By: Laura Phillips
This month, I had the pleasure of a lunch to catch up with Anne Swanson, who has transitioned from being a Partner to Senior Counsel at Wilkinson Barker Knauer. Following federal judicial clerkships, Anne has practiced communications law for over forty-three years, in that time witnessing vast changes in communications regulation and in the practice of law itself. With her recent change, she is at a junction in her own life and is looking forward to full retirement very soon. She hopes her retirement will be filled with more international travel, service on various boards and federal advisory committees, time with her grandchild, and visits to all of DC’s museums and new restaurants. She reflects here on the changes she has seen, on the professionals who have inspired her, and the value and benefits of joining the FCBA. As a friend and admirer, I have to say that time spent with Anne is never wasted.
Q. What attracted you to the field of communications?
A. Like many practitioners I have met over the course of my career, I ended up in communications law totally by accident. At the beginning of my first year in law school, I’d sent resumes to scores of federal regulatory agencies but hadn’t gotten a single response. So, I had accepted a job with the legal department of a Los Angeles utility for the coming summer. To my surprise, in the spring of that first year, I got a call from the FCC Chairman – yes, the Chairman – asking me if I was still looking for a summer job. I immediately said “yes.” My next call was to the LA utility to tell them that I would not be joining them. The rest is history. That was one of the best decisions that I ever made. Communications law has been a fascinating place to spend a career – always changing and forever involving the latest technology. The field definitely satisfied my innate curiosity and met my needs as a lifelong learner.
Q. Tell us about the various places you’ve worked through the years.
A. As a D.C. area native, I was fortunate to have jobs on the Hill during high school and right after high school graduation. After that, I again lucked out and spent my college summers and vacations working for the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger. I took a year off between college and law school to work in The White House Press Office as a writer of the President’s Daily News Summary. After law school, I was fortunate to clerk for two federal judges – one on the U.S. District Court in San Francisco and one on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. It was great to have exposure to both federal trial and appellate work in a relatively short period of time. Since then, I have been in private practice. Off and on, I was tempted to go back into government, but I consistently enjoyed my clients and their fascinating projects, and I was never able to find a good time to walk away from those.
Q. Have things unfolded in your career more or less the way you planned?
A. Absolutely not! Even from the beginning there were surprises. About two months after I moved to California for my first judicial clerkship, the judge, who had life tenure, told us he was resigning to move to DC to be Deputy Attorney General. It took the Senate many months to confirm him, so I didn’t move to my 7th Circuit clerkship until long after the mid-year point when the appellate judge had expected me to come. Then, in private practice, I found it challenging to be one of the few women in the room or even in the firm. (One summer, I was not just the only female summer associate in a large firm, but the only female in the entire firm who was not a secretary or paralegal.) Clients, though, seldom seemed to mind that I was female, and, as my career went on and more women entered the profession, gender distinctions thankfully started to fall by the wayside.
Q. What’s the most interesting or challenging thing that you’ve done in your current position?
A. As I look back, my career has been a long series of interesting and challenging projects – that’s the true beauty of communications law and the related areas of navigation and unmanned vehicles, which I also got to experience in the last third of my career. Developing and working on the initial applications for a new technology were always the most fun: the first satellite-to-the home video service, the first cellular applications, the first commercial drone applications. That list alone tells you how long my career has been! I also spent about a decade trying to repeal the FCC’s restriction on newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership, a project that took clients and me to the U.S. Supreme Court a couple times. Long after the clients sold their properties, the rule was finally repealed. I can’t help but wonder how different our local news landscape would be today if that fight had been won earlier.
Q. Is or was there something interesting or someone who surprised or impressed you during your career and why?
A. Richard Cudahy, the federal appeals judge for whom I clerked on the 7th Circuit, was a great teacher and a wonderful mentor. He cared about everyone with whom he interacted and always listened. He strongly supported the careers of his clerks – both male and female. He was always there for us until he passed away in 2015.
Now, at the end of my career, I’ve been very impressed with the leadership skills of Bryan Tramont. I met Bryan early in his career when he reached out to help me with an FCBA project, but, for the last six years, I’ve been able to watch him from my perch within the WBK firm. He has built a very inclusive, high quality law firm that seems to value its professionals’ personal choices. And that approach to management and people comes from the top down.
Q. What do you enjoy reading?
A. I love reading, and my tastes run the gamut. I’m a news junkie, so I usually start each day catching up on overnight developments. I love memoirs and anything written by Calvin Trillin. My choices in fiction usually run to mysteries; nothing makes a long plane flight go more quickly than a mystery by Louise Penny, Jacqueline Winspear, or Donna Leon. During the pandemic, my husband and I devoured books by these authors. More recently, as I attempt to make sense of politics in this country, I am trying to make it through three nonfiction works: Laboratories of Autocracy, How Democracies Die, and Tyranny of the Minority.
Q. Is there something (a hobby or other tidbit) people don’t know about you that you are willing to share?
A. I am addicted to international travel and particularly adventure travel. Over the years, I have hiked in the Himalayas, spent an afternoon with the Chief Justice of Bhutan, whitewater-rafted on the Ganges River and BioBio River in Chile, celebrated a birthday in Greenland, gone on two African safaris – to name just a few wonderful travel experiences.
Q. Can you share your perspective on the pitfalls to avoid or other career advice for those who are just getting started in the communications field?
A. It’s a mistake to take a narrow approach to your work and to focus on only the legal tasks immediately in front of you. For those working in the private sector, make an effort to learn all about your clients’ businesses, or your company’s or association’s industries. Seek out non-lawyers who can teach you the business side as well as the engineering and technical issues. If you are in public service, pay attention to the other branches of government; for instance, if you are at the FCC, learn about the relevant Hill committees and the positions of their leadership. In this field, things can change quickly, and a broader perspective helps you to better navigate those changes.
Q. How long have you been an FCBA member, and what to you is the value of FCBA membership?
A. I’ve been an FCBA member for at least 40 years. Getting involved in the FCBA was one of the best things that I did in my career. Initially, I volunteered for the FCBA CLE Committee. Every year at the first meeting, no matter how junior we were, we were assigned a month on the calendar and expected to organize and put on a CLE program for that month. Producing those programs gave me exposure to issues and professionals outside my immediate field of work and taught me so much. After 10 years of committee service, I was honored to become FCBA assistant treasurer and then treasurer, the perfect positions for learning all about an organization. In several of my other positions – Chair of the FCBA Relations with Other Bars Committee and FCBA Delegate to the ABA House of Delegates – I got to know practitioners in other, very different legal fields and had the opportunity to represent (and brag about) the FCBA. From those positions and the opportunity that I had to be FCBA President, I learned that the FCBA offers so much more value than other voluntary bar associations – particularly in its collegiality, the wide range of CLEs, and other events. I am so proud to see that tradition continue. None of this would be possible without the amazing behind-the-scenes work of the FCBA staff. Kerry Loughney deserves so much credit for all the FCBA has accomplished while she has been at the helm. She makes her job look effortless, which is not the case – herding lawyers is actually a really tough challenge.