Alumni Spotlight: Lindsay Orr Foy
Name: Lindsay Orr Foy
Title: Assistant Vice President and Associate General Counsel, Chesapeake Utilities Corporation
Firm Background: Associate, 2012–17; Litigation Group, Wilmington
Lindsay Orr Foy didn’t always plan to go to law school, but inspiration hit in an unexpected place — during an arts administration internship!
“I was a music major with a music management concentration and I thought I wanted to work behind the scenes in a theater or something like that,” Lindsay said. “I did a summer internship with an opera company, and it just felt like working in any other business. It didn't really feel like I was working in the music industry.”
But the one thing that she really enjoyed was when a colleague asked her to look at a contract — the opera thought they might have a claim against a contractor. Analyzing the contract turned out to be her favorite assignment of the summer.
“Since I was trying to figure out what I was going to do after graduation anyway, I thought maybe I’ll go to law school,” she said. “I had a legal studies minor and political science minor so I had a little background there. Putting all that together, I decided to go to law school.”
After law school, Lindsay’s career as a litigator brought her to Faegre Drinker, where she built the skill set that would eventually help to secure her first in-house role.
“I really learned the value of always doing good work for your clients and maintaining good relationships — even if it's not a field you ever pictured yourself going into,” Lindsay said. “I never imagined that I would end up working for a utility company. But I tried to do good work for the client and they remembered me favorably, and that helped get me in the door later.”
Lindsay found her niche in the utility industry and quickly progressed to her current position: assistant vice president and associate general counsel for Chesapeake Utilities Corporation, a multifaceted energy delivery company. From natural gas and propane to electric distribution and transmission pipelines, Lindsay’s team covers the company’s footprint up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
“We oversee all of the legal matters for the company. We have about 1100 employees,” Lindsay added, “so it's a big organization for only a few lawyers to support. We oversee litigation, negotiate contracts, and advise on HR issues. We work closely with outside counsel when we're not directly handling ourselves, so it’s really an opportunity to be involved with a lot of different areas.”
If Lindsay could recommend one skill to hone before jumping into the world of in-house counsel, it would be time management. Not only are you tasked with staying on top of the company’s legal matters, but you have to be prepared to switch gears at a moment’s notice — especially with the rise of virtual meetings.
“There used to at least be a couple minutes between meetings to let you get down the hall to the other conference room,” Lindsay said. “Now you just click a button and you're on to the next meeting, and most of the time it's on a completely different topic.”
Among her accomplishments in this role, one of the things Lindsay is most proud of is bringing work in-house that was previously handled by outside counsel.
“I had some background in labor and employment from my time at the firm,” she explained, “and I'm enjoying the opportunity to work with HR on a variety of employment issues that previously were generally handled by outside counsel. I feel like that’s an area where I’ve been able to add some value.
When she’s not in the office, you can find Lindsay watching Philly sports (Go Birds!) with her husband and their small menagerie of two cats and two puppies. She’s also found a unique way to bond with her fellow attorneys and legal professionals over their shared love of music.
“We colloquially refer to it as the ‘lawyer musical’ in Delaware,” Lindsay said. “For the last 20 years or so, the Honorable Robert Young, a Delaware judge, would write an original musical comedy every other year, based very loosely on an existing play or story that had a trial in it. He’d turn something like ‘The Crucible’ into a musical comedy, and then a bunch of lawyers and judges and legal professionals get together and put it on, with all of the money raised going to the pro bono society. Sadly, Judge Young passed away a few years ago, but the group is continuing on and planning a new show next year. So that's really fun because I still get to have that outlet, and it's a surprisingly good networking opportunity because you're with judges and other lawyers in such a laid-back setting.”
