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Smith Welcomes
First In-House Counsel
 Georgia Yuan, chief legal counsel for the
University of Idaho, became Smith’s first general counsel on June
1. Yuan is responsible for providing legal counsel to President
Carol Christ and deciding when outside legal advice or assistance
with litigation
is necessary. “Upon coming to Smith, I became convinced that the
college would profit from the advice of someone with legal
training and intelligence, in creatively addressing individual
problems and in developing
policy,” explains Christ. “Georgia Yuan will be a resource
to the entire campus, providing advice about avoiding legal
vulnerability and resolving legal conflicts."
Yuan, who was an attorney
in private practice with a Pullman, Washington, law firm
before going to the University of Idaho in 1990, is a graduate of Oberlin
College. She received a master of science from Stanford University and a Juris
Doctor from the University of Idaho. Coming with her to Northampton are her
husband,
Larry Meinert, a geology professor at Washington State University; her daughter
Kim, who will be a first-year student at Oberlin in the fall; and her son James,
who will be a high school sophomore.
At Idaho, Yuan and her three colleagues
in Idaho’s office of university
counsel covered the full range of legal services for the university and the faculty -- contract
and employment law, hiring, affirmative action, equal opportunity, terminations
and grievances. Students are not very much involved in her work, Yuan says, “unless
they’re in trouble…. If this job is done well, students aren’t
even aware there is an office of the general counsel.” But she does enjoy
mentoring students and has used law student interns in her office.
Asked what
she felt was her most important work at Idaho, she said she believes
she created “a feeling on campus that there is always an office you can
go to for policy and legal advice that won’t tell you what you have to
do but will help you accomplish what you want to do. …What I like about
being a general counsel in an institution of higher education is that you assume -- and
I think you’re right in assuming -- that you’re [in] an environment
where people thrive on learning at all levels and for a variety of reasons, but
always at great depth.”
Commenting on the value for Smith of having
in-house counsel, Yuan notes: “You
have an attorney focused very particularly on what’s happening here and
how people desire to interact from both a contractual perspective as well as
just how you want to order your employment relationships, how you want to order
your relationships with students, just how you want to organize [the college].” Outside
counsel will continue to be called on for litigation and for highly complex areas,
like intellectual property, taxation, certain areas of giving and construction
and real estate transactions. In a general counsel, Yuan says “you have
someone who can help you be much more efficient about engaging an expert on the
outside.” |
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