Mark Bekheit, an M&A partner and global vice chair of M&A at Latham & Watkins LLP, has spent almost his entire career in the firm’s Menlo Park, Calif., office, but a period as an in-house lawyer at SanDisk Corp. was pivotal for his career, he said on this week’s Drinks With The Deal podcast.

As a third-year associate, Bekheit moved to Latham client SanDisk, which at the time had a robust M&A pipeline. That pipeline quickly slowed, and within a year he returned to Latham, where he became a partner in 2019.

Several people Bekheit worked with at SanDisk are now his clients. Eric Whitaker, formerly the chief legal officer at SanDisk, is now the CLO at 10x Genomics Inc. (TXG). Garth Bossow moved in 2015 from SanDisk to Airbnb Inc. (ABNB), where he is now vice president – legal, corporate and privacy. And Stephanie N. Wells is the deputy general counsel at Cadence Design Systems Inc. (CDNS).

In addition, Bekheit said: “I got a lot of perspective going in-house. I decided that I wanted to practice at a law firm but that I would be in a little more control as to what my practice looked like. At the end of the day, a job is a job is a job, and whether that’s at a law firm or in-house, there are going to be positives and negatives, and the objective is to maximize the positives and minimize the negatives.” That approach, he said, “has stuck with me since then, even as a partner.”

Check out the podcast with Mark Bekheit below:

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