SAN FRANCISCO — To hear LinkedIn GC Erika Rottenberg tell it, billable hours are about as welcome as patent trolls: not at all.

Those were two takeaways from a Friday panel at the American Bar Association's annual meeting in San Francisco, where Rottenberg and GCs from FireEye, Avnet and Stanford — all women — touched on everything from their careers in the Valley to outside counsel's knowledge gaps — and sometime habit of "going native" in the business.