For Stiven, moving in-house was chance to put faith in action

Before interviewing to become general counsel at Moody Bible Institute, Janet A. Stiven had been doing her homework for decades.

“You’ve been in my home; you’ve been in my car,” she told J. Paul Nyquist two years ago. “And I can’t say that about a lot of people. You don’t realize the impact that you have.”

Stiven was referring to Nyquist’s presence on Moody Radio, which she listened to frequently at home, in the car with her children and husband and during her 28 years commuting to work in the Loop.

That interview, Stiven’s Christian faith and her deep and varied experience in corporate law helped her land the vice president and GC role early last year. After nearly three decades with Dykema, Gossett PLLC, she left the partnership and moved to Moody’s 23-acre River North campus where 1,650 students get a tuition-free education to pursue careers in ministry.

As soon as Stiven arrived, she went to work learning the wide range of programs the institution developed since its founding 129 years ago by shoe-salesman-turned-evangelist Dwight Moody.

The nonprofit, which received $37 million in contributions last year, can feel like a conglomerate.

A publishing division is housed in Chicago. As is the radio division, which owns and operates 36 stations across the country that, with the help of 1,700 affiliated stations, allow its programming to reach an average of 1 million listeners per month.

Stiven knew those aspects of Moody well, but she was surprised by the breadth of the organization and one program in particular — an aviation pilot training program in Spokane, Wash., where the institution has a 650-student campus.

“We have planes? And I’m supposed to do what?” Stiven said, recounting her initial reaction. “I wasn’t expecting that one.”

The aviation program trains pilots who will fly missionaries to remote locations across the globe — all funded through donations by churches and others.

Stiven may not have known about the infrastructure required to send and supply missionaries into the field. But training pilots contributes to the breadth of legal issues she manages at Moody, and that expansiveness has been one of her favorite aspects of the job she’s held for 16 months.

She called the variety “intellectually stimulating.”

Higher education has its own compliance regimen. Publishing creates intellectual property issues. The radio business entails dealing with the Federal Communications Commission. And training pilots requires interacting with the Federal Aviation Authority.

And that’s not even mentioning commercial contracts, which the two-lawyer, two-legal assistant law department reviewed more than 800 of last year. That’s part of the reason she’s looking to hire a third lawyer.

“For a lawyer, it’s a great job in terms of the intellectual challenges,” Stiven said. “To work here, I think you have to be someone who really loves to learn.”

It also helps, Stiven has found, to be a self-described “process person.”

After spending the first month on the job meeting with as many executives as possible, Stiven has implemented a number of processes to better handle Moody’s legal needs.

Those include creating a digital system for the legal department to receive and review contracts — an update from a time when they were put into envelopes and slid under a lawyer’s door.

“That creates some order,” Stiven said.

She is also bringing order to compliance by creating a spreadsheet that notifies lawyers and internal clients about two things: What rules they need to comply with in their day-to-day operations and what rules force them to do things such as filing documents with regulators.

“We have a lot of moving parts here, so by using a spreadsheet concept you get a big-picture look: What are the filings we have to make? What are the rules we have to comply with, and what requires us to take action?” Stiven said.

Steve Mogck, Moody’s chief operating officer, said Stiven’s process focus and professional experience has been “hugely helpful” to the organization.

As important as her processes have been to boosting the legal department’s performance, he said, her understanding of people has been just as valuable.

“She gets that she really has an educational role in helping people to understand (compliance) and then setting processes up that enable people to follow them,” Mogck said.

As for Stiven’s description of the wide range of work as “intellectually stimulating?”

“One might think you’d be overstimulated with the amount of different things we have going on,” Mogck said.

“But she loves to learn. And she has been learning, but she also keeps applying what she’s gained through her practice in the Chicago Loop about how do you learn different areas and apply different processes.”

Jeffrey M. Dalebroux, a Dykema partner, worked with Stiven for 28 years, their offices sharing a wall for some time.

Their time at Rooks, Pitts and Poust, a midsize Chicago law firm that became Dykema’s Chicago office in 2004, prepared her well for a general counsel position, he said. At that firm, younger associates were allowed to work on a broad range of issues.

“I think Janet has found that, being a general counsel, you get asked questions on an even wider variety of things than maybe she anticipated,” Dalebroux said.

“And I think she does enjoy that, and I think she has that intellectual curiosity to delve into new issues and find the best practices for her institution and the best solutions for any problems.”

Stiven said her law firm practice also helped her in interacting with outside counsel now that she’s purchasing legal services. As a partner, she said, she often invested her time to better understand a client’s problem or business and would also provide efficient legal advice, even if that sometimes meant fewer billable hours.

“What’s really valued, and what I still think some law firms struggle with is: Tell me the best way to do it even if it means you’re not going to make as much money,” Stiven said.

“Somebody did that recently, and I called them back to thank them. I just said, ‘Thank you. Because that was the right answer and it was the right way for us to spend the money.’ There will be money to spend on that law firm later … It’s in your best interest to look for ways to invest a little bit of yourself in the relationship. Because it builds trust.”

Originally from Addison, Stiven said she decided to become a lawyer around the fifth grade. Pursuing that goal, she was engaged in student government and debate. After graduating from the University of Illinois, she earned her J.D. from DePaul University College of Law.

After working in litigation for a short time at Rooks, Pitts and Poust, she transitioned into corporate law, which she said she enjoyed because of the opportunity for a “win-win.”

“As a process person, I really enjoyed deals. ‘What’s our business goal? How are we solving it with this transaction?’” she said. “And coming up with all the due diligence that will help you understand if it will be the right fit and making it happen was just a lot of fun. And I had a great chance to do that over 28 years before I left Dykema.”

Her Christian faith had been guiding her to find ways her legal skills could help others, she said, and maybe a new pro bono project would accomplish that.

But then she came across Moody’s job posting.

“Sometimes you can be called to serve in ways that you don’t expect, if you want to follow where you’re led,” she said. “And so, for me, it was a chance — instead of me guiding the way, taking a note from the playbook of God and seeing what he had planned for me.”