[Podcast] Alumni @ RopesTalk: Conversation with Dan Krockmalnic, Boston Globe Media

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On this episode of Ropes & Gray’s Alumni @ RopesTalk podcast, employment, executive compensation, and benefits partner Megan Bisk is joined by alum Dan Krockmalnic, chief operating officer and general counsel at Boston Globe Media. Dan shares his journey from Big Law to his current leadership role, discussing his transition from litigation associate to COO and GC, his experiences producing award-winning content like Murder in Boston, and the valuable lessons learned along the way. Tune in to hear Dan's insights on career development, the importance of mentorship, and his advice for young lawyers.


Transcript:

Megan Bisk: Thank you for tuning in to the latest installment of the Ropes & Gray alumni podcast. I’m Meg Bisk, a partner in the employment, executive compensation, and benefits practice. I’m delighted to be joined by Dan Krockmalnic, a friend and former colleague. Dan is the chief operating officer and general counsel at Boston Globe Media. Dan was a classmate while he was at Ropes, and I’ve enjoyed following his career. Dan, welcome to the podcast.

Let’s start by talking about your transition from Big Law. You obviously started at Ropes. We were summer associates together back in 2005. Spent seven years as a litigation associate. Then, you spent time at the attorney general’s office, then News/Media Alliance, ultimately landing at The Boston Globe. You’ve held several leadership roles at The Globe, including general counsel, and then most recently chief operating officer and general counsel. Congratulations on your promotion. Can you talk a little bit about your current role and your career path?

Dan Krockmalnic: Of course. Now, the current role, the new-new part is the COO part. I came in here in 2017 as GC. I’m just frankly a couple of weeks into the COO thing. What that means practically is I’m here to help my CEO and my president with really whatever they task me with. So, for example, right now, we are wrapping our arms around all of the key initiatives that we have going on company-wide. We are building out a way to understand how each of them is going, what lies ahead for them, what might be working, what might not be working, what might we need to be doing differently as a result of that—basically like an operational dashboard—spanning all sorts of company initiatives, from real estate to newsletters and content initiatives, and the like. It’s been a very fun transition, from the advising work of legal, and the GC role to the operational role that I’m just now stepping into. There’s more to come on that, but so far, so good.

Megan Bisk: How do you divide up your role? I know it’s hard to separate out things that are legal, and legal advice versus a business role. I think most GCs would say if you’re a good GC, you’re actually a business advisor all of the time, even when you’re giving legal advice. But in your current role, the lawyer part of your job, is there a distinction between what you’re doing?

Dan Krockmalnic: There is, yes—and I think you’re spot on about that. A good lawyer is a really good advisor, and yet, there is a distinction, I think, with difference between advising and understanding how a business operates to advise effectively, to actually operating and doing the doing. That is what I’m still wrapping my arms around in a fun and exciting way, but it is different. I do disaggregate my hats and my roles in that regard. Sometimes, I’m doing something as COO and that’s what I’m still figuring out, and plenty of the time, I’m still doing something as GC, which I’m more used to now, after seven and a half years—there’s no shortage of that work to go around. You might have read a thing or two hopefully in The Globe, but maybe elsewhere, too, about the various challenges that all sorts of companies, be it law firms like you all, to news media companies such as us are facing with the new administration, around the clock.

Megan Bisk: I’m sure, but it sounds like it’s an exciting challenge for you.

Dan Krockmalnic: It is—it’s the best. Just really fortunate to be here.

Megan Bisk: I noticed your first job was as a paperboy at The Globe. Was that foreshadowing for where you sit today? Did you ever think you’d be going from that to your current job?

Dan Krockmalnic: That’s good digging. Yes, it actually was. I actually have a copy of the pay stub sitting here in my office for one of my weeks—I was paid biweekly. In prep for this interview, I actually went and I took a look at it, which I haven’t in forever. It was for $16.83. I did the math—I was paid six cents for every daily paper I delivered, and a meaty 33 cents for every Sunday paper, which bought me a lot of candy from those paychecks, but that’s about it. Love to say there was foreshadowing, but I’m not so sure.

Megan Bisk: That sounds like a pretty great job, too.

Dan Krockmalnic: It was fun, except for when it rained out, or when it was cold out. I was like, “Wait a minute. I still need to do this?” And my dad was like, “Yes. You still need to do this.”

Megan Bisk: Getting those good habits ingrained early on. Switching gears a little bit to Murder in Boston, a fascinating watch—it ultimately won an Emmy®, and more recently, a duPont-Columbia Award, just amazing accomplishments. Can you tell us about the moment when you found out that the series had won those awards?

Dan Krockmalnic: The moment for the Emmys was at the Emmys—I got to be there at the awards ceremony. I was seated on the floor, like one of those fancy people, at a table filled with HBO executives, and it was amazing, when Murder in Boston, the name was read. The director went up there, accepted the award with his team, and even name-checked me in his acceptance speech, which was honestly hard to believe and take in. The duPont-Columbia Award, I don’t presume familiarity with that—it’s basically the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer Prizes. It is, in industry terms, a big deal, and so, it was really cool to learn that we had also won that. And that was back at Columbia, where I went to law school, for that awards ceremony.

Megan Bisk: Another full circle moment there.

Dan Krockmalnic: I know—totally. Being in the same room with the other winners, the finalists, it sounds trite, but it’s honestly true, it is so inspiring what so many other documentary journalists are doing around the country. It was especially cool because that was the space where all of our law school proms were held back in the day, so I really never thought I’d be going back there for this reason.

Megan Bisk: Very cool, indeed. I won’t profess to be an expert in this world—it’s far and away from the halls of Ropes and my day-to-day, but I would love to hear a little bit more about the production process. Was there a particularly challenging moment that you recall that you had to manage as you were working through that?

Dan Krockmalnic: There were a handful of challenging moments—I won’t get into specifics. The project was a huge undertaking. It was a three-part documentary series that, of course, ran nationally on HBO. It was a 10-part podcast that was largely completely independent of the documentary series. And there was a huge print and digital series in our print paper and online in our app as well. Frankly, we’ve never done something of that magnitude before, let alone in conjunction with a partner, and so, there was naturally some learning on the fly about how to do that. It was complicated at times, like I said, but all of us—The Globe team, the doc team, and HBO—really appreciated how special what we had was. We were all focused on getting it done as well as we could, and I’d like to think the results speak for themselves.

Megan Bisk: You’ve certainly done a lot of really interesting things in your career. I think a lot of us end up in places where we use the skills we developed in law school, or working at law firms in ways that we didn’t expect, sometimes in creative ways, sometimes really just in unexpected ways. Have you found any surprising ways that your legal training and experience influenced your approach to your role as a producer of a successful podcast, and now a docuseries?

Dan Krockmalnic: It’s not what I trained for. If I step back a bit, producing really is the process of getting everyone to proverbially row in the same direction, and work collaboratively together. As I suggested, sometimes that requires some persuasion, and I think in that regard, my training as a litigator, of having to make cogent, concise arguments on my feet might have helped a bit. There’s one specific example that I have in mind. It was Halloween night, and I actually had to come back from trick-or-treating with my younger son to do a call with the co-heads of HBO Documentary Films, because there were a couple of loose ends that we really wanted to have wrapped up in a very specific way, about the portrayal of certain people in the documentary, and that was an exercise in oral advocacy, pure and simple.

Megan Bisk: That’s so interesting. I feel like you go about your day-to-day, you learn things, you develop in different ways, but it’s so hard to predict where you’re going to end up, so always fun to see. We first met when we were not even lawyers—we were law students. We have lots of young lawyers and associates who are just kicking off their careers. What advice would you have for those lawyers who are just getting started, whether at Ropes or somewhere else?

Dan Krockmalnic: Take calls. Take meetings. Be open to the notion that you might end up doing something “when you grow up” that’s very different from what your career looks like and is today in this moment. If you love what you’re doing right now, awesome—keep doing it. If you think you might want to be doing something different, also awesome. I think the way to figure that out is by being curious, by asking questions, by meeting folks outside your comfort zone, and by being proactive about that. Have no shame. Look people up. Email folks out of the blue. Ask them about their careers, how they got to where they are right now, if they’re someone you think you might want to have a similar career path as them. And really, just never say “never.”

Megan Bisk: Great advice. My experience has been that people love talking about themselves, their careers—that’s the type of information that most people really love sharing. People aren’t hesitant to take those calls.

Dan Krockmalnic: I think that’s right. One of the very nice things I think about the legal profession is so many of us really take it seriously that is a profession. I’m deeply fortunate to work where I do, and to do what I do now. I have lots of folks, lots of law students, lots of junior lawyers who reach out to me to talk, and I have a policy of just never saying “no,” because I was once in those shoes. I understand what that’s like, and if I’m able to give them any advice about how to end up where they might want to be one day, this is exactly what I tell them: how I got to where I am is not itself as helpful, in my specific circumstances, as is the idea of I was just open to talking to a lot of folks. And you never know how, as you say, looping back to Columbia, or the paperboy, how things might come full circle, based on conversations that you would’ve had.

Megan Bisk: I’m always surprised by what a small world it is, both in Massachusetts and then just in the legal community more generally. I share that advice, and I think people don’t always appreciate how many times you may cross paths with somebody that you might meet in a variety of different circumstances. Life is long, legal careers are long, and it’s just really hard to know where you’ll end up, and so, if you can leave doors open, and do things to open those doors, it’s never going to hurt you.

Dan Krockmalnic: Totally agree. It’s a small Bar in Boston, and in the greater Boston area. The older that you and I get, the more we realize that it’s finite. Folks know who you are, and reputations matter. You can either choose to be someone who takes conversations, who is nice, and who tries to bring up folks to understand what opportunities may lie ahead for them, or you can be someone who says, “I’m too busy. This is all zero sum.” It takes work to be the former, but I think it’s very important to do so.

Megan Bisk: Looking back at your time at Ropes & Gray, do you have a favorite Ropes & Gray memory that you’d be willing to share?

Dan Krockmalnic: Part of my answer to that is the trip that we took at the end of our summer down with a bunch of our summer associates to Baltimore to go catch the Sox, and with a bunch of your friends from William & Mary—that was super fun. But I think the real answer is when we were baby lawyers, just moving into the city and having real jobs for the first time out of law school, out of clerkships, etc., it was no one small moment, or one night, or anything like that—it was just the idea that we had each other, and that we’d regularly meet up for drinks, for dinners after work, and just check in on each other, relax, have fun, and unwind. It sounds so cliched, so trite—I get it, but it’s true. That’s my honest answer. I look back super fondly on those days, and I think it was important for us to help get us all settled, and to start the process of figuring out who we are and who we might not be and be there for each other. It was great.

Megan Bisk: Completely agree. I feel like having people, whoever those people are, on the days that are very long, and there are many of them, and the days that are very hard, and there are many of those as well, it just makes it so much easier. That was a very fun trip to Baltimore.

Dan, thanks so much for joining me today. It’s always great to connect. I know that our alumni community will appreciate the chance to hear about your experiences at Boston Globe Media, and at Ropes & Gray. For all of our alumni out there, please visit the alumni website at alumni.ropesgray.com to stay up to date on our alumni and get the latest news about the firm and our lawyers. For those listeners who may be interested in more of our podcasts, they’re available wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.

DISCLAIMER: Because of the generality of this update, the information provided herein may not be applicable in all situations and should not be acted upon without specific legal advice based on particular situations. Attorney Advertising.

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