© 2012 The Texas Lawbook.
By Natalie Posgate
Staff Writer for The Texas Lawbook
The J.D. may be giving the M.B.A. a run for its money when it comes to becoming qualified to lead a company.
Of the 498 chief executive officers on the 2012 Fortune 500 list, 46 – or roughly 9 percent – have law degrees, according to U.S. News & World Report. One of the leading law schools to produce corporate CEOs is Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law – ranked No. 51 on U.S. News’ Best Law Schools list.
Three of this year’s Fortune 500 CEOs who have law degrees are alumni of SMU: Angela Braly of WellPoint, Inc.; David Dillon of The Kroger Co.; and Edward Rust, Jr. of State Farm Insurance. All three companies are in the top 50.
Dean John Attanasio of the SMU Dedman Law School said that each year 20 percent of SMU graduates go into business careers.
“SMU has a long tradition of training business leaders – CEOs, vice presidents and heads of big foundations,” Attanasio said. “Running a legal foundation has company parallels. There are a lot of people who go to law school at SMU with that kind of thing in mind.”
Attanasio said that SMU’s evening program especially sees students who have been in the corporate workforce who decided to study law to advance their careers.
“I think that a lot of companies are turning to lawyers for leadership in part because certain areas really involve a lot of law in them,” he said.
The other Texas law school on the U.S. News list proved itself an anomaly. Richard H. Anderson, the CEO of Delta Air Lines, Inc., which is ranked No. 83 on the Fortune 500 list, is a graduate of the South Texas College of Law – the only law school on the list that U.S. News did not rank.
In addition, there are four executives on the list who did not graduate from Texas law schools but are CEOs of Texas companies: Gregg Engles of Dean Foods Company; Richard Kinder of Kinder Morgan, Inc.; John J. Lipinski of CVR Energy, Inc.; and David Steiner of Waste Management, Inc.
Of the other top law schools to produce corporate CEOs, eight are from Harvard Law School, and both Columbia University’s School of Law and the University of Virginia’s School of Law claim three from the list.
Attanasio said he isn’t sure that the increased amount of lawyers-turned-CEOs is necessarily a trend, but rather a shift in the tendency for the corporate world to have a more robust regulatory environment – especially companies involved in industries such as healthcare or insurance.
“Sometimes I think what’s happening is that as some lawyers have become CEOs because of the legal environment being specific to their company,” he said. “It gets companies thinking of them more as leaders than just lawyers.”
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