Building a Talent Pipeline

Editor's note: this is a story from the the Fall 2025 Chicago-Kent Magazine. To read the magazine in full, follow this link.

“We have about 65 lawyers and 13 Chicago-Kent College of Law grads, so about 20 percent” of our firm is alums, says Bob Surrette ’97. “I’ve always been happy that the Chicago-Kent students that we hire are able to do the work on the first day.”

Surrette has served as the president of McAndrew, Held and Malloy, Ltd. since 2013. He originally started at the firm in 1996, while he was still in law school. After passing the bar, he spent a year clerking for Judge John A. Nordberg, senior judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, before returning to McAndrews for good.

“We’re an intellectual property boutique firm. All we do is intellectual property law,” he says. “Most everybody at our firm has a science or engineering background. I forget how many Ph.D.s we have.”

Surrette, himself, is on his second career.  

He spent five years working as an engineer for Pratt & Whitney, a leading aerospace manufacturer, before pursuing a different path.  

“They sent out young engineers to work with their suppliers to make a part cheaper and faster and to see if you can figure out a way to make it better,” he remembers. “I worked with a lot of different technology companies and became interested in how companies developed and protected their intellectual property.”

That interest led Surrette to pursue his M.B.A. (in 1992) and his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering (in 1994), both from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He then enrolled at Chicago-Kent.  

He’s been involved with the law school ever since.

Surrette began teaching as an adjunct in Chicago-Kent’s Legal Writing Program shortly after graduating and continued to teach for 15 years. He is currently chair of the Chicago-Kent Board of Advisors and a member of the Illinois Tech Board of Trustees, and he has served as president of the law school’s Alumni Board of Directors.

“You start doing it because you think you’re giving back and ultimately you’re the one that’s gaining the benefits from your experiences and the people that you meet,” he says.

One of the main benefits of his close involvement with law school is the nonstop pipeline of talented young attorneys who graduate from Chicago-Kent and then join McAndrews.

“I was a student, then professor and I am an alum. But I’m also an employer,” he says. “I see things from a lot of different perspectives, and I can tell you that I generally feel that the students we hire from Kent are prepared to practice law the first day they walk through the door.”

McAndrews’ general counsel and shareholder, Deborah Laughton ’02, has been a part of both sides of that pipeline—first as a law student interviewing with Surrette for a 2L summer associate position and now as the firm’s general counsel.

“I think that it’s an important connection between our firm and Chicago-Kent,” she says. “I love that Bob has that pipeline. I think his involvement is in part why we’ve been able to get so much talent to come from Chicago-Kent to us.”

Surrette continues to recruit from Chicago-Kent because the students and attorneys from the school continue to impress him.

“If you look at some of the specialty programs at Chicago-Kent, its legal writing program has been fantastic,” he says. “Its trial advocacy program has been fantastic. The IP program is fantastic.”

Adds Laughton, “I think McAndrews has an advantage in recruiting from Chicago-Kent because of the intellectual property program. It tends to attract people who have that initial interest from day one, a commitment to intellectual property, so to say. There’s quite a few of us that were not just hired by McAndrews, but have spent our entire career at McAndrews.”

Surrette estimates that around 70 percent of the lawyers at McAndrews have spent their entire legal careers at the firm.  

Laughton attributes much of that to the atmosphere at the firm, which Surrette fosters.

“Running a law firm is not easy,” she says. “We are all lawyers on our board of equity partners. That means we are all very good at advocating a particular position. He’s very good about understanding the different motivations for different stakeholders, being empathetic to those different viewpoints, and guiding us to a solution.”

Despite the challenges, Surrette’s career has been a dream come true.

“One of the clients that I’ve represented for the majority of my legal career is one of the world’s largest medical device companies,” he says. “The fact that they’re asking me for advice and I get to give them advice, it’s a pinch yourself moment to a certain extent.”