“Everybody has different styles, which makes it
interesting in a boardroom going through negotiations,”
says Jacobs, “but eventually you are able to close the gaps
and bring everyone to the table and get a deal done.”
complicated divorce from Time Warner
nine years after its acquisition. Jacobs has
seen thousands of AOL employees come
and go, including five departed CEOs:
Steve Case (1991 to 2001), Barry Schuler
(2001 to 2002), Robert Pittman (2002),
Jon Miller (2002 to 2006) and Randy Falco
(2006 to 2009).
Today, as general counsel of the digital
media company, Jacobs is at AOL for what
the company feels is its second act of its
history. She oversees all of AOL’s legal,
regulatory, compliance and public policy
issues. She supervises 50 in-house lawyers
who are located at AOL headquarters in
New York, and in Dulles, Va., Los Angeles,
San Francisco and London, and serves as
corporate secretary and adviser to Armstrong
and AOL’s board of directors. But if you tell
Jacobs she doesn’t seem to fit the stereotype
of a high-powered corporate lawyer, she
takes it as a compliment. Jacobs may be
a big shot, but she’s personable. She’s in
her mid-40s and looks even younger—and
she holds no pretentions. When she hears
something funny, Jacobs has a habit of
leaning back, giving a spontaneous whoop
and clapping her hands.
She grew up in the 1970s and ’80s in
Bellevue, Wash., where her father worked
as a Boeing engineer and her mother
as a schoolteacher. Her father’s father
was a small-town lawyer in Indiana, and
Granddad Jacobs’ stories made practicing
law sound like something she’d want to do.
Her parents, especially her father, pushed
Jacobs and her two younger sisters to do
their best. “He told us there’s nothing we
can’t do,” she says. One of her sisters now
works for Microsoft in Seattle and the other
for Fidelity Investments in Boston.
Theirs was an outdoorsy, sporty family,
and Jacobs was a star tennis player in
high school. After graduating in 1985,
she went to the University of Colorado in
Boulder, and by her junior year she had
decided she wanted a career in corporate
law. She majored in finance and loaded
up on math, science and business courses.
But after graduating in 1989, Jacobs took
a year off to work in a sporting goods
store to get a break from school and
earn money for law school. She says that
year in retail imparted many lessons that
have helped throughout her legal career,
including the important moral to always
treat everyone with respect.
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