Sarah Mitchelle ’11’s journey to becoming an associate attorney was anything but linear. After majoring in Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Kansas and working in consulting, she attended law school and landed a position as an associate attorney at Gibson Dunn LLP.
Mitchelle, whose parents worked at Stanford, was born and raised in the Bay Area. “I grew up going to every Stanford women’s basketball game, going to camps on campus. I learned how to ride my bike on the quad,” Mitchell said.
“I remember acknowledging, even as a kid, that it was very cool to live in a place that had so much going on, had such good weather—we could play outside all the time,” Mitchelle said. “It was an ideal place to grow up. I think there is so much to do, from playing in Half Moon Bay to going up to San Francisco and exploring the city.”
Mitchelle was hyper-involved at M-A, playing saxophone for the jazz band and basketball all four years. “I would literally have to run from the gym. Basketball practice would end, and I’d have to be at the band room like 20 minutes later,” she said.
For Mitchelle, jazz band’s major draw was its social scene and the team-oriented environment. “Being a ‘band kid’ was very fun for me, just because it was a group of really interesting people,” she said. “Just like a sport, you’re working towards a common goal. Everybody has to do their part because you don’t want to disappoint your team.”
Mitchelle believes that her time at M-A was formative and set her up for later success, especially through the collaborative and advocacy skills she developed. “Working on a team is critical to working in the workplace. And having communication skills that you pick up by taking a foreign language, for example, are helpful. Things come together in a way that I didn’t really appreciate when I was 17,” she said. “Because I had such a good experience at M-A and I knew how to advocate for myself, I was able to navigate a big school like KU and do well there.”
Mitchelle knew early on in her high school career that she wanted to attend the University of Kansas. With her dad hailing from Kansas and a sizable amount of extended family in the area, Mitchelle knew she would be supported in her decision to attend. “I think I was kind of unique in that the school I wanted to go to was a large public school in the middle of the country. A lot of my friends were looking at Ivy League schools or California schools, but I had been raised a Jayhawk fan,” she said.
Aside from wanting to attend KU, Mitchelle was not exactly sure what she wanted to pursue after high school academically. When she was accepted into KU fall of her senior year, she entered college undeclared.
After taking a graduation trip to East Africa with her mom, Mitchelle was inspired to double major in Anthropology and African studies. “It was when I was sitting with mountain gorillas in the mountains of Rwanda that I realized that was something people could do as a job,” she said. Like at M-A, she stayed busy in college—joining a sorority, tutoring student-athletes, joining the honors program, and studying abroad in South Africa.
Despite her enjoyable time at KU, Mitchelle realized her professional plans were incongruous to her personal ones. “I realized I probably wasn’t going to live in the mountains of Rwanda and live the life that I was planning to live,” she said. “I had to pivot, and so I added a minor in math, and went into consulting after college. “
After graduating from KU, Mitchelle became a consultant at Ernst & Young, a large accounting firm. While a consultant, she married her husband, who was in law school at the time. Noticing the similarities in the tasks they were doing, Mitchelle believed she might be interested in something comparable. “I thought ‘these were really similar,’ and that I might really like law school,” she said.
Beginning law school at Stanford in 2017, Mitchelle was in close proximity to her parents and the area she was raised in. “It was really fun to come and pretend to be an adult in my hometown. My law school friends are wanting to go to the Dutch Goose or walk the dish on the weekends, and like people are referring to the Safeway I grew up going to as a ‘Secret Safeway,’” Mitchelle said. “It was just a very hilarious experience.”
Besides its location, Mitchelle enjoyed Stanford for its plentiful and high-quality resources. “I think Stanford is a tremendous place to get a legal education. We have small classes with faculty who are some of the best in the world,” she said. “At that point, I knew I wanted to go on the more corporate side, the more transactional side of the law, so I was able to take classes I was interested in, and participate in their clinical program.”
“I met just some of my very closest friends in the world who are just incredibly competent and interesting at Stanford,” Mitchelle said. “It was really the best law school experience any of us could have asked for.”
Fresh out of law school, Mitchelle moved to Denver and secured a corporate attorney position at Gibson Dunn, one of the world’s largest law firms. “It was a pretty natural progression from law school. A lot of people go to big law firms after law school,” she said. “I thought working at a law firm would be super analogous to my experience at Ernst & Young, which was a really positive experience. I remembered from consulting, I really liked the ‘professional services’ model, where you’re working on all these different projects at once. You have different clients. They all have different problems, and you have to solve all of their problems with the best solution for them.“
At first, Mitchelle was hesitant to enter Big Law, a term used to describe the largest law firms in the world. “Big Law has a reputation of being really hard and demanding, because you work a lot, your clients expect a lot of you, and you’re kind of expected to always be available,” she said. “I think I went into Big Law sort of just seeing how I could do it, like how long it would work, and if I thought it would be a sustainable option.”
Mitchelle is, to her surprise, fulfilled with her current position. “I started at my current law firm probably expecting to be there for two or three years until I was tired and thought it was too hard,” she said. “I’m going to be finishing up five years in December, so it’s clearly going a lot better than I would.”
“I just happened to find really good people in Denver and a practice area that I’m interested in, and teams that I work well on, and clients that like me,” Mitchelle added. “So I’ve stuck around doing it for as long as they’ll have me.”
“I’m unlike the lawyers that you see on TV—I don’t go to court, I don’t take depositions, I don’t fight. Nobody goes to jail,” she said. At Gibson Dunn, Mitchelle helps businesses, mostly public ones, raise money. She also helps with governance, assisting boards of directors and rewriting trading policy. In addition, Mitchelle files suits with the Securities and Exchange commission and ensures that her clients are complying with their rules.
“I would say 50% of my day I’m reading, editing, and revising,” Mitchelle explained. “Maybe 10% of the day I’m writing something new, but usually I’m tweaking things that already exist. And then the rest of the day is listening and talking—and that’s meetings with clients, meetings with other lawyers, and just making sure that we’re progressing the deal.”
Mitchelle is ultimately satisfied with the path she has taken, particularly because of the versatility of her law degree. “A JD just gives you flexibility. So for the day that I wake up and I don’t want to work at all is awesome. I could go to a million different things, and that’s just like a nice sort of fallback.”
Mitchelle’s advice to current M-A students: “You should just be nice to everybody. You should get to know as many people as you can while you’re there, because it’s a really interesting pot of people that are all thrown into one high school. You can learn a lot from each other. Don’t get caught up in all the competition and all of the stress that comes with being a 17- and 18-year-old. You only get to be in high school once—and, yes, it’s important to push yourself and do the best you can and set yourself up for success. But at the same time, it’s also important to have friendships and to try extracurriculars you’re interested in.”
To those interested in law: “There’s no one path to being a lawyer. You don’t have to be pre-law, you don’t have to take political science, you don’t have to go straight from undergrad. For me, it was really valuable to become a consultant a couple years after college and evaluate what I wanted to do, and it also taught me all these professional skills that were super valuable and useful and applicable in the business context.”
