Stanford Law School Alumni

10/18/2026

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1105676298991380

10/17/2026

Stories, toasts, hikes to the Dish, and big ideas. 🌄

Our youngest SLS Reunions guests gathered for storytime in the Crown Library, alumni celebrated with classmates at class dinners, and this morning folks laced up for a walk to the Dish before diving into thought-provoking panels.

Here’s a look at the latest moments!

10/16/2026

“So great to see you!” is the phrase of the day as SLS Reunions kick off on campus. 🎈

From the red carpet check-in to old friends finding each other, memory lane moments, and engaging presentations, the energy is fantastic.

Here are a few snapshots so far, with more to come!

10/13/2026

https://www.facebook.com/StanfordLawSchool/posts/pfbid02ZjVD3fSznxZC8TeY7fXtCaXLCzmLjvtLjWAPRWnUxUE3RDbMmq9m7CoczKhnfTESl

Register for The Future of the Legal and Medical Professions Symposium, Oct. 26

Law and medicine have long been distinct professions, but they are increasingly confronting the same fundamental questions:

⚖️ How will AI change expert work, and how should institutions adapt?
⚕️ How can the professions ensure access to essential services for those who cannot afford them?
💡 How can the professions maintain public trust and confidence?

Stanford Law School and Stanford Medicine are bringing together leaders and thinkers from across both fields for a full-day symposium to examine what the professions can learn from one another as they navigate this period of rapid change.

Learn more and register: https://brnw.ch/21x6lvi

09/30/2026

Register for The Future of the Legal and Medical Professions Symposium, Oct. 26

Law and medicine have long been distinct professions, but they are increasingly confronting the same fundamental questions.

💡How will AI change expert work, and how should institutions adapt?
💡How can the professions ensure access to essential services for those who cannot afford them?
💡How can the professions maintain public trust and confidence?

Stanford Law School and Stanford Medicine are bringing together leaders and thinkers from across both fields for a full-day symposium to examine what the professions can learn from one another as they navigate this period of rapid change.

Learn more and register: https://brnw.ch/21x64oi

09/28/2026

Daniel G. Weiss, MA '91, JD '96: One Stanford Alum's Twenty-Five Years on the Climate Investing Frontier

You'll find Daniel G. Weiss in the pages of the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Fast Company, and the Los Angeles Business Journal, where he was recently named one of the region's most influential business leaders. Daniel sat down with us to discuss how Stanford Law School helped form a foundation for his success.

What you won't find in the existing coverage is the person shaped by SLS: a Shakespearean sonnets course, the mentorship that brought him to clean energy in Los Angeles, and his return to campus as a lecturer. That's what this feature sets out to share.

In 2001, Daniel co-founded Angeleno Group with Yaniv Tepper, his undergraduate roommate, after practicing mergers and acquisitions law at O'Melveny & Myers. Twenty-five years later, the firm has become one of the nation's longest-standing venture capital and growth equity firms focused exclusively on clean energy and climate solutions. Its portfolio has generated more than $10 billion in enterprise value, produced roughly 1,000 patents granted or pending in the US, and helped keep an estimated three billion metric tons of carbon out of the atmosphere—work that has also created some 17,500 green-collar jobs along the way.

After Daniel lectured earlier this year on Stanford's campus, Stanford Law School Dean George Triantis invited him to teach a course of his own in the spring of 2027 on climate finance, a fitting continuation of a relationship with SLS that began three decades ago. Additionally, Daniel recently accepted an invitation to join the Stanford Law School Venture Fund (LSVF) board, which helps SLS deploy its endowment in venture deals.

“When we started Angeleno Group, we believed that clean energy and climate solutions would one day become a mainstream area for institutional investors,” Daniel said. “A great deal has changed over twenty-five years around the economics and technology of the sector. Clean energy, efficiency, and water management are now a $10 trillion global industry.”

One element of the industry that surprises him most is not the scale of what has been built, but the nature of what has emerged. “One striking recent development has been the factors driving renewed interest in clean energy,” he said. “It's sparked in part by AI data centers and the enormous demand for power to support them — which we didn’t anticipate when we started out — and more broadly by the electrification of the entire economy, met with a progression of technology that has made renewable energy the cheapest and quickest way to meet that demand.”

In our conversation, Daniel was deliberate about what Stanford Law School gave him. “Some of my most formative experiences came from Stanford Law School, both inside and outside the classroom,” he said.

“Inside, I was taught skills in issue spotting, advocacy, negotiation, and critical thinking — tools that translate directly into evaluating companies and structuring deals.” Daniel’s instinct for exploring past the legal field extended outside the classroom too. He fondly recalled a course he and his classmate Carolyn Wessling, JD '96, once took together on Shakespearean sonnets, for which they received academic credit.

“It might not sound like the most obvious course for two law students to take,” he said, “but it was the kind of thing Stanford encouraged: go find the class that will broaden your thinking and the skills that round you out, not just the one that will look good on your legal résumé. I think that habit of curiosity has served me as much as what I learned in a classroom.”

It was outside the classroom that Daniel met Warren Christopher, JD '49, a distinguished Stanford Law alum and former US Secretary of State.

“I met Chris when I was a student at SLS and he was visiting campus, and he went on to become an important mentor to me,” Daniel recalled. “He taught me the importance of judgment and the power of listening, and the responsibility and privilege of members of the profession for civic engagement.” That relationship led to his first job at O'Melveny & Myers, where, working on energy and power deals, he began to notice a pattern.

“As a transactional lawyer working on deals, particularly in energy and power, I saw firsthand the scarcity of institutional investors focused on clean technology, which at the time wasn't really a category at all,” he said. “That white space was what we set out to fill. In a very real sense, Angeleno Group traces back to meeting Chris at Stanford Law School. His mentorship brought me to O'Melveny, to Los Angeles, and ultimately to co-founding the firm.”

When asked what he's most proud of since graduating, Daniel didn't hesitate. “My family gives me the most joy,” he said.

In his professional life, the answer is the firm he helped build. “I'm very proud of my partners and our team for having built an institutional investment platform focused on sustainability that genuinely did not exist before,” he said. “And twenty-five years in, in many ways, it feels like we're just getting started.”

He points to a decade-long supercycle in climate tech venture capital that began around 2013, a period he described as one when “seeds were planted in a garden of innovation.” Capital flowed then into early-stage companies and first-time entrepreneurs building new technology. Now, he said, even in a political moment when the sector is out of favor in some circles, that generation of companies is reaching growth stage and scale, drawing in a new wave of talent to the sector.

“Every day, we get to work with extraordinary entrepreneurs building high-growth sustainable businesses,” he said. “The level of innovation we're seeing is simply better than ever, in both quality and quantity. We're at an inflection point in the next generation of clean energy and sustainability technologies. We believe this is one of the most compelling moments we've seen to deploy capital in the sector since we founded the firm.”

That sense of perspective is part of what Daniel plans to bring to campus in his course on climate finance. For him, the return to Stanford feels like a full-circle moment: the same place where he learned to spot issues and hone critical thinking skills is now where he plans to prepare the next generation of students to enter the field. He sees real opportunity for Stanford students in climate finance, an industry he believes is entering its most interesting chapter, and views teaching as a way to be of service—to pass along what twenty-five years of betting on what's possible has taught him, and to help students see themselves as part of what comes next.

“We're genuinely excited about the future of sustainable investing,” he said. “And there are good reasons to be.”

-VV

Do you have other SLS alumni you’d recommend for a spotlight feature? If so, send them our way! Please email our office at [email protected].

09/08/2026

“Stimulating puzzles that I get paid to solve”: Judge Louise LaMothe on alternative dispute resolution

Louise LaMothe, AB '68, JD '71 is a commercial and employment arbitrator and mediator, teacher and advocate for gender equality, former United States Magistrate Judge, mentor to many, grandmother, and SLS class volunteer. In her six decades since graduation, Judge LaMothe has also made philanthropy a consistent priority in her life. This year, we celebrate her 50th consecutive year of giving to Stanford.

In your career you've seen the percentage of women partners in firms grown from single digits to over 25% today. What still keeps the profession from reaching an equilibrium in terms of gender?
In my view, it's the entire patriarchal society that we live in.

It's the same reason that we've never had a woman president in this country. And then, I think at a more specific level, it is the completely inadequate support for families. And I'm a really good case in point.

When I started out, it was still pretty much unheard of for women to go to law school. But we in the Class of ’71 were the first large class of women and as we had pushed our way into and through the profession we made a difference by opening the way for many more women

If you look at women who graduated before me and even women graduating around the same time as me, many had no children. Pamela Rymer, who was a United States District Judge and later a Judge on the Ninth Circuit, was a Stanford law alum. Pam never married, had no children, and seemed totally devoted to the law.

I was successful in having one child, super late, and I realized that that was all I could manage, even with a husband and full-time, live-in help. The firms where I worked were not really supportive. I ended up leaving private practice entirely when my son was eight or nine, at a point when the men in my cohort were entering their highest-earning years.

Why? Because all of these structures that are supposed to support families in a country were lacking.

Talk about your current ADR practice and how it keeps you engaged in your sixth decade as an attorney.
What the ADR practice gives me is flexibility, which is what I think we're all looking for, and stimulating puzzles that I get paid to solve. And it's one job where having gray hair is okay.

I didn't even know it at the time, but when I went on the bench in 2014, since it was only a part-time magistrate judge position here in Santa Barbara, I was allowed to keep a little private practice on the side. And so one of my friends who was a retired judge said to me, “you know, you ought to join the AAA’s judicial roster.” That has made me more attractive to parties, who frequently write into their arbitration agreements that the arbitrator must be a retired judge.

What do you tell new law students whom you meet who are considering careers in public service?
A friend of mine, who's the executive director of the Legal Aid Foundation here in Santa Barbara says that the biggest impediment to considering public interest practice is the debt students are coming out of law school with. I think that the enthusiasm is still there, but they have to be practical.

It’s particularly a tough proposition for women. Those women graduating today who haven't already had kids are thinking, “Oh my gosh, now I've got to start a family.” So if you both have to start a family and pay back your debt, what are the odds that you're also going to have the bandwidth to take on a public interest position? This all plays into the inadequate support for families in our country.

You've held a dozen volunteer roles for Stanford and SLS over the years. What has motivated your generosity of time? Does it come from the same instinct that drives your philanthropy to Stanford?
For me, what's really been important throughout my career has been mentoring others. There were no women on the Stanford Law School faculty during my time there. I was fortunate, however, to be mentored by a number of the men. When the Kansas Law School hired me in 1971 as the only woman and youngest professor, Professor Anthony Amsterdam mentored me. His generosity impressed me.

It's the mentoring that we do for each other in the profession that's really important. So, right after I started teaching at the University of Kansas, I was in the very first class offered by the National Institute for Trial Advocacy. And that began, really, a career-long investment in NITA. And I taught for them, over the years, during many summers.

All of that teaching, I think, just comes from the fact that I experienced such isolation at first. And so, [beyond Stanford], I've done a lot of work through the local bar, and the women's bar, especially, in mentoring especially women.

The philanthropy is really driven by wanting to give back. I had a half-tuition scholarship in my first year, and I worked as a resident assistant in freshmen dorms, Florence Moore and Cedro, in Wilbur. These jobs allowed me then to finish with very little debt, which was a godsend.

I can't have a conversation with a SLS graduate these days without discussing with them how AI will impact the profession. Do you see it putting mediators out of work?
Some of the more minor cases are being handled that way already. But I think most of the cases where people have a real emotional connection to what's going on…that will last. I'm seeing in mediations that people want to go back to being in person after several years of wanting to do it entirely on Zoom.

But in arbitration, you know, I think what I'm seeing is around the edges, we need to use AI to make ourselves more efficient. And the courts are tiptoeing in, from what my friends on the bench tell me. They're very careful about the use of AI. But everybody understands that it's going to be helpful if you can figure out how to incorporate it into what you do.

What do you do for fun?
I have three grown grandchildren who live in the northwest and one little grandchild, who’s in San Diego, so I go back and forth a lot.

My parents instilled in me, maybe because I was their oldest child, this message of being productive. And that's the reason I'm not just gardening, you know? I feel as though we got a great education, and it's a shame to just let our expertise wither because we're in our 70s. I mean, I don't want to work at the same pace I worked in my 50s. But, to stop altogether, I think, is not smart.

Otherwise, I travel a lot, as far away as I can, and I read. And I do garden. I love to dig in my garden.

- JM

08/27/2026

Every River Needs a Good Lawyer

“We’re not in the league of the real water warriors. But we’re Californians, we’re outdoor people. We always felt the loss of clear-running healthy rivers and streams would be a loss to future generations.”

For Jim Genes and his brother Dean, a love for rivers instilled in childhood has become a belief they have spent most of their adult lives acting on.

The two brothers grew up in Fresno in the late 1960s and early 1970s, fishing for bluegill and bass on the San Joaquin River with Fifi, a local farmer’s frog-chasing poodle. Their father taught them to fly-fish on the Upper Kings.

Both became whitewater kayakers and watched the West’s postwar dam-building spree take away the rivers they knew.

In 1979, the New Melones Dam was completed on the Stanislaus River, drowning one of California’s most popular whitewater runs. Jim and Dean never dreamed the Stanislaus could be lost under a dam. While others did fight the New Melones Dam, they paid no attention to it, until it was too late.

When the dam builders came for the Upper Kings, Jim and Dean got involved in the fight.

“Over the years, Dean and I have donated to many water and charitable causes that we’re interested in,” Jim says. “We’re not wealthy, and these smaller organizations are forever just trying to raise money to keep the lights on.”

So they went looking for a way to make an impact on a larger scale. The answer was a shift: from writing small checks to various organizations, to directly funding the people who might one day argue to protect rivers and watersheds.

“People only do what the law requires them to do. That’s where law and policy come in—and water lawyers can have that larger impact,” Jim says. “So we asked ourselves, if we can have maximum impact through law, how can we do that?”

What they landed on was clever and specific—the summer between a law student’s first and second year.

“Law students in between their first and second year are super enthusiastic,” Jim says. “So we wanted to create an internship between the first and second year to get students excited about water policy by exposing them to it.”

Public interest internships have long paid less than their private-sector counterparts. Students drawn to public interest work often cannot afford the summer that would launch them into it. A fund like the one provided by Jim and Dean Genes removes that calculation. It also gives students room to spend a summer inside a field they may not have heard of and perhaps find their calling.

The brothers made many cold calls, working from an environmental law directory. Eventually, Peter Drekmeier, policy director of the Tuolumne River Trust (now called Yosemite Rivers Alliance), connected Jim and Dean with Molly Melius at Stanford Law School. Melius, a lecturer in law, manages the Environmental and Natural Resources Law and Policy Program and directs Stanford's Lawyers for a Sustainable Economy initiative. Her counterpart at UC Davis, Professor Karrigan Bork, was a law school classmate. The brothers brought their idea to both Melius and Börk.

“Thanks to the support and creativity of Stanford Law School, we were able to create summer internship programs at both Stanford and UC Davis exposing first- and second-year law students to river and watershed policy,” Jim says.

The Genes Family Fund was established in 2022 and has since supported twenty-two Stanford Law students in obtaining summer funding to do this essential policy work, with up to six more fellows to be named in fall 2026. Internship hosts have included the U.S. Department of Justice, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic.

Because the internship program runs concurrently at UC Davis, that twenty-two figure counts only the Stanford side. As of fall 2026, another twenty-six law students have participated in the Davis program, which also focuses on river and watershed policy.

And while many of the recipients arrive at law school and their 1L summer knowing what field of work they want to go into, not all do. For quite a few, this summer experience is what directs them. To date, at least six of the Stanford students have gone on to work in environmental law.

One UC Davis student had hoped to work in environmental, tribal, and community-based law, and thanks to an internship the Genes Family Fund supported, she connected with the job of her dreams. In 2025, two Stanford Law students worked on an amicus brief filed on behalf of Professor Börk and other UC Davis faculty in a Ninth Circuit water case, San Luis Obispo Coastkeeper v. County of San Luis Obispo.

While these achievements are gratifying, Jim and Dean don't consider them the only measures of the program's success. All law students who participate, regardless of the direction they choose for their futures, come to understand, on some level, the importance of water policy and watershed conservation.

“We’re playing the long game,” Jim says. “We want to expose young people who may come back to water rights at a later point in their lives—be it via career, volunteering, or philanthropy. An internship between the first and second year is a very good time to plant the seed.”

Jim and Dean get to see where the students are placed each summer and where they land afterward. It is philanthropy with an immediate return. To that end, they welcome anyone who wants to contribute to the fund, or even adopt it, name and all.

Their aspiration now is to transform their philanthropic support into a permanent Stanford endowment that funds this internship for law students in perpetuity, and then to do the same at UC Davis, so that both internships outlast them.

“Rivers and their watersheds shaped us and have always been an important part of our lives. We want to ensure future generations have the same opportunities we did,” Jim says.

-VV

08/03/2026

Leading on a Global Stage: Adriana Maestas, '01, JD '05, General Counsel at ING Americas

Younger siblings often draw inspiration from the paths carved by their older siblings. Adriana Maestas credits her sister, who blazed the trail as a lawyer:

"She showed me just how valuable this profession is and how those legal skills are useful wherever you go."

Fueled by her desire for global opportunities, Adriana began her career in international law. Before law school, Adriana became a Rotary Scholar in Mexico, where she studied the legal system and worked for a prosecutor. When Adriana attended SLS, she encountered a level of rigor unlike anything she had ever experienced before and soon realized that lawyers truly are a self-selected group. With the support of former Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez, Adriana secured a law clerkship with Judge Weinberg de Roca at the Appellate Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in The Hague, Netherlands.

"Professor Martinez invested in me. She stood for something and believed in things, which was very inspirational to me," says Adriana. "The internship was an amazing experience; working in a UN-created body in an international setting was both impactful and meaningful. I learned so much about international law, human rights, and humanitarian law. It was truly a life-changing experience."

Now, in addition to her career in banking, Adriana is personally committed to tackling environmental challenges and has additionally engaged in pro bono legal work focused on immigration matters, child advocacy, and voter protection.

After several years in private practice, her international drive then took her to London, where she joined a capital markets practice at an international law firm with global clients, followed by six months in Hong Kong before eventually seeking an in-house role in New York.

In 2017, Adriana joined Lloyds Banking Group as a senior legal counsel. There, she had the good fortune of being mentored by the regional general counsel at the time, Steve Dolmatch, which prepared her to become the next regional general counsel.

"The mentorship and personal investment was hugely beneficial. I also was able to see firsthand how an effective sponsor can triple-charge your career," she says. Under the leadership of the then-CEO Andy Schaeffer, Adriana transitioned smoothly into the role of general counsel North America for Lloyds Banking Group.

The dynamic nature of being a general counsel demands a broad understanding across varied legal subject matters and quick adaptability to new challenges and an evolving commercial and regulatory environment.

"There's an important human aspect to being a general counsel—managing and centering communication and relationships is at the heart of what we do. Good relationships form the basis for good work and good outcomes, and everything we do is truly a team effort. I'm proud of the teams I have built, and I strive to foster teams that are guided by values. I lead with equity, trust, transparency, and integrity. I appreciate people who give of themselves in furtherance of the tasks we're entrusted with every day. I want team members to feel empowered, to take ownership of their work, and to grow and challenge themselves."

Navigating the challenges of balancing a demanding career and starting a family has been a pivotal aspect of Adriana's journey.

"They say there's never an ideal time to start a family from a career perspective, and there really isn't," she says. "That said, as the years flew by, I became increasingly certain I wanted to experience motherhood and not lose sight of the most meaningful aspects of life."

After just a few short months in her first general counsel role, Adriana and her husband welcomed their first child.

"I am so grateful to have worked for an institution and leaders that supported me in taking an extended parental leave of eight months. The legal and executive team culture of collaboration that we created also made that possible."

Now, nearly a year into her new career chapter, Adriana is the general counsel for ING Americas. "It is a wonderful challenge! A new platform with lots of stretch opportunities. I'm supporting the business while growing and strengthening the legal team and navigating the complex and changing regulatory landscape."

- VV

Do you have other SLS alumni you’d recommend for a spotlight feature? If so, send them our way! Please email our office at [email protected].

07/20/2026

How One Family Turned a Birthday into a Legacy

When Bob Caplan’s children came together to establish the Robert Caplan Law School Scholarship Fund in his honor last year, they were not marking a retirement, because there has been no retirement. They were marking a birthday: his 90th. None of them had attended Stanford Law School. Most of the family had not attended Stanford at all, with the exception of his youngest daughter, Hilary. The gift was not about their connection to the institution, but about his.

"That made me feel really good. My children have their own causes. They did it because of my affinity for Stanford Law School. It was a real compliment,” says Bob.

Bob started at Stanford Law School in 1957. The choice pulled him far from Portland, Oregon, where his family lived, and set a different life in motion than the one he might otherwise have led. He remembers his class, and the faculty that shaped it, with that particular warmth of someone who understood, even then, that something important was happening.

"We had an interesting class,” he says. “Lots of veterans who took law school seriously. Really amazing professors. The faculty was outstanding."

After graduating in 1960, Bob took a position at a small firm in San Diego. He has been at Seltzer Caplan McMahon Vitek ever since. "If I hadn’t gone to SLS I probably would have ended up in Portland again."

About sixty-five years into his legal career, Bob manages to sound neither tired of the work nor surprised by its longevity. He has watched the practice of law transform in ways that would have been unrecognizable to the young man who graduated in 1960; the pace of it, most of all.

"Obviously the speed at which everything is moving has accelerated,” he says. “You used to send a letter out; in recent years it’s email. People now expect instant answers."

He discusses the earliest word-processing tools, including carbon copies, with the same measured curiosity he brings to recent developments in artificial intelligence.

"AI has added an additional dimension to the practice of the law. You can get cases from AI and get the documents drafted in an instant."

He is 90 years old but has not had a desire to retire. Until two years ago, he was still managing the firm, Seltzer Caplan McMahon Vitek.

"The larger firms generally move you along but when you are part of a small firm—like mine, which has about thirty-five attorneys—there are ways to remain."

The Robert Caplan Law School Scholarship Fund that bears his name is, by his description, not yet large. But scale, he suggests, is not the point.

"It’s not a large fund but if you get a group of people pooling together and contributing, you can have a real impact,” he says.

What the fund represents to Bob is reciprocity. SLS launched his career. And that career, by any measure, flourished.

"Those of us who graduated and went into the practice of law a while ago have generally done well economically,” he says. “It’s always been more a question of what should be done as opposed to whether something should be done to give back. This scholarship fund is a wonderful way to give back to SLS, which gave us the start of our careers."

For students arriving now, tuition is a very different proposition than it was in 1958. Back then, Bob’s family was able to cover the cost of his legal education.

"I’ve been very fortunate and my children have all done very well. It’s great that this fund can support new students who come to SLS and are being helped financially."

When asked to publicly discuss the new scholarship recently, Bob balanced his humility with the desire to help the school.

"If this scholarship could inspire others to do a similar thing, then that’s fine. I love the concept of encouraging people to give back."

He is 90 years old and still at his desk practicing real property law. “Still doing what Stanford Law School made possible.”

The fund that bears his name carries that same conviction.

To contribute to the Robert Caplan Law School Scholarship Fund, visit give.stanford.edu/honor/caplanfund.

-VV