SunLaw Founders Transition Out of Leadership Roles

Olga Mack, SunLaw co-founder (Photo: Jason Doiy/ALM)

The founders of SunLaw, a networking group for women in-house counsel, are transitioning out of their leadership roles.

Olga Mack, one of SunLaw's founders and the vice president of strategy at Quantstamp Inc., said she and the group's other four founders, Katia Bloom, Fatima Khan, Debbie Rosenbaum and Rebecca Savage, are stepping down to provide other women in the group an opportunity to take on a leadership role.

"Being a leader at an organization of a sizable membership and great mission kind of comes with leadership opportunities ... and so we very explicitly talked about how those opportunities should be shared," Mack told Corporate Counsel. "What I basically called at the time a George Washington phenomenon of transition."

After the leadership change, Mack said she may stay on in an advisory role. Over the past year, she's had several other professional changes, taking on a new role at Quantstamp and an appointment to the California Law Revision Commission. She said she will still be involved in Women In-house Support Equality, or WISE, another group she co-founded.

SunLaw's other founders will take on varying levels of involvement in the organization. Khan, the senior director of legal and chief privacy officer at Demandbase, said that she, like Mack, plans on serving in an advisory role on special projects. She took on her role at Demandbase just over a year ago, according to her LinkedIn profile.

"We feel like it’s time to pass on the torch to the next generation of leaders," Khan said in an email. "We have all gained a tremendous amount of knowledge and sense of community through our roles and we hope that others are able to do the same."

The group was founded in 2015. At the time, all five founders were in-house counsel based in the Bay Area. Since then, the group's members have spread to San Diego, Los Angeles and parts of Oregon and the East Coast, networking at events and through a Listserv and Slack channel.

SunLaw began seeking new leadership team members in an email to the group's Listserv Monday. Khan said the size and structure of the next leadership team could change, depending on what her successors think is best. Mack said it's up to the next group of leaders to determine what is best for SunLaw.

"I’ve done quite a few transformations, careerwise, in my professional life, and I find that part of learning and moving forward involves giving away opportunities that have served me and now can be of service to somebody else," Mack said.