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If you had given me a million chances to predict my future back in 1982, when I started college, I would’ve been zero for a million. There’s no way I could have predicted — much less planned and charted out — my course.
Frank Jimenez, general counsel and corporate secretary at GE HealthCare, began the discussion in conversation with ACC President and CEO Veta T. Richardson by reflecting on his unlikely path to becoming one of the most respected lawyers in the United States.
Jimenez, who spent spans of his career as chief of staff to the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, general counsel of the US Department of the Navy, and multiple corporate legal roles at S&P 500 companies, started in law as a litigator like many in-house lawyers.
“I’m happy that I became a litigator, and the skills and strengths it instilled within me are several,” he shared with ACC members during the InConversation webcast. Jimenez mentioned three skills in particular that litigators bring to the table:
- Communication. “You have to take these legal concepts and make them understandable to [non-lawyers]. And you have to take complicated problems and issues and distill them down to their essence — the key question or the key challenge.”
- Understanding all sides. “Very few issues are simple. They’re complex. So you have to understand them from all sides. And then you have to understand your business colleagues’ challenges from their perspective. So thinking about it other than just through your own lens is critical.”
- Uncover, discover, and reveal. “You have to dig down and you have to ask — why — multiple times just to unearth information, and I think that’s a critical skill for in-house counsel, as well.”
Jimenez emphasized the importance of networking — and career resources such as ACC — as key to his unusual trajectory in life. “At every stage of my career, my next step has been enabled by people that I had met previously,” he said.
At various stages in his career, Jimenez has overseen legal, compliance, government affairs, corporate security, and communications functions — a situation not uncommon for many in-house counsel. According to the 2024 ACC Chief Legal Officers Survey, 58 percent of CLOs oversee three or more business functions beyond legal, and 27 percent oversee five or more.
“It’s important to understand how leaders think and how leaders can be successful, and I think it’s critical for us — whether we report to the CEO or not — to think in those terms, to be a true business partner and enabler to company leadership,” Jimenez said of in-house counsel gaining a seat at the table. “Because it’s critical to the success of the company.”
Jimenez also shared thoughts on the importance of pro bono work, participating in volunteerism and community service, and establishing work-life balance — an increasingly important topic for in-house counsel, as explored in ACC’s new Well-being Toolkit for In-house Lawyers.
“We’ve had collective conversations about workload, and we’re trying to create a safe mentality for people to ask: Does what you’re asking me to do have to be done? Does it have to be done now? Does it have to be done by me?” These three questions can help empower people to keep their workloads tolerable, Jimenez said.
“And the other thing is, as just a mindset, it’s so important to view our colleagues as humans and people first, and as professionals and colleagues second. That should bleed through in everything we do, every day, every hour,” he added.
