private R2 institution, but it lost its classification during the pandemic, when it was unable to graduate the requisite number of Ph.D. students.
Hampton President Darrell K. Williams expects to regain R2 status this fall, as the university was awarded a $4.9 million Department of Education grant to establish a climate science degree and a $1.7 million grant from the Simons Foundation to advance research in fusion plasma science. On top of that, Hampton allocates between $20 million to $25 million toward research. Nonetheless, Williams says, Hampton needs assistance from the state to keep up its research work.
“We do need state funding to provide our unique capabilities,” Williams says. “It is very important that private institutions get included in the research portfolio of the commonwealth.”
Peace is cautiously optimistic that the Virginia General Assembly will see fit this session to incrementally raise TAGs from $5,000 to $6,000 by 2026, yet he and some other advocates for the state’s private schools have a longer-term goal — to see one or more of the commonwealth’s private schools attain a coveted R1 or R2 rating.
Becerra and Peace, too, have joined the call for public funding. In a December 2023 column published by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the two laid out their case for state funding to assist Virginia private universities to attain R1 or R2 status. As an example, they pointed to Mercer University, a private R2 school in Georgia that has benefited from state support, and to a public-private partnership in Austin that created the prestigious Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas.
“For a state to be known for a state-of-the-art health sector depends on a steady flow of important research,” Becerra says. “Virginia has not invested in research at private universities, and it is missing out on important opportunities.” Within a couple of years, she says, her goal is for Marymount to gain R2 status, even without financial assistance from the state.
Not every backer of the state’s private colleges and universities agrees that Virginia needs a private R1 or R2 school, though.
“It takes a lot of resources to go from an institute focused on teaching to one that emphasizes research,” says Shank, president of the VFIC. “U.Va., Virginia Tech and Virginia Commonwealth already have that status, and it would be hard to compete with their massive head starts.”
Shushok also cites the law of supply and demand. “With fewer high school grads coming into the pipeline,” he says, “it might be best to invest more in what you already have.”
Speaking to an audience of more than 20,000 human resources professionals gathered in Las Vegas for his organization’s June 14 annual conference and expo, Society for Human Resource Management President and CEO Johnny C. Taylor Jr. said that HR execs are ready to meet the array of challenges created by the “new abnormal” of post-pandemic workplaces, where “everything is new again.”
In this new abnormal, some adverse effects of COVID have lingered. The job market may be strong, but angst about the economy is widespread. The line between work and personal lives that got blurred during lockdown still has not become clear, even as return-to-office mandates have people scrambling to adjust. And some workers are now worried about the potential of losing their jobs to artificial intelligence.
Add to these concerns the existential burden of living in a society in which political, social and racial tensions seem to ratchet up daily, and the result is a workforce experiencing high levels of depression and burnout.
In an April poll about mental health conducted by the American Psychological Association, 77% of 2,515 employed adults polled nationwide reported experiencing job-related stress within the previous month. About a quarter of those respondents blamed that stress on being subjected to a toxic workplace, which, the APA says, can include dealing with excessive demands, micromanagement, job insecurity, discrimination and poor communication. Women and people with disabilities tend to suffer most from such working environments, the APA found.
Good mental health is not just a cause for private concern anymore, but a matter of dollars and common sense for businesses, because burnt-out and unhappy workers are generally less productive and can be harmful to workplace culture.
Symptoms of burnout can include coming in late and leaving early, insomnia and substance abuse, says Ben Madden, board president of Northern Virginia SHRM and owner of Arlington-based human resources consultancy HR Action. “Quiet quitting” and “slow working” are terms that have entered our vocabulary for a reason, he adds.
HR professionals need to be experts on people, as well as business and culture, Taylor said in his June speech. “HR must be that person everyone can trust and that person who can predict how humans — a company’s workers — will respond to action and behaviors,” he said. “We need to understand our people at the deepest levels.”
Last year, the World Health Organization reported that 12 billion working days are lost to depression globally every year, and it estimates that the annual cost in reduced productivity to the U.S. economy is $1 trillion. Those statistics highlight one of the major points of Taylor’s June speech — that human capital is the most valuable form of business capital and that companies that expect to be successful must take better care of their employees’ mental health.
Most businesses still have some room for improvement on that front, however. The APA survey found that just 43% of employees surveyed said they have access to on-the-job insurance that covers mental health and substance abuse disorders. An equal number of those surveyed said that they fear repercussions if they were honest with their employers about their mental state.
But “that narrative is shifting,” says Scott Snell, the Frank M. Sands Sr. professor of business administration at the University of Virginia and co-author of co-author of the textbook “Managing Human Resources.”“Most organizations,” he says, “are at least aware of the issue and are acting on it in good ways.”
The largest companies with the most resources are leading the way. Alex Alonso, chief knowledge officer for SHRM, says that businesses with more than 5,000 employees have begun offering “a boatload more” of materials and resources to aid employees with challenges in their personal lives, as well as more flexible scheduling and “more talk space.”
Three of the commonwealth’s largest employers — Sentara Health, General Dynamics Information Technology, and Booz Allen Hamilton — are exemplars of this change.
Healing the healers
Norfolk-based health system Sentara Health has 31,000 employees working at more than 100 sites across Virginia and North Carolina. Although every sector of the economy was impacted in some fashion by the pandemic, front-line health care workers took the brunt. Yet, says Becky Sawyer, Sentara’s executive vice president and chief people officer, in some ways, employee stress was easier to manage then than it is now.
During the COVID pandemic, health care personnel were in crisis mode and were able to stay resilient knowing that the burdens placed on them by the crisis eventually would lift. However, they’ve since transitioned “from crisis burnout to a state of uncertainty,” Sawyer says, and “the new way of the world is creating moral distress.” Sentara’s response has been to roll out many more resources to support its workers’ mental health.
Another order of business has been to make its worksites safer. Workers in public-facing sectors, ranging from retail and health care to transportation, have experienced unprecedented levels of hostility in recent years, with almost a quarter of those surveyed by the APA reporting they were verbally abused in the prior month. The U.S. Surgeon General lists protection from harm as the first essential to workplace mental health, and safety is a huge issue in the health care field, Sawyer says. (Workplace violence is four times more likely to occur in a health care setting than in other industries, according to a 2021 study by the Cleveland Clinic.)
To keep employees safer, Sentara has begun issuing badges to visitors and has installed weapons detection systems. Employees are being trained in how to defuse potentially violent situations, and each of Sentara’s divisions now has its own workplace violence prevention committee.
The health care system has extended its free resources for emotional and mental health to 40,000 medical providers and has added on-site mental health counselors to supplement its in-house employee assistance programs. Such counselors remain a rarity among businesses. The APA found that just 12% of survey respondents said their workplace has anyone on site with mental health training.
“General anxiety is higher than what we’ve seen in the past,” says Daphne Gillie, Booz Allen Hamilton’s global wellbeing program manager. Photo by Will Schermerhorn
Two other elements needed for a healthy workforce are employees who feel that they matter and that their work matters, according to the surgeon general. As “a mission-oriented organization that every colleague aligns around,” Sentara’s approach to decision-making is deliberately inclusive, Sawyer says. Sentara wants its employees to know that their voices are heard and that their opinions are considered. Yearly employee surveys, which have an 85% participation rate, she says, help leaders get a grip on what issues matter most to their workers.
“Burnout was a real and present concern long before COVID,” Sawyer says, “but we can take more meaningful approaches now.”
Defending defense workers
Like health care workers, national defense workers at two of Virginia’s largest government contractors, Reston-based General Dynamics Information Technology and McLean-based Booz Allen Hamilton, faced intensely stressful situations during the pandemic. Many had to continue to work on-site at clients’ facilities despite general lockdowns, while the work itself intensified. “COVID brought out some of our adversaries,” says GDIT President Amy Gilliland.
The security clearances that many employees of both contractors must have to perform their jobs also piled on the stress. These clearances became more difficult and time-consuming to obtain during COVID, and, although Gilliland says that only 1% of clearances are revoked or denied because of mental health issues, the belief persists in the industry that any perception of mental vulnerability will result in losing clearance. That widespread, if mistaken, notion continues to make people reluctant to seek help even when they find themselves spiraling downward.
Last year, GDIT got a rough wake-up call about the threats to its employees’ mental health when it logged a 3% increase in suicides among its 30,000-plus workforce. That grim statistic led to “real discussions about the elephant in the room,” Gilliland says.
These days, GDIT wants its employees to know that “it’s OK not to be OK,” and that the company is there to help. In 2021, Gilliland launched the “How are you, really?” campaign within GDIT to destigmatize mental health issues and encourage employees in need to seek help. GDIT supports an employee’s need to step back or even take a leave of absence, and it has instituted or beefed up a slew of mental health support programs, including:
A partnership with a health care insurer to provide alcohol-abuse treatment;
A website to provide information and links to mental health support networks and care providers;
A concierge tool, Wellthy, to assist employees in navigating family care options;
Talkspace, a program allowing employees to chat with counselors and therapists by text, phone or video;
And a speaker program to call attention to mental health challenges such as post-traumatic stress syndrome, a big concern for a company that employs many veterans. “It caught on like wildfire,” Gilliland says.
GDIT also is training its managers “to lean in with empathy,” she says. “We’ve learned that we can be more flexible and that rigidity is not necessary. Take care of the people, and they can take care of the mission. Our national security imperative is to deliver well employees.”
Like GDIT, Booz Allen Hamilton also has 30,000-plus employees and its mission-driven work binds employees together, but that dedication can also lead to burnout, says Daphne Gillie, Booz Allen’s global wellbeing program manager. “General anxiety,” she says, “is higher than what we’ve seen in the past.”
Booz Allen’s response has been to take a holistic approach to the problem through its employee assistance program, a confidential resource that employees can access for free. The program offers coaching to manage stress and counseling services for employees and their family members. Diversity, equity and inclusion ambassadors also have been deployed in each of Booz Allen’s business sectors, along with wellness champions who are conversant on available wellness benefits and can help educate and influence their colleagues to tap into available resources.
Booz Allen is dedicated to creating “a culture of caring,” Gillie says, but “bridging the gap between the knowing and the doing takes work.”
As companies such as Sentara, GDIT and Booz Allen are taking the mental health of their employees much more seriously than ever before, smaller companies also have begun to follow suit. A 2022 SHRM survey of 3,129 human resources professionals found that 78% said their organizations — some with as few as 10 employees — offered mental health resources or planned to do so within the next year.
These employers, whatever their size, are coming to recognize that the new abnormal is here to stay and that with it comes a new bottom line. Mental health services are no longer just a nice-to-have benefit, but essential.
U.Va.’s Snell sums it up, saying, “Taking care of employees is a business issue.”
Of the 1.3 million attorneys practicing in the United States — more than 35,500 of them licensed to practice in Virginia — the American Bar Association reports that more than half are based at law firms, while only about 10% serve as in-house general counsels. That disparity is not because general counsel jobs are unwanted or unattractive, however — quite the opposite. Although they come with their own set of pressures, in-house legal positions are often highly sought-after and can be hard to come by.
“In the ’80s, going in-house was considered inferior,” says Deborah Majoras, a former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and longtime chief legal officer for Procter & Gamble until her retirement last fall. Back then, recalls, Majoras, who received her law degree from the University of Virginia, in-house counsels “mostly kept the trains running on time,” and the “sexy issues” were farmed out to law firms. That’s not as often the case these days.
Today, in-house lawyers get their fair share of interesting casework without being subjected to the pressure of racking up billable hours. And instead of being at the beck and call of a bunch of clients, they serve just one — the business itself. Their schedules are generally more stable and predictable than those of their law firm counterparts, which can promote a healthier work-life balance, too.
Some of in-house legal work’s biggest benefits are intangible, says Paul Eckert, an adjunct professor of law at William & Mary and a former partner at international law firm WilmerHale. For instance, attorneys at law firms can feel disposable at times, he says, particularly those who are still hustling to make partner. Meanwhile, corporations tend to nurture and encourage the development of their attorneys, making it clear to them that they are valued. Working in-house also offers the chance to be part of a team that shares a common mission, rather than being a hired gun, and that appeals to a lot of attorneys.
The main drawback to going in-house, Eckert says, is compensation; at a law firm, attorneys often can make twice as much as they could by working as in-house counsels. In 2021, legal news website Above the Law reported that escalating base salaries at law firms coupled with special bonuses have further increased that pay disparity. With the ABA reporting that law school debt now averages $160,000, a much larger paycheck can be quite a lure. The differences in compensation between law firms and in-house attorneys are far from universal, however, especially when stock options can be a part of a general counsel’s compensation.
‘Build and grow’
It was the opportunity to be part of a team and share a sense of mission that led Sheila Sears to make the jump from a law firm to a general counsel position about a decade ago. She was eight years out of American University’s law school and a newly minted partner at a boutique D.C. practice that specialized in construction law and government contracts when Hitt Contracting, a Falls Church commercial builder, came calling. Businesses like Hitt usually headhunt mid- to senior-level practitioners like Sears who can provide the expertise they need most in their particular sphere of business. Karen Woody, an associate professor of law at Washington and Lee University, says that few corporations hire off college campuses, which is how law firms find many of their junior associates.
Sears wasn’t really looking for a change when Hitt approached her, but she was attracted by the possibility that she could “build and grow” along with the company — a scenario that certainly came to pass. Hitt had an annual revenue of about $800 million around the time that Sears came onboard in 2013; in 2022, it posted annual revenue of $3.4 billion.
“You are the client, so it is very personal,” Sears says of her work with Hitt, where she oversees a department of three attorneys plus support staff.
Pluses aside, the challenges of working in-house can be daunting. Many general counsels must expand their comfort zones to serve as both legal and business advisers. Sears, for example, deals extensively with risk management, contracting and safety concerns in addition to more standard legal areas, while legal operations at other types of companies can include strategic planning, billing discipline, tech issues and financial and project management.
“You have to become more of a generalist,” Sears says, and “you have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. You sometimes have to make some quick decisions and act without all of the various boxes checked.”
Max Stuckey, CarMax deputy general counsel. Photo courtesy CarMax
“Change is a constant,” says Mac Stuckey, vice president, deputy general counsel and corporate secretary for CarMax, the Goochland County-based Fortune 500 used vehicle retailer. During his nearly 20-year tenure as the company’s deputy general counsel, CarMax has built out its online presence and expanded its bricks-and-mortar presence from 50 locations to 240 nationwide; the company posted $31.9 billion in 2022 revenue. This exponential growth has meant that Stuckey and his team of 30 lawyers have had to master “more and varied business areas,” he says, including cybersecurity and privacy. This calls for being adept enough to stay on top of the latest advances in the digital world as well as federal regulations and procedures for dealing with governmental entities such as the Federal Trade Commission.
Stuckey says he and his colleagues have “deep expertise” in their specialty practice areas and most of CarMax’s legal work is handled in-house.
During Majoras’ 14-year tenure at Procter & Gamble, keeping most of the work in-house was also the norm. “The lawyers loved it,” she says.
Outsourcing needs
Nevertheless, many businesses, particularly smaller ones, by necessity and choice outsource a good portion of their legal work.
“They might not be able to handle litigation,” says Washington and Lee’s Woody, or they may not be sufficiently staffed to handle emergency situations, such as a massive data breach. Being in-house, as Sears points out, also can “involve a lot of work that you might not have touched before,” and sometimes outside lawyers must be brought in to fill knowledge gaps.
Greg Gallopoulos, who leads 80 in-house attorneys at General Dynamics, says the federal contractor often calls on outside firms for specialized legal work. Photo by Shannon Ayres
Greg Gallopoulos is senior vice president, secretary and general counsel for General Dynamics, the nation’s fifth largest aerospace and defense contractor. As the Reston firm’s general counsel, he oversees about 80 in-house lawyers at a company that employs more than 100,000 worldwide and reported $36.6 billion in 2022 revenue.
“Our legal department is very lean through good times and bad,” Gallopoulos says. General Dynamics taps outside firms for specialized law work such as litigation and mergers and acquisitions. M&A has been an explosive area of the law in recent years, involving a record $5 trillion globally in 2021, although the deals have slowed down lately.
According to the Association of Corporate Counsel, many big companies handle their legal needs in the same way that General Dynamics does. Sixty percent report having contracts with outside firms, usually based on a retainer system rather than on hourly billing. These arrangements can be expensive, says Eckert, the W&M professor, and rates are steadily going up. But, in the long run, hiring outside lawyers can end up being cheaper than expanding permanent staff, and it can make contingency planning easier.
In recent years, businesses across the spectrum have had to adjust their long-term and contingency planning to allow more time to be devoted to negotiating a rapidly changing, sometimes almost chaotic, regulatory landscape.
And for companies with global business, Gallopoulos says, the intersection of regulations has become all too frequent. In Europe, for example, privacy laws trump free speech, whereas the opposite is true in the United States, he says — at least for now. Complicated and conflicting laws in different countries vastly complicate life for international firms such as General Dynamics. And even within the United States, regulations on issues such as wages, hours and safety can differ widely from state to state, which means that the legal department of a national builder like Hitt can spend many hours trying to keep abreast of developments to ensure compliance.
One hot topic affecting general counsels’ work substantially recently is ESG — environmental, social and corporate governance — metrics used to evaluate how well a company handles its responsibilities to contribute to the public good. These include a company’s environmental impact, and whether it has taken steps to reduce its carbon footprint and its use of renewable energy. The social component can include labor practices, diversity initiatives and support for the local community, while governance encompasses transparency in financial reporting and ethical business practices.
Majoras says companies feel pressure from stockholders and employees to prove their ESG bona fides. Millennial workers in particular often feel personally invested in how their companies meet benchmarks for good corporate citizenship.
And consumers figure into the ESG equation, too. Witness the recent boycott of Bud Light by conservatives because of the beer brand’s marketing partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, or the ongoing kerfuffle in Florida between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Walt Disney, which began when the entertainment giant took a stand against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, which critics have labeled the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
The risks of a company taking almost any stance on a public issue in this divisive cultural and political era are obvious, yet lingering on the sidelines is not always an option, and that can involve the need for legal advice in addition to public relations. “Knowing when to take a position and when to stick to your knitting is tough,” Majoras says, “and it takes up a lot more [of a legal department’s] time.”
At an early June networking reception to celebrate this year’s Virginia Business Women in Leadership Awards winners, many in attendance pointed out how unusual it was for dozens of women executives from across various industries to join together in the same room.
Held at law firm Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders LLP’s Richmond office, the event brought together more than 20 of this year’s cohort of 37 Women in Leadership honorees to meet and forge professional connections. The reception’s uniqueness highlights how hard many women executives have worked to succeed and rise to the top of historically male-dominated industries, continuing to climb corporate ladders and break C-suite glass ceilings even today.
This impressive third annual cohort of awardees was chosen by our editors from a competitive field, with more than 320 nominations submitted this year. To qualify, nominees must be based in Virginia and hold C-suite or equivalent positions at their organizations. Deciding this year’s list, Virginia Business’ editorial staff considered factors such as overall professional accomplishments, civic engagement, mentoring and breaking glass ceilings. Our winners are divided by their organizations’ workforce size: small employers with 99 or fewer employees; midsize employers of 100 to 499 people; and large employers with 500 or more workers. Past winners were not eligible for consideration.
Congratulations to this year’s group of accomplished and talented leaders!
LARGE EMPLOYER
ELAINE BEEMAN Chief leadership officer and civilian portfolio lead, Accenture Federal Services, Arlington
AMY CARRIER President and CEO, Centra Health, Lynchburg
DEB DAVIS Vice president and general manager of Mission Solutions Sector, General Dynamics Information Technology, Falls Church
JENNIFER DeBRUHL Director, Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation, Richmond
LIZA WILSON DURANT Associate provost for strategic initiatives and community engagement and professor, College of Engineering and Computing, George Mason University; Director, Commonwealth Cyber Initiative Northern Virginia Node, Arlington
ELENA EDWARDS Chief markets officer and regional CEO for North America, Allianz Partners Group, Henrico County
CASSIE HARTOGS Tax regional managing partner, BDO USA, McLean
GHADA IJAM Chief information officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Richmond
DR. MELINA R. KIBBE Dean, University of Virginia School of Medicine; Chief health affairs officer, UVA Health; Professor, Departments of Surgery and Biomedical Engineering, University ofVirginia, Charlottesville
AISHA McGILL Chief business officer, Koniag Government Services, Chantilly
MELINA DAVIS CEO and executive vice president, Medical Society of Virginia, Richmond
BETSY FRANTZ President and CEO, PathForward Inc., Arlington
REBECCA GELLER President and CEO, The Geller Law Group, Fairfax
LINDA HUTSON GREEN Vice president of economic development, Institute for Advanced Learning and Research; Executive director, Southern Virginia Regional Alliance, Danville
GRETA J. HARRIS President and CEO, Better Housing Coalition, Richmond
LAURA KOTTKAMP Executive director, Monroe Park Foundations at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
RITA McCLENNY President and CEO, Virginia Tourism Corp., Richmond
Talk to those on the front lines of startups — entrepreneurs, investors and those running incubators and accelerators — and one word comes up over and over: pivot.
If an entrepreneur isn’t able or willing to be flexible, chances are poor their business will succeed.
“Those unduly connected to what they started with must understand and address the need to pivot,” says Josh Green, director of the Fairfax-based nonprofit Innovation Commercialization Assistance Program (ICAP), funded by the Virginia Small Business Development Center. “Otherwise,” he says, “they become a statistic.”
According to a 2021 survey by CB Insights, which tracks business analytics, a lack of need in the market kills off 35% of startups. That’s a failure factor exceeded only by the 38% of startups that ran out of cash or failed to raise new capital.
“You may have a great idea, but you can’t move forward without knowing if anyone will buy it. A startup’s biggest mistake is not responding to what customers want,” says Katie Overfield-Zook, entrepreneurial ecosystem builder for the Shenandoah Community Capital Fund (SCCF), a Staunton-based nonprofit entrepreneurial support organization that offers startup and small business loans and helps entrepreneurs develop business plans and skills.
Celebrating failure
Roanoke entrepreneur Laura Godfrey has founded or co-founded five companies in the past two decades, and she’s had one of those fold.
It was with assistance from the Roanoke-based Regional Accelerator and Mentoring Program (RAMP) in 2019 that Godfrey evaluated Point 93, which sought to connect consumers with goods at a price they picked by using a blockchain-based identity wallet. RAMP helped Godfrey decide that the company’s solution was too broad and that blockchain was too decentralized to handle the volume of transactions the company projected.
Godfrey credits the quick identification of Point 93’s problems with helping her pivot around customer personalization and data acquisition, and that led her to co-found Brandpoint Analytics, a software-as-a-service platform that allows consumers to exchange their data for price adjustments. More recently, she’s found success as chief operating officer of Bookelicious, an online resource she co-founded with Lea Anne Borders — the California-based wife of Louis Borders, co-founder of the now-defunct Borders retail book and music store chain.
Bookelicious has attracted $2.2 million in seed money.
The company focuses on increasing literacy rates by helping educators and parents match children with age-appropriate and topic-specific books. Launched about a year and a half ago, it’s in use at 3,500 schools nationwide. In Virginia, Bookelicious’ clients include Prince William County and Roanoke City public schools.
Godfrey, who calls herself an optimist, learned from the experience of folding Point 93. “I think that probably in the future it will make it hopefully easier if I have to make the choice again, because nothing bad happened,” she says.
Lisa Garcia, director of RAMP, the accelerator that helped Godfrey test Point 93, says, “We often don’t celebrate failure, but to learn early that an idea is not viable is a success.” Since its 2017 founding, the nonprofit RAMP has advised and supported 43 companies, including five in its most recent cohort. Of those, at least 79% remain in business.
Given that high success rate, RAMP-supported companies are beating the odds, and by far. The U.S. Small Business Administration says only about half of new businesses survive their first five years.
Brendan Richardson co-founded Charlottesville-based Astraea, a satellite imaging and data analytics company. Photo by Matthew R.O. Brown
Pivot and persist
“There are lots of ways to fail and just a few to succeed,” says Charlottesville entrepreneur Brendan Richardson, who’s among the fortunate minority to fall into the latter category.
In 2012, Richardson co-founded Everactive Inc., a company that produces semiconductors that wirelessly and continuously transmit data using minuscule amounts of power. The technology has many applications — including wearable, self-powering medical devices — and Everactive has grown into a business with more than 80 employees and a valuation of more than $18 million. But Richardson, a self-described “business guy,” left the company in 2016 because it was time to bring on a CEO with semiconductor experience. Ready for his next venture, Richardson co-founded Astraea, a Charlottesville-based satellite imaging and data analytics firm.
His original idea for applying machine learning to data obtained from satellites was expensive and too broad, so he “pivoted from trying to find the ‘killer app’ for satellite data to building a cloud-based tool,” he says, one that lets the customer decide what data to gather. For example, a solar energy company asked Astraea if it could provide the addresses of every rooftop in six Virginia counties that had the reflective surface that it preferred for installations. Astraea delivered that information in five hours. The tool has also been used in Ukraine to provide land data to the Ukrainian and allied governments and humanitarian organizations amid the Russia-Ukraine war.
Astraea’s website promises “everything you need to leverage geospatial data in one place,” and that formula has attracted enough customers that last summer Astraea raised $6.5 million to scale up its operations.
Richardson credits the company’s success to being willing to abandon an idea that wasn’t working and go where demand existed. “When something goes wrong, use it to pivot in the right direction,” he says. “That’s where persistence comes in.”
Persist and adapt
Carly Buxton’s Richmond-based startup, Nessle, is a smaller-scale business than Astraea, but persistence and adaptability have been central to its survival as well. Buxton’s initial business plan called for a digital help platform for new parents, but it turned out that many parents wouldn’t pay for something they thought they could find for themselves online for free. Meanwhile, Buxton found herself fielding inquiries from doulas, parenting coaches and other family consultants about how they could get their services listed on her platform.
“It all started to click,” she says, leading in an obvious direction for a pivot: Let parents access Nessle for free while charging vendors a listing fee.
That plan had legs. Last year, Amazon Web Services awarded Buxton and her business partner, Michelle Cunningham, $125,000 cash and $100,000 in AWS credits through its Impact Accelerator for Women Founders. The grant gave the partners breathing room to turn their platform into a curated directory of child-centric experts.
John Failla’s story features a plotline similar to Buxton’s. He was a lousy math student and had several tutors, but he didn’t much like any of them. He envisioned a resource for people like himself to find in-person tutors with whom they could relate, and in 2016 he founded edtech startup Trilogy Mentors, which rebranded in 2021
as Pearl.
Five years ago, Failla took his idea to Richmond-based nonprofit incubator and entrepreneurial hub Startup Virginia, which helped him connect with mentors and people in the industry. That eventually led to a rethink of his original business plan and a shift away from being a company developing tutoring software to becoming a cloud-based solution for organizations to launch their own branded, customizable platforms for online tutoring.
“You can’t be overconfident,” Failla says. “Building something that isn’t needed — it’s an expensive lesson to learn in money and time.”
Morgan Evans, Startup Virginia’s communications and program manager, helped Failla avoid that costly mistake. “Before you gamble on an idea, you’ve got to do the necessary work,” Evans says, and for Failla, that work involved conducting customer interviews. Data gathered from those interviews convinced him that his company needed a rebrand.
That turned out to be a smart move. Pearl now has 18 employees and counts the Illinois State Board of Education as a customer. Last year, it was boosted by a $250,000 grant from Accelerate, a national nonprofit initiative supporting increasing access to “high-impact” tutoring in public schools.
Additionally, Pearl has received more than $4 million in backing from organizations including Charlottesville-based CAV Angels and 757 Angels, an investment group based in Hampton Roads. Angel investors usually assist startups and early-stage companies in reaching the next level, and they generally make their money back when companies like Pearl are sold.
“The startup ecosystem is a super risky space,” says 757 Angels Director Monique Adams, adding that many would-be entrepreneurs “fail early and fail often.” But angel investors “love companies that execute pivots successfully in the face of significant customer discovery.”
Since 2015, 757 Angels has invested more than $100 million in 52 companies, which cumulatively have generated 1,500 high-paying jobs, says Adams, who’s leaving the organization in June when 757 Angels will join the VentureSouth network, one of the country’s largest angel investment groups. She will be succeeded by Paul Nolde, former executive director of Lighthouse Labs, a Richmond-based early-stage startup accelerator.
In Northern Virginia, serial entrepreneur Tonio DeSorrento warns that launching a startup can be “so hard, so stressful, with no safety net, no instructions,” he says. “A healthy detachment is a must.”
His latest venture is Fairfax-based GovForce, which helps federal contractors and their subcontractors to comply with government regulations. DeSorrento co-founded GovForce in 2022 and serves as CEO for the company, which early this year snagged $2.5 million in seed money and hired its first seven employees.
But DeSorrento had a harder road with the previous business he headed and co-founded, Arlington County-based Vemo Education, which he left in October 2021 after Vemo’s biggest investor asked him to step down and make way for new leadership.
Established in 2015, Vemo was based on a model of making future income-sharing agreements in exchange for paying tuition for college students. But the National Consumer Law Center and the Student Borrower Protection Center filed a complaint about Vemo with the Federal Trade Commission in June 2020, alleging that the company engaged in deceptive marketing. And in 2021, 47 students filed a lawsuit against Vemo, alleging that Vemo and a coding academy had colluded and engaged in illegal and deceptive business practices. Vemo is no longer in business, according to a 2022 article from education news journal The Hechinger Report.
“It’s honestly not fun to think about how I didn’t hit the home run with that company that maybe people expected me to,” DeSorrento said of the experience in a February interview with Washington Business Journal.
Nevertheless, as a second-time co-founder and CEO of a startup, he is hopeful for a better outcome. Entrepreneurism, after all, requires a certain amount of optimism, as well as a willingness to pivot.
“You have to fall in love with your customers,” DeSorrento says, “not your solution.”
Virginia Business Associate Editor Courtney Mabeus-Brown contributed to this story.
With the combination of new tech businesses and older companies employing artificial intelligence and other innovations, Virginia needs lawyers who know the difference between bitcoin and blockchain.
As the commonwealth becomes home to more defense contracting giants, along with Amazon.com Inc.’s HQ2, law firms and law schools are busy bringing attorneys and students up to speed on digital privacy laws, cryptocurrency trends, cybersecurity issues and more.
William & Mary Law School’s course listings for the 2022-2023 academic year, for example, included offerings such as “AI and More,” “Electronic Discovery,” “Data and Democracy” and “Cyber and InformationSecurity Essentials.” Other law schools also have been revamping their curricula, and the Virginia State Bar is offering continuing legal education programs focusing on data privacy, social media’s impact on trademarks and laws governing the use of AI technology.
“They’ve been doing a good job of turning the ship,” says Beth Burgin Waller about this shift, and she should know. As cybersecurity and data privacy practice chair at Woods Rogers Vandeventer Black PLC in Roanoke, her entire caseload is cyber-focused. She’s also an adjunct law professor at Washington and Lee University, where she teaches tech-centric classes to law students.
Burgin Waller believes that Virginia is in a good position to navigate the rough and sometimes uncharted legal waters of electronic matters thanks to its robust tech sector, which routinely mixes innovation and entrepreneurship. The state has “a deep bench of tech lawyers,” she says. “It is a mini-Silicon Valley.”
That deep bench serves both established tech giants such as Microsoft Corp. with presences in Virginia, and lesser-known tech companies pioneering innovations in areas such as autonomous vehicles, drones and biotech, Burgin Waller says. With the world’s largest concentration of data centers, Virginia in particular has an abundance of corporate clients needing legal assistance with permitting and approvals processes for data centers. But the demand for tech-savvy lawyers doesn’t stop there. Virtually any business can face legal issues regarding technology, ranging from cybercrime issues to compliance with data privacy laws.
Although mass layoffs at Google, Meta and Amazon have dominated headlines in recent months, Burgin Waller sees this backpedal as an anomaly. “Layoffs will not thwart innovation or the ongoing need for tech-focused lawyers,” she says.
‘No guardrails yet’
Legal and technological “complexity reveals opportunity” for new legal business, says Washington and Lee Law Professor Joshua A.T. Fairfield. Photo courtesy Washington and Lee University
The ethical and moral questions posed by artificial intelligence creations such as chatbot ChatGPT and image generator Midjourney have led to stories focused on concerns over AI stealing jobs or creating controversies by whipping up realistic photos of former President Donald Trump resisting arrest, but fast-moving developments in AI technology also are creating opportunities for lawyers to advise clients in the absence of clear case law.
When OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, 100 million people immediately began using it, some for nefarious purposes. No comprehensive federal laws govern the technology’s use or abuse, however, and although 17 states introduced AI-related bills in 2022, Virginia was not among them.
“There’s going to be a need to regulate this,” says Burgin Waller, “but there are no guardrails yet.”
So far, AI laws passed in four states are focused on just studying the technology, says Sharon D. Nelson, a former president of the Virginia State Bar and president of Sensei Enterprises Inc. in Fairfax, which specializes in IT, cybersecurity and digital forensics services.
This lack of coherent law will create more court cases, but that’s not necessarily a problem, says Washington and Lee Law Professor Joshua A.T. Fairfield, who specializes in technology law areas such as cryptocurrency and data privacy. “The basic assumption is that technology is faster than the law, but the law is a series of rules that we work out all the time,” he says. “The oldest cases sometimes can handle new areas. Congress often comes along after that process. We don’t have to wait for that.”
AI is already on its way to becoming a must-have tool for lawyers. It can greatly reduce the hours that attorneys must spend on mundane tasks such as tracking down precedents.
“Imagine having a paralegal that could find exactly the case you were thinking of in six seconds rather than [taking] weeks of research,” Fairfield says. AI is “better than humans doing [research] by hand, and you make far more mistakes if you don’t use it,” he continues. Fairfield predicts that law firms that don’t deploy AI could soon find themselves at a disadvantage. The firms “with the biggest dataset will win,” he says, “and that might squeeze out smaller competitors.”
Nelson has been using ChatGPT in her research and has found it useful, yet she cautions that its help comes with some caveats attached. “You have to be careful about what you put in there,” she warns, because once confidential attorney-client information is uploaded to a chatbot’s database, it stays there. And another troubling aspect of chatbots is their penchant for spewing out falsehoods. Sometimes ChatGPT “hallucinates,” Nelson says. One time, for instance, it provided her with court cases that either didn’t exist or were misconstrued.
This unreliability may be a temporary or diminishing problem as the technology bounds forward. In March, OpenAI released GPT-4, which it says is far more accurate, multimodal and concise than its predecessor. For instance, it scored among the top 10% of test takers on a simulated bar exam, while its previous incarnation scored in the bottom 10%.
Another recently released AI chatbot, Harvey, was designed specifically for the legal profession, and it promises that any confidential data uploaded to it can be siloed — even within a law firm. About 3,500 lawyers at the international firm of Allen & Overy LLP have tested Harvey, and the firm now is integrating its use into its practice.
“Lawyers are going to do foolish things with AI, no doubt,” Nelson says. “There will be many lawsuits. But at the end of the day, AI is about money, and no one can afford not to be on board.”
The jury is still out on just how many courtroom challenges will be generated from using AI as a robotic paralegal or attorney surrogate, but Fairfield is adamant that it will never take the place of human lawyers.
“By its very essence, it is not capable of crafting new narratives,” he says. “The fundamental role of lawyers — to advance the law by advancing new frameworks for how to see a question — will remain untouched by AI.”
‘Out of control’
AI has seemingly come on the scene with the sudden force of an explosion, but data privacy is a longstanding, simmering issue. Unlike the European Union, however, which has stringent privacy laws dating back to the late 1990s, the United States still lacks a comprehensive statute regulating the harvesting of personal data.
“Data collection is shockingly under regulated in this country,” Fairfield says. “Companies gather everything they can because they can always sell it. It’s out of control.”
Congress is moving to address this concern slowly, so regulatory decisions have defaulted to the states, only a handful of which have so far passed laws concerning data harvesting.
The upshot is a “patchwork of privacy rights based on where you live,” says Burgin Waller, and lawyers are left to deal with “dissonance among these little regimes.”
In January, Virginia’s Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA) took effect, governing any company doing business in the commonwealth — not just those headquartered here. It allows customers to opt out of their personal data being shared or sold to other businesses. While this seems like a simple aim, compliance with varying state laws such as these can be tricky for companies and the attorneys advising them.
For one thing, Virginia’s data privacy
law “does not apply to every business out there. A wide swath is exempted,” says Robert Michaux, a lawyer with Richmond firm Christian & Barton LLP and chairman of the Virginia Bar Association’s intellectual property and information technology law section.
Among many other exceptions, VCDPA does not cover government entities or protocols associated with the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which already includes restrictions on access to individuals’ medical information.
Attorneys often look to California, the first state to enact a data privacy law, for guidance, as well as to the European Union, but Burgin Waller notes that keeping up with technology law requires vigilance and keeping up with the latest, ever-changing tech trends.
“I’m constantly in touch with global news to be on top of new incidents and regulations to hit the highest mark we need to hit,” she says.
Sharon D. Nelson, president of Fairfax cybersecurity and IT firm Sensei Enterprises, uses AI chatbot ChatGPT as a legal research aid. Photo by Will Schermerhorn
‘Ransomware 2.0’
Cybersecurity and cybercrime are intertwined and expanding specialty areas for attorneys. Burgin Waller’s practice now includes tasks such as assisting clients in drafting third-party vendor agreements to protect themselves from litigation, as well as advising clients in obtaining cyber insurance policies.
“Ransomware 2.0,” as she terms it, has evolved into a more insidious threat, moving from holding information hostage for a payout to criminals selling stolen data or posting it online. Today, AI can be used to spam many people at once with phishing emails, and chatbots can help hackers break encryption codes and gain access to bank account numbers and other sensitive information.
All this tech-related criminal activity means that “a lot of lawyers are moving toward data breach and data privacy” specialties, says Nelson. These lawyers investigate breaches, counsel companies on paying ransoms, identify what data was compromised and work with digital forensics experts to determine how breaches occurred. They may also act as a corporate liaison to law enforcement and other government agencies. After an attack, Nelson says, lawyers also help with remediation and public relations. “Most often, a class-action suit is filed, so there’s a lot of money in defending against such a suit,” she explains.
“It’s definitely an open field,” says George F. Leahy, a law student at William & Mary and president of the Data Privacy and Cybersecurity Legal Society, a student organization that hosts speakers and provides a forum for students interested in these legal specialties. “These are brand-new issues, and lawyers will have a lot more work,” he says.
Although “the law has been slow to react” to regulating new technology, Leahy notes, William & Mary has not. The university, he says, has done a good job of preparing tech-savvy law grads with a comprehensive array of relevant courses.
The bottom line on this everything-everywhere-all-at-once situation regarding technology and the law is that Virginia’s attorneys would seem to hold a winning brief: No matter what area of tech law may anchor their practices, they should have no shortage of casework.The implications and consequences for society, by contrast, remain more questionable.
Legal and technological “complexity reveals opportunity,” says Fairfield, “but what is good for the lawyers is not necessarily good for the country.”
In the accounting field, the books are out of balance. Demand for the profession’s services is rising, which is one for the assets column, but on the debit side of the ledger, the number of people willing and able to provide those services is dropping so alarmingly that some firms are being forced to turn away clients.
Rectifying that imbalance is not going to be easy or perhaps even possible any time soon, and even in the long term, some creative accounting is going to be necessary to turn the situation around.
The profession’s numbers are being crunched from both ends, both nationwide and in Virginia.
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) reports that 75% of the country’s CPAs reached retirement age in 2020, which, concurrent with the pandemic, helps explain a Bureau of Labor Statistics finding that 300,000 accountants and auditors — about 17% of the workforce — left the field between 2020 and 2022. Of those who left, about 35% to 40% were CPAs.That’s a substantial loss, considering that the number of accountants and auditors in the United States was about 1.5 million last year.
At the entry level of the profession, the numbers are correspondingly negative. In 2020, the AICPA reported 2.8% fewer accounting graduates at the bachelor’s degree level and 8.4% fewer at the master’s degree level. An August 2022 Deloitte poll found that four out of five hiring managers at public accounting firms and 69% at private firms reported that talent retention was a challenge. Workplace data provider Revelio Labs Inc. backs up those figures. For the first 11 months of 2022, there were 177,880 job postings in the accounting and auditing fields, and almost 64,500 of those openings were unfilled as of Nov. 30, 2022, Revelio Labs reports. In 2021, there were 141,340 openings in the industry.
“It’s a war,” declares Fran Randall, a partner and Richmond market leader for Forvis, one of the nation’s top 10 accounting firms. “Everyone is fighting for the same talent.”
Stephanie Peters, CEO and president of the Virginia Society of CPAs (VSCPA), seconds that assessment. The state has about 28,000 licensed CPAs, she says, but “even to maintain [those numbers] will be an effort.”
How did this happen?
The gap between supply and demand in the accountancy field can be traced to several bedrock issues.
Virginia has 28,000 licensed CPAs, but maintaining that level “will be an effort,” given industry trends, says Virginia Society of CPAs President and CEO Stephanie Peters. Courtesy photo
First, the pool of available college graduates overall is shallower than it used to be, meaning that many professions, not just the accountancy field, face personnel shortages. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported 662,000 fewer U.S. undergraduate students in spring 2022 than the previous year, a drop of 4.7%. And that shortfall “is just the appetizer round,” says George Forsythe, a managing partner in Richmond accounting firm WellsColeman. The downward demographics, he says, means that “the shortage of people is only going to get worse.”
“Every profession is experiencing this, but we [in the accountancy field] are getting more than our fair share,” agrees Gary Thomson, head of Richmond-based accounting and professional services consultancy Thomson Consulting and a former VSCPA chairman. “This is an acute situation.”
Why the situation has become so acute comes down to issues of time and money, plus the less quantifiable problem of image.
Earning a CPA license requires 150 credit hours — 30 credits more than the normal 120-hour requirement for a bachelor’s degree. Those extra hours add up to about a fifth year of college — along with all the sacrifice, study and tuition costs that commitment represents. The 16-hour CPA exam also is notoriously difficult. Typically demanding 300 to 400 hours of study, the exam has a first-time pass rate of only about 50%.
Yet all the extra work is not commensurately rewarded. The average salary for a CPA is just $62,410, according to the CPA Accounting Institute for Success, but financial analysts typically earn $95,570 a year and financial managers make an average of $131,710, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“That value proposition of that extended learning experience” is a big problem, says Royce D. Burnett, chair of Old Dominion University’s School of Accountancy, which has about 400 undergraduate accounting students and 20 to 25 students in its graduate program.
Universities need to reevaluate how many credit hours and which courses should be required for accounting students, says Margaret Cowell, an associate professor at Virginia Tech. Courtesy photo
Finally, there’s the existential problem of the field’s decidedly unglamorous image. People picture an accountant “sitting alone behind a desk all day doing grunt work,” as Peters puts it. And when tax season rolls around, many accountants traditionally are swamped, with no time for their personal lives.
“Our profession has been known for its rough deadline schedule of 70-, 80-hour-plus weeks,” Thomson says. “That was expected when I came along, but you can’t reliably expect that anymore. We have to modify our expectations. Sometimes different is difficult, but that is not a negative.”
‘A seismic shift’
“The pandemic was a time to have space to think about changes we should make,” says Virginia Tech’s Margaret Cowell, an associate professor of urban affairs and planning who specializes in economic development and labor force issues. “Change usually takes a long time, but this was a seismic shift.”
The result of that shift was the realization that accounting had “to provide a more flexible model. We have to go beyond the balance sheet to come up with more creative options,” she says. “Young people are demanding something different.”
That “different” starts with how accountants are educated.
“We have to create an environment that … [accounting students] can embrace,” Burnett says. Accepting online learning was a start. That was unheard of 10 years ago, Cowell says, but now it’s par for the course.
“If someone is smart and capable, we are interested,” says WellsColeman Managing Partner George Forsythe, left, who hired Brett Shea, a trained accountant who had been working as an arborist. Photo by Rick DeBerry
However, the Virginia Tech professor believes that remote learning is just the beginning of what may be necessary to reverse falling enrollment. She expects that educational institutions will need to face much more difficult questions, such as, “Do we need to require so many credits? Are all the courses essential? [And] what can we convey in half the credit hours?”
Additionally, schools will need to be vigilant in assessing whether their curricula have kept pace with modern accounting needs. Today’s CPA performs “less data entry and more analytics,” says Thomson, and Burnett admits that schools have not exactly been “Johnny to the gate” on technology.
Also overripe for change is the compensation earned by accountants and auditors, who are likely to be very familiar with what other professionals are earning.
“Salaries across the board are increasing,” says Peters, especially in fields with major labor shortages.
WellsColeman is typical in having had to increase pay “dramatically” to attract and retain employees, Forsythe notes. Some firms help employees cover the time and cost of the additional educational hours needed to pass the CPA exam, too.
For example, KPMG, one of the nation’s largest accounting firms, is offering employees two months’ salary to study for the test, which will be cut in half next year to eight hours and updated to better reflect current technology.
Compensation has become much more than a matter of numbers, though. The willingness of workers of any age to put in marathon hours has virtually evaporated, and firms have instituted much more liberal leave policies, such as flexible personal days off, as long as the work gets done.
Firms also are expanding the amount and type of benefits offered to employees. At Keiter, a Henrico County CPA firm with more than 100 accountants, the leave package for new parents has been broadened to include employees who need to care for extended family members, says Managing Partner Gary Wallace.
Greg Wallig, managing principal of Grant Thornton LLP’s Metro D.C.-Arlington office, says that health and wellness perks and support for continuing education also are extremely important to his firm’s employees.
Culture, rarely spoken of 20 years ago, matters greatly too.
“People are interested in what is the company’s vision,” Wallace says. “What are its values?” Firms such as Forvis, which formed last year from the merger of Dixon Hughes Goodman LLP and BKD CPAs & Advisors, stress their commitment to their own people and not just to their clients.
“It’s not just trickle-down,” Randall says of boss-employee interactions. “It goes both ways.”
Short- and long-term solutions
Faced with a dribbling pipeline of potential hires, accounting firms have had to become much more proactive about increasing their outreach.
“We have to blow our own horn,” says Peters. “We have to show that accounting is a dynamic profession, not just sitting behind your desk doing grunt work anymore.”
One way many practices are trying to do that is by dramatically expanding their campus outreach, far beyond just offering internships. Keiter, for instance, now has two full-time recruiting coordinators available to coach students and listen to any concerns they might have about a career in accounting. Forvis does too.
“We have intentionally increased our presence on college campuses,” Randall says, “and are actively involved with professors, organizations and students directly.”
At the same time, recruiting minorities has taken on increased urgency. The most recent AICPA Trends Report found that only 7% of accountancy graduates identified as Black, 9% as Asian and 13% as Hispanic. To improve those numbers, ODU held a weeklong National Association of Black Accountants seminar on its campus last summer, while companies such as Grant Thornton have become a regular presence on historically Black college and university campuses.
Beyond these efforts, companies’ leaders have been forced to adopt more open minds about who might make a good fit for their firms. Experienced workers can be particularly hard to come by, and companies such as Keiter now are happy to rehire former employees.
“We’ve been mindful to keep in touch with folks who left the firm,” Wallace says, “and [we] had good success in getting them back.”
WellsColeman is similarly open to less-than-conventional hires these days. The firm recently added to its payroll 30-year-old Brett Shea. He had been working as an arborist for five years, despite having an accounting degree. “Twenty years ago, people would be like, ‘You’re crazy,’” Forsythe says of Shea’s hiring, “but if someone is smart and capable, we are interested.”
Shea values the stability and financial prospects of the accounting profession. In a time of economic uncertainty and widespread layoffs in the tech field, accountancy is widely regarded as recession-resistant.
Like other millennial workers, Shea was impressed by WellsColeman’s connection to the community. The company serves many local clients, and that, he says, makes him feel that he is a part of something.
His employers managed to hit another millennial sweet spot with Shea by making it clear that WellsColeman cares about its staff. “George [Forsythe] is transparent about the steps that he takes so that we all stay happy,” he says.
In the meantime, while hires like Shea remain rare, the accountancy field is making up staffing shortfalls by increasing hiring of part-time, freelance and seasonal workers.
Outsourcing and offshoring also has “risen with a speed like I’ve never seen before,” Thomson says, with much work ending up being sent to part-time accountants in other countries, a development that not all domestic clients find desirable. Those overseas accountants are considerably less costly than U.S.-based contractors, who often cost accounting firms more per hour than in-house staff, although their costs are offset by not receiving benefits.
Thomson says that many people are working on the problem of how to attract more workers to the accounting profession, and that “there’s a lot of activity, not just talk” about the problem.
“Getting a CPA [certification] is a no-brainer,” Peters says. “It is going to pay off.”
Black History Month traces its origins to an annual weeklong observance started in 1926 by historian and scholar Carter G. Woodson, a Virginia native. And since then, the February celebration of Black history makers and events has been intertwined with commemorating successful business icons like fellow Virginia-born greats Maggie Walker and Booker T. Washington.
With this in mind, Virginia Business presents our 2023 Virginia Black Business Leaders Awards, recognizing a reader-nominated group of some of the state’s most accomplished Black executives. On this inaugural list are 17 leaders, chosen from 108 nominated executives in finance, federal contracting, higher education, law, technology and other sectors. Our editorial team selected the 17 winners, scoring nominations based on factors including overall professional achievement, community impact and mentoring.
Additionally, Virginia Business’ editors selected four of these 17 award-winning executives for additional recognition as inaugural members of our Virginia Black Business Leaders Hall of Fame, celebrating their outstanding careers and general excellence in business leadership. Our 2023 Hall of Fame members are: Gilbert Bland of the Urban League of Hampton Roads; Victor Branch of Bank of America; Victor O. Cardwell of Woods Rogers Vandeventer Black; and Warren Thompson of Thompson Hospitality Corp.
In this feature, you’ll read about our winners’ influences, what they’ve learned in the professional world and how they continue to pay that knowledge forward to others.
Congratulations to all the winners of our 2023 Virginia Black Business Leaders Awards!
Click on the names to read more about our winners.
Founder, president and chairman, Thompson Hospitality Corp., Reston
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