About

When Verizon faced a multi-week strike involving 40,000 employees in 2011, Randal Milch found himself personally reviewing more than 60 pending NLRB unfair labor charges and assessing the litigation suitability of each himself. Soon after, he took on another huge challenge: the company’s high-profile, $3.6bn transaction with arch rival Comcast. ‘Handling a matter of such size and visibility in-house would have been unthinkable for most general counsel’, opines Jones Day’s Willis Goldsmith. But it seems Milch is ‘not most general counsel’. In the fall of 2012, he impressed observers yet again by his leadership of an interdisciplinary team of inside and outside counsel when Verizon transferred approximately $7.5bn in balance sheet pension liabilities via the purchase of a single group annuity contract with Prudential; the complex matter required a mix of pension, federal regulatory, state insurance, and asset pricing expertise. Goldsmith commends Milch’s team for operating in a ‘collaborative fashion under very tight deadlines’ and surmises that ‘in short, Milch has already accomplished what most general counsel hope one day to achieve. He has developed a legal department that actually does take the lead on major high-profile matters. And his department, essentially without exception, has been highly successful in doing so’.