3M General Counsel Ivan Fong to Speak at W&L Law
On Thursday, Sept. 15, Ivan Fong, general counsel of 3M, will discuss his career as a general counsel. His talk is titled “Off the Record: Life as Outside, Government, and Inside Counsel.”
The talk is scheduled for 11:45 am in the Millhiser Moot Court Room, Sydney Lewis Hall, on the campus of Washington and Lee University. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Fong is Senior Vice President, Legal Affairs and General Counsel of the 3M Company, a $30 billion global, diversified technology company based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Fong has been named one of “America’s 50 Outstanding General Counsel” by the National Law Journal, and under Fong’s leadership, 3M’s law department was also recognized by Corporate Counsel as one of the best legal departments of the year and by the Financial Times as one of the most innovative in-house legal teams of 2015.
Prior to joining 3M in October 2012, Fong was nominated by President Obama and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, leading a team of over 1,800 lawyers in the Department’s headquarters and seven operating components. Prior to his government service, Fong was the Chief Legal Officer and Secretary of Cardinal Health, Inc., a $91 billion global healthcare company based in Dublin, Ohio. He was previously Senior Vice President and General Counsel of GE Vendor Financial Services and prior to that was GE’s first Chief Privacy Leader and Senior Counsel, Information Technology.
Fong also previously served as Deputy Associate Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice; a partner with the law firm of Covington & Burling in Washington, DC; and an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. He began his legal career as a law clerk to Judge Abner J. Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Fong currently serves on the boards of Equal Justice Works and Minnesota Public Radio. He is also a member of the Council of the American Law Institute, the Minnesota State Bar Association’s Diversity & Inclusion Leadership Council, and the Greater Twin Cities United Way Tocqueville Society Cabinet. Fong has previously served as chair of the Association of Corporate Counsel, chair of the American Bar Association’s Section of Science & Technology Law, a trustee of Stanford University, and on numerous national and community-based non-profit boards. He has received, among other honors, the Trailblazer Award from the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, the Justice-in-Action Award from the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc., and the Spirit of Excellence Award from the ABA.
Fong holds a B.C.L. with first class honors from Oxford University, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He received his J.D. (with distinction) from Stanford Law School, where he was president of the Stanford Law Review, and an S.B. in chemical engineering and an S.M. in chemical engineering practice from MIT. A registered patent attorney, he is admitted to the bars of California (inactive), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Minnesota, and Ohio.
