Zabrina Jenkins never imagined she would end up as executive adviser to the CEO when she joined Starbucks as a junior in-house lawyer in 2005.

Jenkins, who got her start as an employment litigator at Seattle-based law firm Garvey Schubert Barer, was the first junior-level litigator in the company’s then-nascent corporate legal department. “At the time. it was pretty unheard of to have an in-house litigation position, particularly for a junior-level lawyer,” Jenkins said in a fireside chat Tuesday with Berkeley Law’s Irene Liu as part of its General Counsel Institute.