Andres Carrillo Demystifies a Law Career at Meta

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By any metric, Andres Carrillo has made it. The lawyer spent nearly five years in a Bay Area firm before beginning an in-house tech career that has taken him from Immersion Corporation to Twitter (prior to the Elon Musk takeover) to Meta.

Since joining Meta in 2018, Carrillo has been promoted to his current role as director and AGC of Reality Labs, Meta’s business and research arm focused on virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. Reality Labs develops headsets and mixed reality experiences that may redefine how users interact with technology in their daily lives.

But Carrillo doesn’t dwell on the destination; he’s more focused on the journey. He’s young, but this tech attorney has already had enough professional bumps and bruises to last him the rest of his professional career. Yet Carrillo knows there are likely hundreds, if not more, lawyers who have experienced abysmal timing through no fault of their own.

Welcome to the Working Week

Carrillo’s story is as much about perseverance as the dream gigs that he’s landed. “I lost my first job straight out of law school,” Carrillo says. “It was 2009, and the economy had spent the last couple of years imploding. I’d been preparing for three years to put these skills to work, and I was out of a job.”

It’s a story that may very well be known as the “millennial blues” in years to come. An entire generation entered a workforce prepared to take their stab at the American dream, only to find a job market that couldn’t make room for them. Carrillo considered many nonlegal careers to start repaying his student loans. But he did have one ace up his sleeve: his belief in himself.

“The values that my parents instilled in me from a young age were so important during that time,” the director says. “Failure wasn’t an option for me. Even though I lost my job, the next thought wasn’t that I was ruined. I was thinking through how I was going to pivot and succeed.”

Your Network is Everything

Carrillo lays out a harsh truth that he hopes more young attorneys can absorb before they get too far in their careers. Rarely are your skills and a snappy résumé going to land you a job. It’s your network. In his case, a law school classmate’s sister opened some doors for him that led to other doors, and eventually, Carrillo proved himself.

“Every job I’ve gotten has come from my network,” Carrillo explains. “I know the pride that can make you think you have to do everything on your own, but in my experience, it doesn’t work that way. You shouldn’t put that pressure on yourself.”

That time worrying about making everything happen yourself would be much better spent getting involved in organizations, meeting other attorneys, and making lasting relationships that can be both professionally advantageous and personally fulfilling.

The Cutting Edge of the Cutting Edge

In his current role, Carrillo has worked on next-generation virtual reality technology, like the metaverse, Quest, avatars, Horizon, and a variety of other early-stage technologies.

“Failure wasn’t an option for me. Even though I lost my job, the next thought wasn’t that I was ruined. I was thinking through how I was going to pivot and succeed.”

Andres Carrillo

And for the director, that means working with statutes and legislation that never anticipated a world where so much could happen within a virtual reality environment or headset. Carrillo says adaptivity is crucial in his role counseling clients across the organization.

He calibrates that guidance based on the current law, where the business is headed, how the landscape is developing, and where it may ultimately land. That requires Carrillo to consider a wide margin of risk—sometimes quite conservative, sometimes the opposite— because Reality Labs is working on issues without precedent.

It’s important for companies like Meta to work with outside counsel who understand their company and products. These external partners also need to have broad-based experience with new and emerging technologies and to be flexible in their approach to supporting a company’s business goals.

Daren Orzechowski, a cohead of A&O Shearman’s technology sector practice, has worked with Carrillo for several years and is one of those lawyers. “We have worked with Andres on a variety of projects. In each instance, Andres is driven to understand the complexities of new technology and then work through how to adapt existing and new law to reach practical commercial results,” he says. “It’s been a pleasure working with Andres.”

Empowerment and Becoming Indispensable

“My first stop internally is always our subject matter experts,” Carrillo explains. “They know our products. They know our historical risk tolerance. And I’ve worked hard to build relationships with those folks because they are so critical to everything that happens here. That’s good leadership, and it’s just being a good person. I want to empower those people, and I want them to know that I trust them.”

That focus on empowerment extends to secondees as well. Carrillo says outside counsel Elizabeth Mendoza became so integral to the Reality Labs legal team that she kept working with them even after she returned to her firm as a partner.

“That’s got to be the dream of an outside counsel,” Carrillo says. “Elizabeth was so indispensable given the deep expertise she gained as a secondee that we had no choice but to continue our relationship with her after she went back to the firm. That’s the kind of empowerment I hope I’m able to provide people here.”

But the most empowering part of Carrillo might still be his willingness to talk about his early struggles. By demystifying what building a successful in-house career entails, speaking about the power of building and leaning on a network, and affirming that no one achieves success by themselves, Carrillo has made himself a poster child—and not for the “millennial blues.” Rather, he exemplifies how resilience, community-building, and confident humility can be the foundation for something truly great.

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