It’s not often an $18 billion-a-year company hires a new general counsel and asks her to build nearly an entire legal department from scratch in a new city. Yet that’s the challenge that confronted Juliette Pryor in 2009, when she became food distribution giant US Foods Inc.’s top lawyer. The United States’ 11th largest privately held company had decided to move its entire legal department from Columbia, Md., to its headquarters in the Chicago suburbs, and only 20 percent of its in-house lawyers and none of its paralegals chose to make the move.
"We were literally building a team from the ground up, with just a few folks who had the institutional knowledge," said Pryor, a former Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom lawyer who had joined US Foods as deputy general counsel in 2005. "It’s one thing for a department to have someone new, but 80 percent of my department became new at the same time. Eighty percent came from different backgrounds, and we had no cohesive theme about who we were."
