By T I M OTH Y H A R P E R
THE FIRST FILTER That’s what Charles Schwab calls his General Counsel Carrie Dwyer B.A. ’73, J.D. ’76
Carrie Dwyer has had a remarkable career, which includes work at government and stock exchange regulatory agencies, a major law firm and, ultimately, as the general counsel seat for Charles Schwab, the financial services behemoth. Charles Schwab has nearly 14,000 employees and $5 billion in annual net revenue, providing brokerage, banking, and investment services to institutional clients and millions of individuals. “She’s always been my first filter for anything of business importance,” says Charles Schwab, founder of the firm more than 40 years ago. “Carrie has always been the first person I would go to with my crazy ideas about new services for investors…She could tell me in a second whether I should pursue it as a business idea or if it wouldn’t meet the regulatory tests.” After graduating from Santa Clara Law, Dwyer landed a job at the American Stock Exchange. The most junior lawyer on a 15-attorney team, she handled whatever the general counsel threw at her, including basic regulatory work and dealings with exchange members. Dwyer rose through the ranks, and by the time she departed the Exchange after 12 years, she was general counsel and senior vice president. “I had a 2-year-old, and I decided to take a few years off to be with her,” Dwyer says. She and her husband added a son, and two years turned into five as the growing family moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn to the leafy Westchester suburbs. Re-entry into the corporate world wasn’t easy. “Many of the people who always told me how great I was wouldn’t even take my phone calls,” she says. She finally landed a part-time assignment at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy in New York. Soon after, Arthur Levitt, who had been her boss at AMEX, was appointed chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). He asked her to come to Washington as his chief counsel in 1993 to help move forward his ambitious agenda for the SEC. “Arthur was really committed at the SEC to being an advocate for
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investors,” Dwyer says. “It was something that resonated with me.” One of her biggest enforcement cases involved price fixing against NASDAQ and the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD); several big-capital markets firms, including Charles Schwab & Co., were implicated for going along with the price fixing. The rest of the implicated firms denied wrongdoing, or assured Dwyer that their conduct was standard for the industry. “Chuck Schwab kept coming in and talking to us,” Dwyer says. “Schwab was advocating for reform.” She was impressed with Schwab, and Schwab was impressed with her. When the case ended, Dwyer was invited out to the firm’s San Francisco headquarters to talk about a job. Schwab’s history of a customer-first culture, along with Dwyer’s long-simmering desire to move back to the San Francisco Bay Area, led her to leave the SEC after three and a half years. In late 1996, Schwab created a top-tier position for her, combining all the firm’s legal oversight into one role. Technically, her title was executive vice president for corporate oversight, but she soon took on the general counsel title, too.