Legal News

Campaign ?08: Michelle Obama?s Sidley Austin Years

By Dan Slater

In the mess of media reporting about the Obamas, we’ve been a little disappointed over the seeming paucity of knowledge when it comes to the Sidley Austin years. We knew that Michelle Obama (Princeton, Harvard law) joined Sidley’s Chicago headquarters in 1988, and that, a couple years later, Barack came along as a summer associate. They met. She left the firm. He turned down Sidley’s offer, and the rest is history.

Today, the NLJ takes a stab at fleshing out Michelle’s three years at Sidley Austin, prior to joining the office of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. “What she learned at Harvard Law School and Sidley Austin has served her well in all of the judgments she has had to make as an administrator and a manager,” said Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law prof who came to know Obama as a faculty adviser to the Black Law Students Association.

According to the NLJ, she joined Sidley as part of the marketing and intellectual property practice group, handling transactional, antitrust and other matters. She worked on teams that represented AT&T in its 1990 hostile takeover bid for NCR, and Union Carbide in its 1990 legal fight to complete a sale of a chemical business unit to Arco over FTC opposition.

When the Arco matter went to trial in Washington, Obama and other Sidley colleagues moved to D.C. to prepare the case, which settled shortly after trial began. Nate Eimer, a former Sidley partner who worked on the case, told the NLJ that Obama — who went by Michelle Robinson when she was at the firm — made a “very positive impression” on Union Carbide’s counsel, a man who was often critical of attorneys. “She stood out from the average associate. She reserved her comment before she was sure of what she wanted to say. Her analysis was clear and precise.”

After the stint in Mayor Daley’s office, Obama took a job as the executive director of a new Chicago youth leadership organization led by Public Allies. Paul Schmitz, now CEO of Public Allies, told the NLJ that her calm maturity made her stand out among the younger staffers, especially for tough tasks like terminating people. “She was very deliberative in her thinking,” Schmitz said. “She would kind of question you, not in grilling way, in a Socratic way. She would try to understand the full situation before making a decision.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 23, 2008 (boomark / email).