A text message from a trusted mentor started Ona Alston Dosunmu’s journey from building Brookings Institution’s legal function from scratch to leading two national professional legal associations. Her path is proof yet again of something I’ve argued for years: in-house lawyers can and should be businesspeople with legal skills, not the other way around.
Some still treat the general counsel seat as the top tier: build the function, earn the leadership team’s trust, and hold onto that role as long as possible. Acting as business leaders, not solely substantive experts, has been the basis of my philosophy of legal support for decades. In my conversation with Ona Alston Dosunmu, President and CEO of the National Association of College and University Attorneys (NACUA), on the Legal Leaders Podcast, I found a kindred spirit.
From first in-house counsel to CEO
Ona started her career in complex international project finance at Latham & Watkins and Akin in Washington, DC. Her next big move was to go in-house at the world-renowned think tank, the Brookings Institution. At Brookings, she began in a business and operational role in the Foreign Policy Studies program and was then tapped to become its first in-house counsel, building the legal function from the ground up. From there she added corporate secretary, then became interim chief operating officer. Each of those moves took her further from substantive legal work and closer to running the organization, proving her value to business leadership and building her profile as a business leader with legal skills.
Higher education general counsel run “small cities”
As head of NACUA, Ona now serves the lawyers who have the complex and highly challenging job of providing legal support to colleges and universities. “It’s very much like, at least for the larger campuses, being the mayor of a small city,” is how Ona describes it. There’s a police force to run, a health system to keep staffed, and student housing and research labs that need protecting. On top of all that is a seat in the president’s cabinet as a strategic advisor.
The operational range a modern GC builds, managing financial, technological, safety, and reputational risk while participating deeply in strategic decision making, is the same scope an organization looks for in a chief executive. Those skills were never confined to law, provided the person carrying them chose to use them elsewhere.
Sponsorship is not mentorship
A mentor gives you advice, whereas a sponsor puts their own credibility on the line for you when you’re not in the room. For Ona, that arrived as a text message, not a job posting. Someone who had watched her present to the board sent her one line: “You are ready to run an organization.” Her interim COO role existed because the person leaving that seat told the board to tap her specifically. Her career did not move forward only because she was capable. It moved because someone with standing said so, out loud.
Ona left Brookings to become the inaugural full-time executive director of the California Lawyers Association, standing up a new organization after the state’s mandatory and voluntary bars split. Her description of the pace: “I did about seven years’ worth of work in two and a half.” Then the pandemic hit, and she was recruited to lead NACUA, where she now leads an organization serving thousands of deeply purpose-driven higher education lawyers.
Her career did not move forward only because she was capable. It moved because someone with standing said so, out loud.
Building a legal function from nothing, then leading and scaling it, is not a minor achievement. It sits in the same category as taking a company public or steering it through major M&A: real, high-value, high-profile work, and every in-house lawyer knows it. The gap isn’t that people underweight what building something from scratch is worth. It’s that they rarely describe it in terms a board recognizes as leadership, not just legal delivery.
A few points I think are worth considering:
- Stop assuming the general counsel seat is your final title. Look for adjacent operational responsibilities inside your own organization before you look outside it: corporate secretary work, a general management stretch, or an interim operating role.
- Ask for sponsorship, not just feedback, from someone who has watched you operate. Both of Ona’s executive roles trace back to a person willing to vouch for her by name. Ask people who see your work at its best whether they think you are ready for more – and whether they’d say so to the people who decide.
- Don’t wait for a polished role to prove you can lead. Starting something from scratch, a legal function, a scrappy team, or an entire association, is tremendously valuable. It’s harder to see on a resume than a title, but not harder to prove in a conversation.
Many legal leaders hold high-impact roles tackling tremendous levels of complexity. What usually stands between that reality and the next title is someone willing to say you’re ready, and a lawyer willing to believe it. As Ona put it:
“I have had people intervene in my life and career in ways that I’ll never be able to repay. I can maybe repay it forward.” – Ona Alston Dosunmu
That is the real invitation here. If, like Ona, you got a message that changed your path, go change someone else’s.
Listen to the full conversation with Ona Alston Dosunmu on the Legal Leaders Podcast and hear the rest of her story, including how NACUA is reaffirming its core values.
