A glance at Christopher Lal’s appointment book for a recent Monday shows a man who has his hands in many pots at Irvine-based Tilly’s Inc.
The action-sports retailer’s “one-person legal team,” as he puts it, started the day with an early morning phone call updating the audit committee of the company’s board on litigation and risk matters. His next stop was a meeting with an outside counsel about a class-action lawsuit against Tilly’s, followed by a consultation with the company’s head of real estate on several outstanding store lease negotiations.
The company’s vice president and general counsel also made his rounds to the marketing department to discuss new social media initiatives and looked into Tilly’s new distribution center for e-commerce before he was done for the day.
“That’s one of the reasons Tilly’s is a great place to work at,” he said. “You are very involved in many aspects of the business. It’s not a boring job.”
Lal was among five general counsels honored at the Business Journal’s fifth annual General Counsel Awards Sept. 23 at Hotel Irvine (see related stories on pages 1, 4, 6 and 8). At the podium, he thanked his former colleagues at O’Melveny & Myers LLP in Newport Beach, the firm that gave him his first job out of USC Gould School of Law, and his wife, Amy Laurendeau, who’s now partner at O’Melveny.
Lal spent six years at the firm representing public and private clients and acting as their outside general counsel. He also focused on mergers and acquisitions, and securities.
RemedyTemp
One of his big clients, RemedyTemp Inc., recruited him away in 2005 to handle all matters pertaining to employment law and human resources for about 25,000 temporary workers.
His stint there was short-lived.
“About a year and a half later, the company was approached by a strategic buyer, and we ended up selling, which was great for our shareholders,” Lal said, referring to Remedy. “The management team was let go at the closing, as they usually are.”
He landed his next role in 2007 as head of the legal team at Sunstone Hotel Investors Inc. in Aliso Viejo. He oversaw the company’s real estate transactions and later managed its portfolio of properties.
In 2009, he joined Thompson National Properties LLC, a private Costa Mesa-based real estate company.
But Lal still had his eye on the public sector.
“Tilly’s went public in May of 2012, and later that summer they were looking for a general counsel,” he said. “I met with their folks and knew this would be a great place to work.”
The sum of his previous experiences made Lal the right candidate for the job.
“I was a corporate lawyer at O’Melveny, so I became an expert in corporate and securities work and corporate governance and representing public companies,” he said. “Working at a staffing company gave me a lot of great experience on the employee side, dealing with employment and [human resources] matters. And then at Sunstone it was the acquisitions and the dispositions, the leasing and the real estate work that went along with it. All that experience has come to play an important role here at Tilly’s as we open new stores—that, along with having the healthy balance of business pragmatism, is very important.”
Lal has also been helping Tilly’s transition into the public spotlight after being a privately held company for 30 years.
“The challenge and the opportunity is to preserve what makes Tilly’s great—that entrepreneurial spirit, the connection with our brand and our customer, and the energy we want to portray in our stores and online—while balancing that with being a public company that has to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley (Act),” he said. “ Now you have to document controls and procedures, write narratives around what is it that you actually do to control inventory or expense management. That’s something that people who have been here a long time say, ‘We’ve been doing it like this for years. Why do we have to write down the process?’ ”
Lal said he’s also educating employees to be “careful about disclosure of confidential information now in a way we didn’t have to before,” since results of the company’s operations are announced quarterly, and the company’s stock value could be affected.
Hezy Shaked and his then-wife, Tilly Levine, founded Tilly’s in 1982. The company has more than 200 stores in 32 states and a market value of about $211 million.
“It’s a really cool place for a number of reasons,” Lal said. “For one, no day is the same.”
