Lois Boyd: Founding Member of Fenwick West and LAMA, Past President of LAMA

Summary

Lois Boyd is a highly accomplished Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) for Fenwick & West LLP, a prominent law firm based in Silicon Valley. Boyd is also an active founding member and past president of the Legal Administrators of the San Francisco Bay Area (LAMA).


Boyd studied Economics and Political Science at the University of California at Davis and then received her Juris Doctorate degree at the same university. After graduating, she joined Williams & Connolly in Washington D.C. where she worked as a Lawyer and Business Manager for 10 years.

Impressed with her legal and business expertise, Fenwick & West LLP sought out Boyd to join the firm in 1999. She initially came aboard as their Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and was later promoted to Chief Administrative Officer (CAO). In her current role, Boyd is responsible for overseeing all personnel, facilities, financial and technology matters for the law firm.

Boyd has been incredibly involved with the Legal Administrators organization (LAMA). She was an active founding member and past president of the organization, and she helped develop the organization and advancements in legal technology and process improvements. In addition, she delivered several keynote speeches at LAMA events which featured her vast knowledge on the topics of Human Resources, Business Management and Law Practice Management.

Throughout her career, Boyd has been the recipient of several awards and recognitions. She was honored to be the first African-American woman to receive the “Outstanding Legal Administrator of the Year” award from the Association of Legal Administrators. Boyd was also given the “Outstanding Member of the Year” award by LAMA.

Lois Boyd is an exemplary leader in the legal field. With her law degree, extensive business management experience, and commitment to the advancement of LAMA, Boyd has proven to be a shining example of success. As the Chief Administrative Officer at Fenwick & West LLP, and an active founding member and past president of LAMA, Boyd has achieved a tremendous amount of accomplishment and recognition within her field.
 

Lois Boyd, CAO of Fenwick & West LLP and LAMA Founding Member and Past President

Lois Boyd is the Chief Administrative Officer at Fenwick & West LLP, a leading technology and life sciences law firm located in Silicon Valley. She has been with the firm since 1992, when she moved to the Bay Area from Minnesota.

Before joining Fenwick & West LLP, Boyd was a partner at a San Francisco law firm, where she focused on health care law and litigation. She is an experienced legal administrator and was an instrumental part of the team that opened Fenwick & West LLP's New York office in 1997.

Boyd is a founding member of the Legal Administrators and Managers Association (LAMA). She was also the past president of LAMA Silicon Valley Chapter. She has served on several committees and boards within the Association.

Boyd's involvement in LAMA as a founding member and past president has helped the organization to grow. She has been a mentor to new members and has developed programs that have opened up opportunities for members to learn and grow.

Boyd is a passionate advocate for women in the legal industry. She is committed to making a positive difference in the lives of her colleagues and her community. She is also a strong believer in diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

<<When opportunity knocks, Lois Boyd answers. As Chief Administrative Officer of Fenwick & West LLP and a founding member of the Legal Assistant Managers Association, her career has flourished through a series of unexpected opportunities.

Ms. Boyd, 51, initially planned to become a juvenile justice attorney but realized early on in her career that she preferred management to the practice of law. Fenwick has about 275 attorneys, with offices in Mountain View and San Francisco, and Ms. Boyd's job involves overseeing administrative issues in all areas.

"I oversee all of the administrative and financial operations of the firm," she said. "My career history is serendipitous, I guess you'd say."

Ms. Boyd started her career as a paralegal, and her first management job was as a paralegal manager. It was during her time as a paralegal manager that she decided managers in law firms needed an association of their own.

The Association of Legal Administrators, or ALA, had a more narrow focus in the early 1980s, and as a paralegal manager, Ms. Boyd was not eligible for membership. The ALA was made up of the top administrators in law firms then, although now the organization includes paralegal managers and others as well.

Because paralegal departments generate revenue in law firms, Ms. Boyd and others felt the managers of such departments needed an association of their own. They created the Legal Assistant Managers Association, or LAMA. The group changed its name last year to the International Paralegal Management Association, with the less catchy acronym, IPMA.

Originally from Oregon, Ms. Boyd was at the University of Illinois when one of her professors suggested she become a paralegal to see if she would enjoy the practice of law before committing to law school. She spent 12 years as a paralegal at San Francisco's McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen (now Bingham McCutchen), learning most of her paralegal skills on the job. She started managing the paralegal department soon after joining the firm.

She said juggling budgets and managing personnel was a challenge at first and that she supplemented her on-the-job learning with management and accounting courses.

"Once you get yourself immersed, you really do start to learn and understand how it operates," she said when asked about the challenge of learning to keep the firm's books. "And to be fair, law firms are not terribly complex as organizations, as financial organizations. There are very few levers you can pull. They're pretty straightforward; there's just not a lot complexity to it, I mean, in the scheme of the world, in terms of corporate structures and so forth. So once you get a grasp of it, it's…well you can learn it."

One day Ms. Boyd realized she loved working in the legal profession but didn't want to go to law school.

"My advice is to be opportunistic," she said. "When opportunities come your way, go for it. Because you don't really know where it's going to lead."

If Ms. Boyd hadn't seized the opportunity to take the managerial job, she may have ended up an unhappy attorney.

"I realized I was far better suited to management than the practice. And that, in fairness, was based upon observing the practice in a corporate law firm," she said. "It's not that I didn't find it interesting or intellectually challenging or stimulating, but I recognized that perhaps with the exception of litigation, it's a pretty introspective profession. You spend a lot of time on your own pouring over documents and writing and so forth."

Ms. Boyd advises paralegals who would like to get on the management track to try to get a position managing paralegals. And don't be afraid to take risks or even leave the profession to explore other areas.

After 12 years at Bingham McCutchen, Ms. Boyd decided to do something completely different and accepted a job as business manager of a Presbyterian church. She liked the church work but after two years decided she missed the legal profession. When she started asking around about jobs, Ms. Boyd feared her unusual two-year absence in the nonprofit sector would hurt her chances. It didn't.

She joined Latham & Watkins as an office administrator. Bingham Mcutchen called to ask if she was interested in the CAO/executive director position at the firm. So she went back to Bingham McCutchen for 12 more years until accepting her current CAO position at Fenwick.

Ms. Boyd said she was lucky to have had mentors along the way but said she suspects these days it would hard to get to her position without a post-graduate degree.

"I feel like I had a lot of wonderful opportunities and people who believed in me, and I was able to pursue them and so it turned out pretty well," she said.

Ms. Boyd is still interested in juvenile justice and mentors a young woman through a volunteer program called Invest in Kids, which sponsors troubled children with potential to finish high school and go to college. Ms. Boyd laughs when asked if her interest in juvenile justice was because she was a juvenile delinquent.

"No, I was a good girl. Boring, boring, boring," she said. "You know maybe some day I'll have the opportunity to be the bad girl, but I think it can wait."