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Not much can throw Nichol Garzon-Mitchell off her game. The chief legal officer, SVP, and corporate secretary at advisory services heavyweight Glass Lewis learned how to blossom in a storm from an early age.
Before going toe to toe with international regulators, before building a legal department from scratch, and before entering law school in Mexico at seventeen, Garzon-Mitchell, aged seven, came home from school in Los Angeles on a Monday and learned she was moving to Mexico on Friday.
“My parents are very spontaneous, ‘fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants’ people,” the attorney and SVP says. “We moved so quickly that we literally spent the first three months at the Hyatt hotel because they hadn’t yet found a house to move into before we left LA.”
The Nontraditional Path Can Be the Right One
This whirlwind of change would become routine for Garzon-Mitchell. Her parents enrolled her and her sister in a French school in Guadalajara—though they didn’t speak French—because their bilingual mother wanted her daughters to have three languages at their disposal. But it meant she had to retake second grade.
Then, during her fourth-grade year, her parents skipped her ahead to sixth grade. That move, Garzon-Mitchell jokes, pretty much destroyed her basic math fundamentals and guaranteed her a career in a non-math-related field.
“I want to show Latinas that a nontraditional path can still be the right path.”
Nichol Garzon-Mitchell
After sixth grade, Garzon-Mitchell moved to San Diego for two years, where she attended a Catholic school. Then back to Mexico, and finally back to Los Angeles for her senior year of high school … at an all-girls school. By then, Garzon-Mitchell was determined to go back to Mexico for law school after she graduated.
These experiences explain why you can’t shake Garzon-Mitchell today. They’re also why she’s such an adept international leader who jokes that she would get bored if she worked for a company with operations only located in the United States. Admittedly a Type A personality, she has worked to create a world where Latinas don’t have to face the same hurdles she did as they navigate their careers.
Garzon-Mitchell came to Glass Lewis just a year after its founding. She started out in a part-time research analyst role and transitioned to the company’s inaugural in-house lawyer. In short order, the founders left, Garzon-Mitchell got a promotion to general counsel, and she was tasked with building a legal department from scratch.
“For much of my career, I can’t say that I had many people to show me the ropes,” the attorney says. “I had to figure out what it meant to be a GC, how to build a legal department, and how to be a leader on my own.”
She wants people coming up after her to have more support. That’s why she’s partnered with organizations to mentor and educate future leaders for the past five years. “I want to show Latinas that a nontraditional path can still be the right path.”
The CLO has been busy. This year she was recognized as one of ALPFA’s Top 50 Most Powerful Latinas, in 2023 she was selected as a member of the 2023 Poder25 pipeline program for the Hispanic National Bar Association; and in 2022 she was named a 2022 Modern Governance 100 Compliance & Ethics Leader by Diligent and was an inaugural cohort member of the VC University independent director initiative. She is also an active member of the L Suite, the Latino Corporate Directors Association, the Alumni Society, and serves as cochair of the Latinos Unidos Family Network group at her son’s high school.
Handling It
But back to the CLO’s day-to-day. It’s an interesting time for an expert in corporate governance because, as the lawyer explains, the definition of “governance” has expanded so widely over the last decade. Glass Lewis is best known for providing research and data-backed recommendations for shareholder votes, but acting as a neutral advisor doesn’t always win the CLO a lot of fans.
“At this moment, there is a lot of shareholder activism, political volatility, and shareholder proposals that means we wind up in the spotlight,” Garzon-Mitchell explains. “We are always looking out for the shareholders, which means you have to make hard calls sometimes. We’re used to being in the crosshairs, but it’s become increasingly politicized in a way that is new.”
The CLO says she spends a lot of her days rolling up her sleeves and responding to inquiries from regulators, including Congress, whose salutations aren’t always of the most collaborative tenor.
“A lot of what I do day to day is fairly complex and challenging,” the CLO says with a pained laugh. “But I think of something my mom always says: Everything has a solution except death. She tells me I’m like my dad. Work just doesn’t get to me. It’s just work, and I handle it.”
