Shawn Murphy was set on becoming an investment banker until the savings and loan crisis in the late 1980s took his job prospects away.
“It made me rethink what my plan was,” he said. “I just loved my business law classes that I had to take for my finance degree, so I thought ‘maybe I should explore this law school thing.’ ”
So far, so good for Murphy, who now serves as general counsel at Irvine-based Mazda North American Operations, which had $8.5 billion on the sales of 305,804 vehicles in the U.S. last year. He was one of five honored at the Business Journal’s sixth annual General Counsel Awards dinner on Nov. 19 at the Hotel Irvine.
Murphy’s first job out of college was working as a production buyer for Ford Motor Co. He attended the University of Detroit’s Mercy School of Law in the evenings and shortly after graduation in 1995 joined Ford Motor Credit Co.’s legal team.
He had a foot in the door, but nothing was guaranteed, he said.
The job as a buyer “gave me … familiarity with the company, but I still had to go through the full recruiting process, on-campus interviews, follow-up interviews; you can’t just transfer in,” Murphy said. “In a lot of ways, it’s been a big piece of the success I had. I started from year one as a lawyer at one of the largest, most substantial companies in the most complex legal general counsel offices in the world and did that for 15 years.”
His responsibilities included insurance product development, dealer and consumer financing, and litigation.
Murphy moved to the manufacturing and sales side of Ford’s business as in-house counsel six years later, handling various corporate and treasury-related matters, including lobbying activities, fundraising and state incentive programs.
2006, ’07
In 2006 he moved to Orange County to provide operational legal support and general counsel to luxury brands with joint headquarters in Irvine—Aston Martin, Jaguar, and Land Rover North America—during their last year under Ford’s ownership.
In 2007 the automaker sold a majority stake in Aston Martin, which remains in OC, for $848 million to a group of investors that included racing mogul David Richards, car collector John Sinders, and Kuwait-based firms Investment Dar and Adeem Investment Co. Mumbai-based Tata Motors paid about $1.7 billion for Jaguar and Land Rover.
An opportunity opened up at Mazda as his duties in Orange County wound down.
“It just so happens to be in the same industry, in a business that I spent so much time working in,” Murphy said. “It was a perfect fit.”
An interview with President and Chief Executive Jim O’Sullivan sealed the deal, and he was on board by December 2007. Not much changed at first glance—Ford owned a majority stake in Mazda, and the two companies shared some employees, product plans, pricing arrangements and strategies.
“Even though we were two different companies, because of the equity tie-up we could operate as one,” Murphy said. “From the competition-law standpoint, it was fantastic.”
Ford was facing bankruptcy at the onset of the Great Recession in 2008 when it reduced its equity stake in Mazda from 33.4% to 13%, netting about $540 million. It had cut its holding to 3.5% by the end of 2010.
“For Mazda it was a challenging thing because it was a 30-year relationship with a very substantial company that was going away at a time when the economy was the most troubled it’s been our entire lifetime,” he said.
Murphy said management had to change everything about how the two companies interacted, “because now we were competitors.”
Ford also didn’t have enough capital to allow Ford Motor Credit Co. to continue to provide financing for Mazda’s consumers and some 650 dealers, sending Murphy and two other executives to scramble for a substitute.
“We now have private label arrangement: Mazda Capital Services, [which is] backed by JPMorgan Chase,” he said. “We did an immense amount of work to implement that relationship.”
Murphy’s team also helped Mazda’s parent corporation, Mazda Motor Co. in Hiroshima, Japan, establish new strategic alliances, vendor relationships, and policies and procedures necessary for the automaker to operate independently of Ford.
A recent project includes a $1 billion manufacturing facility in Guanajuato, Mexico, where he and his staff of five attorneys assisted with negotiating and executing rail and trucking agreements to ship product from Mexico to the U.S., and ensuring compliance with local zoning and labor laws.
