Mentoring Makes the Difference

By Emmett Berg

Moving to the United States from Singapore in 2000, Wendy Lim was confident that her international experience as a corporate transactional attorney would distinguish her in a crowded job market.

"I was a lawyer at a large firm, and I naively thought my skills would translate well," says Lim.

But she had little luck when she sent out her résumé, even though Lim had passed the California bar exam. And when she began to solicit advice from California lawyers, some of their suggestions were hard to swallow.

"One person told me to 'retake' law school because, as he saw it, my challenges were being a woman, being international, and not having a JD," Lim says. "It took me a while to see that what he perceived as stumbling blocks were actually strengths."

Lim says she owes that realization to the mentoring of Silicon Valley attorney Mona Sabet. A former resident of Canada, Sabet knew firsthand how difficult it can be to find work with a non-U.S. law degree.

Not long after meeting Sabet and finishing her LLM at Santa Clara University in 2002, Lim found a job at Townsend and Townsend and Crew and Crew in Palo Alto. Sabet, now general counsel of San Francisco software maker Coverity, played no direct role in the hire, but her company soon became a client of Lim's. And what began as a mentoring relationship grew in scope when the two women teamed up in 2004 to launch Women in Licensing (WiL), an offshoot of the Licensing Executive Society.

This year WiL is providing a series of career-development workshops around the Bay Area for professionals interested in technology- and licensing-related fields. Other women-focused legal professional groups such as ChIPs (depending on who you ask, its stands for either Chief IP counsels or Chicks in Intellectual Property) and the Women's Intellectual Property Lawyers Association (WIPLA) also are beginning to focus more on the importance of mentoring.

Lim, now a senior lawyer in Intel's business and technology licensing group in Santa Clara, says she is repaying Sabet (also a ChIPs cofounder) by "paying it forward" to Bisi Akinola, a second-year associate at Fenwick & West in Mountain View who hails from Nigeria. Akinola credits Lim with helping her survive her first year of lawyering in California. "It was just nice to have another woman say to you, 'You can do it. It's possible.' "

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