SCOTT SHER ’97, Antitrust Ace

My Age: 36
My Mentors: Toni Young, John Diamond
What I Loved About Hastings: The Moot Court program. It gave me confidence that I did not have before.

“I’m interested in the purity of facts, as opposed to the contentiousness of litigation,” says Scott Sher ’97. “So, I looked for a firm where I could practice antitrust and maintain a very pure practice.”

That firm would prove to be Wilson Sonsini, where Sher has worked since 1999. With a client list that reads like a who’s who of Silicon Valley—Google, Apple, Genentech, Hewlett-Packard—Wilson Sonsini is one of the top tech-oriented firms in the country. At the time Sher joined the Palo Alto firm, multimillion-dollar IPOs were its focus. When the dot-com bust forced Wilson Sonsini to downsize, Sher saw a golden opportunity to build up the firm’s antitrust practice.

“Back then, we had a small antitrust department,” he says. “And I saw that we needed a presence in Washington, D.C., where the regulators are, to be competitive.”

In 2004, Sher put together a business plan for establishing an office in the nation’s capital. “I sent it to the CEO,” says Sher. “He called me the next day and said, ‘Let’s do it!’

“Here’s what’s cool and why I will never leave this firm,” adds Sher. “They trusted a six-year associate to come up with a plan, and they gave me the infrastructure to build it. They have an entrepreneurial spirit.”
Under Sher’s watch, Wilson Sonsini’s antitrust department has grown to a team of some 30 attorneys. “My practice is dynamic, and I get to work with amazing clients,” he says. “Law can be an unforgiving profession, but I am incredibly lucky.”

ALBERT LIU ’97, Tech Savvy

My Age: 37
My Birthplace: Mainland China
What Hastings Taught Me: The importance of adhering to a moral compass

Stories of wildly successful fresh-faced world-beaters are common in the Internet age. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook as an undergrad. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in their mid-twenties. During the boom years, young attorneys rose through Silicon Valley’s ranks, too, but few as quickly as Albert Liu ’97.

Upon graduating from Hastings, Liu, who had previously worked as a software engineer, landed a job with the New York firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. Based in its Los Angeles office, he worked on public offerings for clients in Silicon Valley. At the young age of 27, Liu became general counsel at one of these companies, Turnstone Systems.

He soon went on to another general counsel position at Yipes Enterprise Services, followed by four years at Netgear.

In 2008, he joined VeriFone, a global leader in secure electronic-payment technologies. As senior vice president and general counsel, Liu brings extensive knowledge of the complex reporting requirements that public companies face these days. “With the implementation of Sarbanes-Oxley,” says Liu, “the general counsel has a greater role in seeing compliance with those regulations.”

Perhaps even more significant, Liu brings innovative thinking to the table. “I work with the management team to find creative solutions to business issues,” he says. “I am not just a legal counsel but a business partner.”