As the firm’s chief people officer, Jen helps position clients for success by fostering an environment where attorneys and professionals can offer their best work.
Jen has devoted her career to people-driven, employee work. As a young professional, she took a job at a startup company handling people functions. Over the next few years, Jen played an active role as the organization grew from a staff of four to more than 400, and she realized she had a deep passion for both people work and growth. She loves nothing more than harnessing an organization’s employee culture to build for its future.
After more than 20 years in human resources roles, including two prior stints as chief people officer for recruiting and IT firms, Jen joined Husch Blackwell in 2024. She had never expected to find herself in the legal industry but was strongly attracted to the firm’s people-first culture, and she loves witnessing how Husch Blackwell culture is lived out even by its most senior leaders. Jen is especially enthusiastic to build out the chief people officer role—her appointment marked the first time all of the firm’s people-related functions, from human resources to employee relations to learning and training to onboarding to performance and rewards, have been aligned under one leader. She knows this alignment is crucial to streamlining services and supporting both attorneys and clients as the firm grows rapidly.
Thanks to her years in the corporate world, Jen operates from a client-oriented perspective. As a c-suite officer at prior organizations, she was deeply grateful to partner with skilled outside counsel who made her own work easier, and she knows firsthand how beneficial and game-changing talented attorneys and their law firms can be for client companies. While her role may seem like an internally facing one, Jen considers clients to be her number one priority: after all, she knows there’s no better way to ensure client service than to provide the right environment for attorneys and professionals to succeed.