The Benefits of a Clerkship with Kevin O’Connor

🎥 May 19, 2025 📺 Counsel House Podcast ⏱ 1m 👁 1606 views

About Kevin O'connor

Kevin O'Connor, Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary at Lockheed Martin, has discussed his approach to leadership and his career in several recent appearances. In a May 2025 podcast, O'Connor described his initial months at Lockheed Martin as a period of listening and learning, stating that to immediately propose changes would be "reckless and egotistic." He outlined his priorities for the legal department as achieving excellence and efficiency, and emphasized that an in-house lawyer's role is not to avoid risk but to ensure clients have the information to manage it intelligently. O'Connor also reflected on his career path, noting that a judicial clerkship was "probably the best thing I ever did" and that he values the ability to move lawyers across different responsibilities within an in-house department. In a separate appearance from May 2025, an attorney named Kevin O'Connor, described as being with Kconor Law Firm, discussed his approach to personal injury law, stating that after obtaining financial settlements for families, he began working to change laws to prevent similar tragedies. He said that if lawyers do not change something, "we're part of the problem as lawyers." This attorney was described as a partner of the show and dedicated to Chicago. Earlier material from 2016 references a Kevin O'Connor receiving a Distinguished Faculty Award for his work in education, with a PhD from McGill.

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Transcript (1 segments)

Kevin O'connor0:00

I think at the time I aspired to be a federal prosecutor and I thought, well, a lot of federal prosecutors have this clerkship thing on their resume, so maybe I should go do that. I was fortunate to get a clerkship. I can look back at that now and say it was probably the best thing I ever did in my career because I just think as a young lawyer, there's no substitute for that experience. There's zero substitute for that experience. You not only go in and have a lot of responsibility thrown at you really well before you deserve it, but you also, if you do it well, you develop a mentor for the rest of your career who's there to give you advice, who's there to make recommendations. And who doesn't listen to a judge when they call to recommend someone? It's not only because they're a judge, but the intimacy of a chambers, you take a comfort level. This judge really does know this person's work in a way that an associate being recommended by a partner they did some work for at a law firm. Not that you don't weigh that, but it doesn't have as much weight as a judge who says, 'I spent a year or two in my chambers side by side with this young man or this young woman, and I recommend them highly.'