🎙 How I Lawyer #113: Mark Fava
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👋 Welcome back to you and I hope you are having a great Friday.
In today’s episode I speak with veteran Aviation Lawyer Mark Fava. Mark started his career as a judicial law clerk and litigation attorney in Charleston, South Carolina but for the past 20+ year he has worked in aviation. In August 2001 mere weeks before 9/11 he went to work for Delta as a Chief Operations Attorney managing passenger litigation and defending the company for all FAA actions. He then worked as a Law Firm Partner focused on litigation and regulatory matters related to airlines, and for the past 13 years has been at Boeing where he has served in a number of different legal and executive roles. He currently serves as the company-wide ombudsman.
Mark is also active in writing and speaking about the legal profession and aviation law. He has a blog called www.theaviatorlawyer.com, he has taught CLE courses about what he learned from his time as a law clerk, and now he is almost done with a book called What I Learned from the Admiral about business and leadership lessons I learned as an admiral's aide over 30 years ago.
Mark is a graduate of University of North Carolina and the University of South Carolina Law.
In our conversation we discuss Mark's path to the law, finding and then carving out a niche in aviation, what it was like to be working as an airline lawyer on 9/11, his time as a junior associate and then later as a partner after being in-house, his move back in-house to Boeing, his transition from a legal role to his current role as ombudsmen, his public-facing speaking and content and why that has been so important to his growth, and so many lessons he has learned along the way.
📚 Time Stamps (Transcript Available at www.howilawyer.com)
[00:00:08] Charting a path in aviation law
[00:08:43] Being an aviation lawyer on 9/11
[00:11:34] Airline Security and lawyers after 9/11
[00:17:41] The importance of building relationships and not burning bridges
[00:26:34] How Mark learned an industry from in-house counsel to outside counsel to in-house counsel once again
[00:33:50] His new role as an ombudsmen and how his legal training set him up for this role
[00:41:20] Finding and learning from mentors
[00:45:21] Closing advice: persistence pays off
This episode is also sponsored, edited, and engineered by my dear friends at LawPods, a professional podcast production company for busy attorneys.
Thanks again for being a part of the How I Lawyer community and see you next week,
Jonah
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