Hillary Sale

Legal scholar

Forget the ivory tower. In Professor Hillary Sale’s world, questions are practical, applicable and ultimately affect the bottom line.

“Corporate law is about power and relationships — what could be more interesting than that?” says Sale, who is in her second year at Washington University School of Law.

She has the no-makeup, all-natural beauty that’s seemingly endemic to native Coloradoans and envied by everyone else. A former legislative adviser turned Harvard Law graduate, she practiced with WilmerHale in Boston, before becoming a professor and co-authoring an authoritative securities regulation casebook. Along the way, she met and married Ned Wood and had a daughter, Perrin Salewood.

Dean Kent Syverud recruited her hard a few years ago, telling her St. Louis was a good place to live, raise a family and make an impact in the country’s second-largest securities market.

“He’s very persuasive, and here I am,” Sale says.

Corporate law isn’t a required course at Washington University, but not many seats are empty.

“Probably about 90 percent of the students here take it, and many of them take it like it’s medicine,” Sale says. “I like teasing and cajoling them into a different place and hopefully making them understand something that many find foreign and complicated when they walk into the room.”

The approach works. After her first year, students awarded Sale the David M. Becker Professor of the Year Award.

“It’s unprecedented,” Syverud says. “She’s been spectacular.”

“With some professors, it’s very much ‘I’m the professor,’” says Phillip Cantwell, one of Sale’s research assistants and former students. “I feel a much more genuine back and forth with her.”

“I like thinking about questions in depth,” Sale says. “To sort of ponder an issue and really think about ways to develop the issue or raise questions or push the issue in different directions.”

As mentor and Harvard Law School Professor Daniel J. Meltzer says, “She’s not just very smart, she’s very imaginative.”

Sale has written about hot, albeit complicated, topics, such as restructuring the SEC and derivative legislation. Most recently, she delved into “the public implications of publicness” for an upcoming issue of Duke Law’s  Law and Contemporary Problems journal.

“How, if you’re a public company, it’s not just about your narrow legal definition but about what people think about you, what the press thinks about you, what the politicians think about you and what they might do if they disagree with what your choices are,” Sale says.

Sale also devotes time to DirectWomen, which aims to increase the number of women on corporate boards. A March report by corporate research firm GovernanceMetrics found that women hold about 12 percent of board seats in the U.S. Last year, Sale coordinated a multiday program for women attorneys that included sessions and networking opportunities with CEOs, directors and other power players.

“They are all incredibly talented, dynamic women who are wicked smart and deserve to be on public company boards,” Sale says of the institute’s participants.

As for Sale herself, “she’s just lovely,” says Mary Ann Jorgenson, a senior partner at Squire, Sanders & Dempsey in Cleveland and DirectWomen’s chairwoman. “You wouldn’t necessarily think she was a dynamo when you first meet her, but she is.”