Dorian Williams, '87: GC Goes "All Out" for Company That Shares His Values
As a person who continually demonstrates an unwavering commitment to his family, career, and public service, Dorian Williams, ’87, has found a happy home at a company with similar core values, putting customers, employees, and community first—Lands’ End. Williams is senior vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary of the international clothing retailer, which was spun off in 2014 from Sears Holdings. Having worked at Sears for 12 years before joining Lands’ End, he led the Lands’ End spinoff. “The spinoff brought things full circle,” he observes, “since I had worked on the acquisition of Lands’ End shortly after I joined Sears.”
“I am a good example of how the University of Chicago Law School prepares you to be successful at whatever life might bring your way,” he says. “I had intended to go into real estate law but ended up as a corporate and securities lawyer.” He summered at Rudnick & Wolfe (now DLA Piper), choosing it in part because of its robust real estate practice, and joined the firm after he graduated, but at the urging of his partner mentor he accepted assignment into the firm’s capital markets group.
During his 12 years at Rudnick, where he became a partner, he took a year’s leave to serve as deputy commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development, where he managed the staff of the city’s Economic Development Commission and was a leader of the successful effort to create a federal empowerment zone.
Joining Galileo International after leaving Rudnick, he was part of the team that negotiated the sale of Galileo to Cendant Corporation. “One of the things I’m very proud of in my career is that after the closing Cendant offered me a job in its legal department,” he says. That job would have required him to relocate from Chicago, where he was born and grew up, and where his wife was serving on the police department (she is now a lieutenant), so he went with Sears.
At Lands’ End, he has focused on transitioning the legal and compliance function to address the challenges of an independent public company. Josephine Linden, who chairs the Lands’ End board of directors, says, “Dorian inspires confidence because of his legal knowledge, accompanied by extraordinary judgment and common sense. As chairman, I turn to him for advice, support, and solutions. We are truly blessed to have him as part of our team.”
“I know it might sound trite, but everything I have accomplished professionally I owe to the Law School, to its rigor and its emphasis on developing judgment and wisdom in addition to sharpening the intellect,” Williams says. “I’ve done a lot of hiring and managing of attorneys during my career, and University of Chicago graduates consistently stand out because of those qualities.”
In his final five years at Sears, as deputy general counsel, Williams led billions of dollars in transactions that included financings and business dispositions. Earlier, he had been a member of the teams that managed the integration of Sears and Kmart after their 11-billion-dollar merger, and he had participated in the 32-billion-dollar sale of Sears’s domestic credit and financial products business.
“For the past 29 years,” Williams says, “I’ve always done my job one way—all out. I have prided myself on maintaining that pace.” Last year, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After treatment at the University of Chicago Medical Center that included four months of chemotherapy, the condition is in remission. Even during his chemotherapy treatments, he hardly missed a beat, participating in conference calls while hooked up to an IV and joking that the insomnia that resulted from the treatments gave him extra time to stay on top of his duties. He says that lately he has been thinking more about what comes next: “With my wife planning to retire next year, my two kids out of college, and living with the reality of how fragile life can be, I have some pondering to do about my future. For now, though, I couldn’t be happier to be in the job I have at a company I enjoy and admire.”