Fueling
the Future

Crazy as it sounds, a key driver powering one of Silicon Valley’s hottest car companies crystallized his professional approach in rural Australia. During a field placement semester with Aboriginal Legal Services, Ethan Floyd ’18 saw the law empower community advocacy and systemic reform.

“Life-changing,” he says. “It drove home the importance of understanding the human story and social context behind every single brief. It taught me that effective counsel requires empathy and compassion. You have to listen and understand an organization’s mission or a client’s lived experience before you can even think about providing a legal solution.”

QUITE A RIDE: Ethan Floyd ’18 takes a proactive approach as corporate counsel at the fast-growing electric vehicle company Rivian.

Floyd is now corporate counsel at Rivian, a surging electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer that builds adventure-focused trucks, SUVs, and commercial vans known for off-road capability.

Keeping the company’s internal structure and external disclosures on point, Floyd manages high-stakes areas that include ensuring compliance with a dizzying number of laws and regulations, helping with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings, and navigating major deals.

He also works to advance Rivian’s environmental mission and the transition to sustainable energy. In law school, Floyd wrote an article published in the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy analyzing the environmental impact certain policies can have on the communities around us.

His LinkedIn page quote, “None of us are smarter than all of us,” signals an intellectual humility and a collective approach. That mindset helped him quickly build trust with colleagues over five years as a law firm corporate associate, as Canva’s corporate legal counsel, and now at Rivian.

“In a law firm setting, the person running the data room has crucial institutional knowledge that I need just as much as a partner’s high-level strategy,” Floyd says. “If anything, it creates better bonds with the people you work with and really bolsters efficiency.”

As in-house counsel at Rivian, he often finds himself in a room full of product managers, engineers, and finance leads, each an expert in their respective fields. “I’m certainly not smarter than an EV company’s head of engineering!” Floyd says. “As such, the most critical responsibility of my job is to synthesize and translate.”

Before going in-house, he enjoyed the fast-paced, high-stakes nature of corporate deals — but felt like he was always an external adviser parachuting in to fix a specific problem.

peed matters to Eric Askins. But his mantra isn’t the “move fast and break things” motto of Silicon Valley. He values agility — progressing quickly, but with a laser focus on making the right steps at the ideal time.

Over 15-plus years in higher education administration, including seven at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Berkeley Law’s new Assistant Dean for Initiatives and Innovation has thrived in dynamic environments. The chance to bring that to the law school and what he calls “the opportunity to build towards what the future of education looks like” was a huge draw.

His portfolio now includes Berkeley Law’s Executive Education Program, whose professional development initiatives help practitioners and organizational leaders achieve their career goals, and the school’s Leadership Academy. Created in 2024, the academy aims to help students serve society in wide-ranging leadership positions across the public and private sector.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky calls Askins “superbly qualified for this role,” which comes with a challenge: to build other new programs that further expand Berkeley Law’s public mission-driven reach.

FORWARD THINKER: Eric Askins is Berkeley Law’s new Assistant Dean for Initiatives and Innovation. Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small

“One of the most amazing things about thinking beyond the confines of a degree program is how big a community you can serve,” Askins says, noting that the Executive Education Program has served over 6,000 people and granted over 4,000 certificates. “We can create offerings and connect people to scholarship and knowledge at different price points across different ecosystems.”

Askins began his education career in the admissions office at Fordham Law and enjoys working with law students, saying “the ability to serve that population again here at a different point in my career with the different set of tools at my disposal was something I couldn’t pass up.”

Making sure Berkeley Law’s current executive education offerings remain flexible and timely amid a rapidly changing marketplace, he notes that Generative AI for the Legal Profession has served over 1,000 people in its first two years and is now being revamped.

“We can meet the market where it is,” Askins says. “You can get input, you can pivot, you can make changes, and some of what we’re learning here are things we can apply in other spaces.”

His priorities also include the Leadership Academy, whose members receive an extra $10,000 scholarship per year on top of their existing gift aid and practical training to lead in myriad roles, building an even stronger relationship between the law school and Haas beyond the J.D./MBA program, and further deepening Berkeley Law’s connection with its alumni as continuing learners.

“When I was hired, it was with a specific focus, obviously, on innovation,” Askins says. “But it’s really about building towards the future. To be able to bring a cutting-edge approach to the law school space — not traditionally seen as a place where you’re going to get the dynamic, creative thinking you see in other sectors — is really exciting to me.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw

“I realized I wanted to be at the table before the deal was even cooked,” Floyd says. “Being part of the team that shaped the product strategy, risk profile, and growth trajectory from the inside was appealing to me. The chance to move from being a reactive problem-solver to a proactive business partner was the main draw.”

Even though data privacy laws differ wildly across the world, Floyd relishes building an adaptable, scalable system that can implement regulatory updates almost in real time without stifling innovation.

“Once you start managing your own deals, you essentially become a conductor of sorts, which is rewarding in its own right,” he says. “Seeing everyone play their part without hampering or hindering the deal as a whole — being able to synthesize the specialized inputs from tax, finance, product, and engineering and turning all that into one coherent package — that’s always rewarding.”

A former editor-in-chief of the Berkeley Journal of Black Law & Policy, Floyd is not remotely surprised to see so many fellow alums driving change in high-level positions.

“The school is always willing to evolve and stay at the forefront of innovation,” he says. “When you couple that with an incredible faculty, you end up with a law school that’s able to produce alumni who continually lead the charge in the tech industry.”

While growing up in history-laden Philadelphia, Lauren Smith ’14 yearned for new frontiers. Professionally, that meant navigating unsettled areas of law and policy.

“There is a thrill to that work, when you feel like you’re not just doing a job but helping shape what the future will look like,” she says.

LIFTOFF: Lauren Smith ’14, senior legal counsel for artificial intelligence at PayPal, calls sound AI governance vital for stability in the financial sector.

PayPal’s senior legal counsel for artificial intelligence since January, Smith honed that mindset working on autonomous vehicle (AV) regulatory issues for four years at Cruise.

“Even on the most trying days, I was motivated by the idea that almost no one had navigated this same challenge before,” she says. “So whatever we produced could wind up being the template on which an entire area of law and practice would eventually be built.”

Smith worked on global health and economic policy issues after college, then considered law school — and did her homework.

“I knew a good number of Berkeley Law alumni and they were overwhelmingly smart, interesting, and ambitious folks trying to make the world a better place and they’d developed the skills to do so at Berkeley,” she says. “They also said wonderful things about their experience there, which was unique. I wasn’t 100% set on law school, but once I got into Berkeley I knew I had to go.”

Smith developed privacy expertise with the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, helped run various tech-related student groups, learned about potential career paths through regular lunch programs and events, and earned a Law & Technology Certificate.

She interned at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy — where she also worked full-time right after graduating — grappled with tech law and policy in then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ office, and helped the ACLU’s Technology and Civil Liberties team.

incent Joralemon ’24 isn’t just the new director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology’s (BCLT) Life Sciences Law & Policy Center — he’s a beneficiary of the innovative initiative that’s made a big splash since launching four years ago.

A former high school biology teacher in New York, Joralemon took the center’s two-semester Life Sciences & Innovation Workshop while in law school. Then taught by Professor Peter S. Menell and Allison Schmitt ’15, the center’s founding director, the course brings law and Ph.D. students together to develop detailed case studies on breakthrough life science innovations.

Joralemon began researching psychedelics after reading journalist Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind and learning about ketamine’s growth as a treatment for mental health conditions.

“I’d found a topic I really felt passionate about and I knew this was going to help make the world a better place,” Joralemon says. “And it wasn’t a crowded field. There weren’t a ton of people talking about it.”

He joined Cravath, Swaine & Moore’s New York City office, learning from IP Practice Co-Chair David Kappos ’90 — former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office director and Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property. Joralemon worked on a pharmaceutical deal representing a company producing non-hallucinogenic psychedelic drugs that modulate the same neurotransmitters as psychedelics without the “trip” of traditional psychedelics.

“They have all these really promising therapeutic benefits,” he says. “It was very affirming to see this class of drugs that I had spent so much time researching be a part of major deals.”

FULL CIRCLE: Vincent Joralemon ’24 returned to Berkeley to lead the Life Sciences Law & Policy Center. Photo by Laurie Frasier

All the while, Joralemon kept in touch with his BCLT mentors. When Schmitt left for a tenure-track job at the University of Oregon Law School, he applied to lead the Life Sciences Law & Policy Center — whose programs, curriculum, conferences, and research help practitioners, students, scholars, and life sciences entrepreneurs tackle issues issues from drug pricing to how AI should be responsibly incorporated into life sciences applications and companies.

“Vincent’s unique combination of scientific training, distinguished legal education at Berkeley Law and Harvard, and practical experience at Cravath brings invaluable expertise,” says BCLT Executive Director Wayne Stacy. “His scholarship on psychedelics, FDA reform, and AI in life sciences has positioned him as a leading voice in the field.”

Joralemon plans to focus on four main areas: Psychedelics and novel therapeutics, the current gaps between incentives to develop new treatments and breakthroughs while protecting the public and opening access to new therapies, the schism between the federal government’s approach to public health and the academic and scientific establishment, and data governance.

He also wants to make the center’s work accessible and digestible for consumers.

“Because I worked in public education and come from a background where nobody was a lawyer, I think about whether my mom or my aunt can understand something I’ve written,” Joralemon says. While planning to involve those with legal training, he also aims “to help explain the law to people who haven’t been to law school. That’s an important civic duty that we as lawyers have.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw

“Berkeley Law supported my work outside of the classroom in a way that opened doors in emerging fields that I couldn’t have imagined,” Smith says.

At Cruise, she led federal regulatory engagement and safety policy for AVs and shaped emerging approaches to their regulation, working closely with federal regulators on incident response, recalls, and safety oversight. Previously, as senior policy manager at Lyft, she helped advance federal and state policy for ridesharing, micromobility, and AVs.

“The most fascinating challenge to me is where entrenched practices and industries meet new, disruptive technology that has the ability to make things more efficient, safe, and accessible,” says Smith, who spent three-plus years as senior policy counsel at the Future of Privacy Forum in Washington, D.C.

The questions that drive her now are how we define and tolerate unreasonable risk in AI technologies — and how we compare machine performance to that of imperfect humans.

“It’s hard for society to stomach the idea that algorithms will result in any harm, even though human-driven processes cause harm every day, whether through car accidents or through bias and discrimination,” Smith says.

As PayPal’s in-house counsel for AI, she advises on emerging regulations, guides product and engineering teams on AI development and deployment, and helps shape internal AI governance practices. Stressing the particular importance of sound AI governance in credit and commerce, Smith savors being among the first wave of companies learning to navigate this terrain.

“There aren’t many templates for what it means to have a successful career in the emerging technology space,” she says. “Most of my colleagues and mentors whose careers I wanted to model had been lawyers at the beginning of the internet — working at then-startups like Google, Twitter, AOL — when everything was an issue of first impression. Eventually I realized their experiences were not replicable, so I’d have to develop my own path. That’s part of what drew me to privacy, autonomous vehicles, and now AI, sub-fields where the law and policy haven’t been developed yet.”

As the world’s unstoppable tech train veered to new destinations that became household names, Jonathan Sidhu ’14 was often on board — as a product specialist for Google Docs and Drive, a legal intern for Facebook during law school, and now associate general counsel at Instagram. At each stop, he has seen common themes power innovation: adaptability, foresight, and resolve.

“It’s taken me almost a decade of practicing law to realize how valuable it is to be someone who can be dropped into an unfamiliar problem or situation, learn a new area quickly, and find a path forward,” he says. “My career has required doing that again and again, and the lawyers I’ve most admired are masters at this. The ability to learn — to absorb complexity, ask the right questions, and build judgment — is essential.”

For a year before law school, Sidhu worked as a journalist at Mint, an Indian business newspaper launched in partnership with the Wall Street Journal. When he joined Google in New York to work on Google Docs, he found himself increasingly drawn to the policy and legal questions that shaped how technology worked.

Watching a product lawyer there field wide-ranging legal questions from engineers and product managers, Sidhu recalls knowing “that was the job I wanted, but without any real understanding of how to get there.”

Berkeley Law provided the bridge, and the ability to deliver valuable legal insights in wide-ranging situations.

“In my legal career, I’ve constantly been thrown into new and unfamiliar areas of law or facts,” Sidhu says. “Many of the legal areas I work with every day — like some fundamental privacy laws — didn’t exist when I was in school or took Information Privacy Law with Professor (Paul) Schwartz, when we read lots of cases about old-school privacy torts. But that experience of absorbing new material, making sense of it, mastering it, and finding clarity in uncertainty has been essential to my career every day since graduation.”

Diving into the “messy, dynamic, and creative” process of working with the people building Facebook’s technology cemented his goal to work in-house at a tech company, embedded with product teams. Following a colleague’s advice, he clerked for two federal court judges and spent several formative years litigating at Williams & Connolly in Washington.

SHAPING SOCIAL MEDIA: Instagram Associate General Counsel Jonathan Sidhu ’14 credits staying nimble amid fast-changing challenges for his rewarding career.

After landing an in-house position with Silicon Valley Bank for a year, Sidhu pounced on the chance to join the social media titan Instagram — where he works with teams that design and build new features for the company. Focusing on creative tools and emerging areas, he’s supporting a new Instagram app called Edits for creators to make videos. Previous projects covered safety, well-being, and the wildly popular Reels.

“The most challenging part is also the fun part: the pace. Things move quickly, and the learning curve is constant and steep,” he says. “But that’s what keeps the work meaningful — there’s always something new.”

Sidhu provides soup-to-nuts legal insights for Instagram’s teams, from early ideation to launch and beyond, advising across global privacy, copyright and intellectual property, consumer protection, competition law, regulatory requirements, and litigation risks. On any given day, he might be the only lawyer in a room of engineers, product managers, and others.

“It’s a bit surreal, and also thrilling, to watch something ship and know your fingerprints — your legal guidance — are woven into the product,” Sidhu says. “The most rewarding parts of the job are when I’ve worked through a complex set of issues, and helped a team find a path forward that feels responsible and risk-managed but also creative.

“Equally rewarding, and a little magical, is seeing a feature I advised on out in the world, being used by people who will never know the challenging and rigorous analysis that went into it.”

Jacqueline Aguilar ’13 defies the notion that prioritizing innovation means changing jobs every few years. As assistant general counsel at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, she welcomes a work environment that she says continually encourages growth, taking on new challenges, and expanding one’s impact.

“Innovation also plays a key role in keeping the work engaging,” says Aguilar, who joined the company right after law school. “P&G is constantly evolving through new products, business models, and ways of working, and the legal function evolves alongside it.”

The company has won many innovation awards, from its AI use in product development to supply chain advancements to product enhancements that elevate sustainability. Aguilar says they “reflect a deeply embedded culture, not isolated initiatives” and that innovation is an expectation across all departments.

Leading complex M&A transactions that can reach billions of dollars, Aguilar consistently brings not just legal expertise but also strategic and savvy business insight that informs key decisions. She sees innovation as vital in legal work — not just by managing risk, but by adding value to the business and enabling teams to move faster, make smarter choices, and execute with confidence.

While core legal principles may be constant, Aguilar says the tools and approaches lawyers use should evolve and that innovation requires curiosity, openness to new ideas, and a willingness to reimagine processes to enhance efficiency and outcomes.

“In practice, innovation shows up in many forms: leveraging technology, embracing change, and continuously asking how we can do things faster, better, and more effectively — whether in solving complex problems, providing advice, or learning and applying new concepts,” she says. “I strive to be an innovator rather than a reluctant follower, because the legal function is most effective when it evolves in step with the business.”

ENDURING PRESENCE: Jacqueline Aguilar ’13, assistant general counsel at Procter & Gamble, has worked for the company since graduating from Berkeley Law.

As a Berkeley Law student, Aguilar won the American Jurisprudence Award in Negotiations, was a best brief award finalist in her Legal Writing class, and participated on negotiation and mediation teams — all of which she credits for her career rise.

“The fundamentals of preparation, understanding both sides’ needs and interests, active listening, effective communication, and creative problem-solving translate directly to M&A and commercial negotiations,” she says. “I use these skills daily at P&G, whether negotiating transactions, aligning stakeholders, or resolving complex issues with business partners. Law school taught me to advocate firmly while building trust, which is the foundation of every deal.”

Particularly on complex M&A matters, that means investing time up front to understand strategic objectives and stakeholder priorities, uncovering opportunities to simplify structures, applying lessons from prior transactions, and seeking ways to streamline and standardize.

Aguilar savors shepherding deals from early brainstorming through closing and transition, but she says knowing when to walk away from one is also a vital part of serving the company and its shareholders.

While managing a busy pro bono schedule, nonprofit board service, and regular mentoring, Aguilar steers fast-moving situations across global time zones and cross-functional teams — ensuring alignment and timely decision-making while balancing speed, risk, and nuances that often carry global implications.

“I’m trusted to navigate complexity, exercise sound judgment, and deliver solutions that advance the business and its long-term objectives,” she says. “Ultimately, innovation in legal work is as much about mindset as it is about method. It’s about enabling smart decisions — combining sound legal judgment with creativity, collaboration, and business insight so the company can succeed.”