Elise and Brielle: We Stay Curious and Ask Questions

Rachael: Welcome back to Formative, the podcast where today's leaders are interviewed by the leaders of tomorrow. Today our guest is Elise Kirban, Global Chief Counsel of Competition at Aon. In this episode, Elise shares how a path that started in theater led her into law. She also talks about the role lawyers play in solving problems, the importance of asking questions early, and how breaking big challenges into small steps can make even the hardest work feel manageable.

Rachael: Hello and welcome. My name is Rachael Gazdick, and I'm your host and CEO of New York Edge. On every episode of Formative, a student from our afterschool program joins me as co-host, and today I'm joined by Brielle from M.S. 57K. Brielle, can you tell our audience a little bit about yourself?

Brielle: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.
My name is Brielle, and I'm in eighth grade. I like to play basketball, cook for my family, and dance with the school dance team.

Rachael: Wow, that's impressive. You're doing so much. All right, Brielle, I think we're ready to go talk to our guest.

Brielle: I'm excited to talk to her I saw in my research that you work in New York City. Are you from New York City?

Elise: Actually, I'm from New Jersey, but I've spent a lot of time when I was young coming into New York, and I've always loved it. Although I was away for a really long time. I went off to school in Chicago area, and then I lived in Washington, DC for many years, and then I lived in Atlanta, but I always knew I wanted to come back to New York.

Brielle: Okay. Why did you decide to work in New York City?

Elise: I think there's no other city like it in the world. I mean, you, you live here. I've been around lots of different places for work. I've traveled a lot around the world. There really is nothing like New York. Some people find it too much 'cause it, it isn't the easiest city always.

It can be a little hard to, uh, to get around and do things, but I always find that it gives me so much more than it takes from me. And also some of the best of the best live and work here, and I like being around people who are smart and curious and wanna do good things.

Brielle: So I saw that you went to Georgetown University. Why did you decide to go to that school?

Elise: So I went there for law school. Undergraduate, I went out to Northwestern University, which is in Evanston, Illinois, outside of Chicago. And I started out actually as a theater major, and Northwestern is known for having a lot of famous actors and actresses come out of there. Um, but I knew over time when I was there, I got to take lots of different classes, not just acting classes, and I was interested in a lot of other things. And some of those things, you know, it's hard to do that when you're in acting 'cause you're always in rehearsals or doing shows or out auditioning. And so while I was still there, I decided I wanted to change, and I went into public policy, which took me to Washington, DC. I didn't go right to Georgetown. First I went to a university called American University, and I got a master's in public administration, which is like how to work in the government. And then I did work in the government for a little bit, and then I worked for a nonprofit for a little bit. And I realized, especially in Washington, everybody who knows how to get things done was a lawyer.So I decided I wanted to go to law school. I was living in DC, which is where Georgetown is, and so I decided to go to Georgetown, which is a really wonderful law school. Really proud to be from there.

Rachael: Is there anything that you learned in acting that helped you in law?

Elise: A little bit. It's interesting, though, because you think like, well, I'm honest. I've been on a stage in front of a lot of people in a play, so it'd be very easy to get up before a judge. I will say it's a little bit different because when you're on a stage in a play, you're playing someone else, and you have words given to you, whereas when you are standing in a-- before a judge in a courtroom, you are very much like yourself. It's just you, and it's your words, and you have to come up with them. No one's written them for you. But over time, I do think the experience of being in front of people and some of the techniques you learn just to deal with kind of that stage fright I would call it, did help me, but it is a little... It's not exactly completely the same. And also just being able to project in a room, all those kinds of things I think were helpful.

Brielle: Okay. Do you have any advice for young people thinking about going to college?

Elise: Sure. I think, you know, my story is a good example of never feel like you're completely boxed in about what you wanna study. So you may not be completely sure about what you wanna study, or you may start studying one thing in school and decide you don't really like it. That's what I did. I had one thing I knew I wanted to do, and I ended up doing something else. And I think the most important thing about being in school is to stay curious and find out what interests you the most. What are the classes you really like? Maybe you'll find something that was completely new to you that you weren't exposed to when you were in, you know, middle school or high school, but you'll get exposed to it once you're in school at university level.
 

So I think that's a good... Never feel, like, I guess my point is never feel like you're locked in when you graduate high school. It's like, "I have to do this," or, "I'm always gonna... If I make a mistake, I won't be able to fix it." You will be able to fix it.

Brielle: What type of lawyer are you, and why did you choose that field?

Elise: So I'm in an area of law called antitrust law. Some parts of the world, they call it competition law. So it's for companies that are out in the business world, and they, you know, they're going out, and they're selling products or services to people. Sometimes they sell it to people like you and me, consumers. Sometimes they sell them to other businesses. And what competition law wants to prevent is companies from using, like, strategies or tactics that would be unfair. Um, so trying to force people to buy products they don't want to get a product that they really, really, really do want, and maybe they're the only ones who offer it. You might have heard there are a lot of cases involving some of the really big tech companies like Apple and Google and Amazon and Meta, and all these companies are really big, and there's some concern by the government and by consumers that they use their size to kind of force customers to do things or make choices they otherwise wouldn't make.
 

So that's one thing. And then there's another area of the law that talks about competitors should be competing hard against each other, right? If you're gonna buy a car from Ford, but you're also considering buying a car from Toyota, you want them to compete hard on price, so you get the best price. But there are some companies that don't compete fairly. Instead, they talk to each other, uh, like behind, uh, you know, the scenes and say, "Let's not compete on price. Let's not compete, and then we can both keep our prices high." That's obviously not fair either. So my job is to make sure everybody in the company understands all the rules as we develop our products. They understand all the rules when they're out there in the marketplace selling, and that we stay on the right side of the law all the time.

Brielle: Is there anything you wish you could change about your job?

Elise: Sometimes I wish I could travel a little bit more. We-- Ever since COVID, we've cut back down on travel, so my company is in lots of different countries, like, a hundred and twenty countries around the world. So sometimes it's nice to be able to see people in person and not always do things via Zoom, so it would be kinda nice to be able to do that. But most of the time, I really like my job. Sometimes it's hard. Sometimes you are asked to make... advise on decisions, and sometimes you know the decision that you're-- you-- or the recommendation you're making to the business, they're not gonna like it 'cause maybe it's not as aggressive as they'd like to be. But, um, that's part of the job is being able to, uh, talk to a businessperson and explain to them why, you know, a particular strategy or a particular product or a particular decision might not be the best thing for the company in the long run, even though in the short run it might seem like a good idea.

Brielle: What is the most difficult part of your job?

Elise: I think the most difficult part, actually, in, for a big company like mine, sometimes the most difficult part of the job is making sure I see everything that's going on all across the company so that we don't make any mistakes because no one's identified something as a potential problem. We try really hard in our dep- law department to make sure we're all very connected with each other. And then I train people who aren't specialists in my area of law to look out for these issues, to make sure that if they see something and they're not sure if it's right or wrong, or they're not sure if it raises a problem or not, to then reach out to me. But that's an imperfect situation because in a company of 60,000 people, it's hard to always know what's happening.

Brielle: How does it feel when a case doesn't turn out the way you want it?

Elise: Oh, it's hard. I actually, right now I'm working on a couple of matters that are in litigation, but the court tells you to try to settle it. So you go off with a private, private, what they call a mediator, who's, who kind of shuttles between the two sides to try to see if they can get it resolved. And I had one the other week where we were just so far apart, and I think one of the things around litigation is that It's often like, you know, there's only one winner and there's a loser. And I- that's one of the reasons I don't do that much litigation. I mostly do advisory work, or sometimes I work on big acquisitions of other companies or, uh, selling companies, or even negotiating a contract with a customer. In that case, everybody wants the same thing. They wanna get to a contract, you know, they wanna do something. But in a litigation, usually, like, someone says, "I win and you lose." And it's hard because everybody has their own perspective on why they think they should win, and it's hard sometimes when we can't see each other's side. I think that's probably the biggest issue.

Brielle: How do you keep yourself motivated when things get hard?

Elise: I think that's just-- I've been practicing law for over 30 years now. So I think just knowing that, like, if you look at something and everything looks hard and you're like, "I have so much to do," or this particular thing I'm working on is really hard. I try to, and this is true for kind of anything in life for me, I try to break it down into small pieces. So instead of thinking like, "Oh, I have to get all of this done," I'm just like, "Okay, what do I have to do right now today to move this forward? What's the first step?" You know, and if I break it down into smaller steps, it doesn't seem so impossible. I remember once I had a boyfriend who was trying to renovate a house and, you know, he had all these, "I gotta get renovated by this date, and it has to be fixed, uh, by this date." And I just said to him like, "Why don't we just take it a day at a time? Let's first do, you know, the, we need to reframe the house and we need to like put on a new roof. Let's just take it step by step, and that way you're more likely to get to your goal than if you try to do everything all at once or you get nervous about like, 'How am I gonna do everything at once?'"
Just break it down into small pieces. So when I'm feeling unmotivated 'cause I feel like either something's not going the way I want or I feel like I have too much to do, I try to break it down into smaller pieces that seem more manageable and not quite as overwhelming.

Brielle: all right. So I know how I asked you motivate things that you keep yourself, but what are some encouragement where someone else gave you when you were struggling?

Elise: That's a really good question, Brielle. I think actually it came around a situation where I'd made a mistake at work. So I'd been talking to someone, it was a, a, a case with another party who w- wanted to s- who was suing us, and they asked me to do something. And I thought I understood, like, what they wanted, but they used a particular term I didn't understand.

And instead of saying, "I don't really know what you're asking me," I pretended I kinda did. I kinda like, "Okay, fine, whatever." And then when I went to my boss, I was like, "We agreed to do this." And he's like, "Why would you agree to do that?" I'm like, "Well, I thought that meant X." And he's like, "No, that means Y." And I said, "Oh, I screwed up."
And one of the things he said to me is, "Never be afraid to ask questions first. Don't try to pretend you know things you don't know. It, there aren't stupid questions. It's a really good idea to always stop and say, 'Do I really understand this?'" And even to the other side, you can say, "I don't know if I can agree to that. Let me come back to you," instead of just trying to fake it until you make it, 'cause sometimes when you try to do that, you actually make a much bigger mistake. So I think that, you know, a- and then that boss of mine, so he was very encouraging to me, and then he once hired me for... He left to go to another company, and then he asked me to come with him, and he wanted to hire me to do something I had never, ever done before.

It was a completely new area of the law. And I said, "But I've never done that." He said, "You'll learn." And I did. And within a year I was running that team. So I think just being able to say, you know, "I believe in you, and I think you have the skills to learn something new," made me feel good.

Rachael: We just have one final question for you. We ask this of all of our guests. If you could go back and speak to yourself at age 13, the age Brielle is right now, what would you tell yourself?

Elise: I'd tell myself not to worry about too much what other people think of me, especially about what I wanna do or what I wanna be, and that as long as I'm really curious about things and I'm really interested in things, then I should just go ahead and go for it.

And like I said, even if it doesn't always work out, don't get too nervous, 'cause you can either try again or you can try something new. Not to be too stressed out, especially at the early stages of your life, about decisions that you feel like might be hard to change, because there really is an opportunity to shift to a different lane or go do something else if you find something else that you really love and that you're, you're good at.
I think that's the most important thing. Find something you, you love or at least like a lot and that you're good at, and then you should be golden.

Rachael: Thank you so much. This was great.

Elise: Been my pleasure. Good luck, Brielle.

Brielle: Thank you.

CREDITS

Thanks for listening to Formative, a production of New York Edge. I’m your host, Rachael Gazdick. Our production partner for this series is CitizenRacecar. This episode was produced by Hajar Eldaas, post-production by Alex Brouwer, original music by Garrett Tiedemann. Thanks to the whole team at New York Edge for making this series possible. Never miss an episode by subscribing to the series at newyorkedge.org/formative or wherever you get your podcasts.