Kate Cook Has a Recipe for Legal Success

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Kate Cook’s path to becoming assistant general counsel of the Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. wasn’t a traditional one. After high school, she couldn’t afford to go straight to college. Instead, she spent several years managing a small local chain restaurant, saving money, and taking night classes toward a business management degree.

A business law class at Suffolk University altered her career trajectory, she says. She changed her major to prelaw and eventually went on to the Massachusetts School of Law.

All through law school, Cook worked as a paralegal at GE, which paid for her education. After earning her degree, she joined GE’s in-house legal team and spent seven years focusing on product liability.

“I found it beneficial to be an in-house lawyer and just have to worry about one client,” Cook enthuses.

In 2021, amid the uncertainties brought on by COVID-19 and GE’s restructuring into three separate companies, Cook received a LinkedIn message about a possible position at Jacobs. Although she wasn’t familiar with Jacobs or actively looking for a job, the company’s work to improve water treatment, transportation, and infrastructure around the world intrigued her.

Her interview went well and Jacobs offered her a position managing personal injury matters, including the company’s toxic tort litigation. Cook has since added complex construction disputes to her responsibilities. She still feels she’s learning something new every day.

She’s also using her strategic expertise from her time at GE to benefit Jacobs. “At the time I was with GE, there was a pretty well-oiled machine in the legal department,” Cook shares. “I brought quite a bit of technical skills and process orientation with me to the legal department here to guide some of the things we want to move through.”

For example, Cook introduced a negotiation approach to toxic tort cases from GE that bundles settlements to secure dismissal agreements in related cases. This strategy has more than doubled Jacobs’s dismissals rate since her arrival.

“Pedigree alone will not get you where you want to go; you need to show results.”

Kate Cook

In addition to her litigation work, Cook leads process management projects, DEI initiatives, and a cross-collaboration between litigation attorneys and operations attorneys. She also co-chairs Jacobs’s corporate counsel externship program with Southern Methodist University, now in its third year.

“I have guided and mentored some brilliant 3L students,” Cook says. “This is something we have to do as lawyers. It’s up to us to shape the next generations.”

One piece of advice she regularly gives externs is that “pedigree alone will not get you where you want to go; you need to show results.” Jacobs exposes its externs to all the tools and technology the company uses because so many jobs now require “significant technical prowess,” Cook says. Having those skills on their résumés “will help them when there are thousands of people looking for a job.”

Cook also provides young law students with practical experience, whether that’s participating in mediation or a session to prepare a witness for a deposition. She wants them to know the ins and outs of what happens every day in the legal department.

Reflecting on her restaurant experience, Cook believes her time in the industry taught her the importance of developing her soft skills.

“Managing in a restaurant environment with personnel of all different backgrounds and personalities—and aligning people with their skill sets as best as you can—helped me be a better people person,” she explains. “It also helped me help them move to the next level. I use that skill when I do annual reviews now, looking at how I can stretch this person and help them grow.”

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