Angela Steele, ’02: From IP Lawyer to GC of McDonald’s
Speaking at a program for students at the Law School last year, Angela Steele, ’02, urged them to strongly consider taking business classes, even if they didn’t think those classes were fully aligned with what they might want to do in their careers.
“You never really know where your career might take you,” she told the students. That is something she knows from her own experience.
Steele is senior vice president and general counsel at McDonald’s US. She has been the GC there since 2021, after having held that position with an interim designation for the previous year.
“When I graduated from the Law School, if you had given me a thousand guesses, I probably wouldn’t have guessed that I’d be working at a giant corporation today, let alone at McDonald’s in a GC role,” she said. “In fact, if you had asked me seven or eight years after I graduated, I still wouldn’t have guessed it.”
In her first four years after graduating, Steele was very happy practicing intellectual property law at Pattishall, McAuliffe, Newbury, Hilliard & Geraldson in Chicago, focused on copyright, advertising, and trademark issues. “I loved my work and the firm, and I could easily imagine myself doing that kind of work at Pattishall for a very long time, or even for the rest of my career,” she said.
Life intervened when her husband, ’02 classmate Scott Edenfield, received an offer that they agreed he couldn’t pass up, to work at the US Attorney’s office in Miami. She went there with him, and did commercial litigation work at Greenberg Traurig. “I handled a lot of litigation, and found that I liked that a lot, too,” she recalled.
When an opportunity came for the couple to return to Chicago in 2011, Steele heard that McDonald’s was hiring for its marketing and intellectual property legal team, and she decided to take a shot. “IP law was what I had most liked doing, but I had been out of that field for more than four years, and I had no experience working as a lawyer at a company,” she recalled. “I was pretty sure they wouldn’t hire me. But they did. And it’s been a wonderful journey since then.”
She sought out a broad range of responsibilities at McDonald’s, serving in four different roles in her first ten years there, including GC for Latin America and managing counsel of an international team.
“I learned skills [at the Law School] that helped me in every job I had, and I trusted that they would help me in any new situation.”
“When an opportunity would come up to try something new, I raised my hand,” she said. “My time at the Law School had a lot to do with that. I learned skills there that helped me in every job I had, and I trusted that they would help me in any new situation. And it wasn’t just skills of legal analysis and writing; it was also the ability to hear all viewpoints in a situation and come up with good solutions. That has helped me immensely with leadership responsibilities, particularly now as a member of the company’s executive team.”
Steele acts on her appreciation of the Law School in many ways: meeting with small groups of students in the “lunch with alumni leaders” program and speaking at larger events, serving on reunion committees, and participating in the women’s mentoring program.
Looking to the future, Steele doesn’t see her responsibilities ever becoming routine. “Being part of the executive team means constantly being engaged in fascinating discussions and decisions, particularly because McDonald’s is not just another big company—many people have strong emotional feelings toward the brand, and it becomes a lightning rod for many kinds of issues that affect not just the company but all of society. I might not have expected to be where I am now, but I am incredibly happy that I am.”