Profiles: Christine Richards '79
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The fact that Fedex has changed and grown so much is one reason that I've been able to stay with one company for more than 20 years.
Christine Richards joined an elite group June 1 when she took over as executive vice president, general counsel, and secretary of FedEx Corporation. Richards is one of just 73 women currently serving as corporate counsel for Fortune 500 companies, according to Corporate Counsel magazine. She is the first woman to serve on the executive committee of FedEx.
Richards joined FedEx in 1984, when it was a single company, Federal Express Corporation, which revolutionized the courier industry by delivering packages overnight, routing all U.S. freight through its Memphis, TN, hub. Having joined a legal department that had fewer than a dozen lawyers, Richards now oversees 137 lawyers serving eight diverse subsidiaries operating in 220 countries and territories, as well as the parent company's government affairs group in Washington, D.C., and its security operations world wide.
In her first position as a regulatory attorney with Federal Express, Richards worked on the company's European expansion. She was also instrumental in crafting a legal strategy that resulted in the de-regulation of interstate trucking.
It worked like this: After Federal Express opened a regional hub in Oakland, CA, packages going from San Francisco to Los Angeles were routed through that hub, instead of going through Memphis. Federal Express was successful on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in challenging the California Public Utilities Commission's imposition of trucking tariffs on the freight, asserting that the Federal Aviation Act preempted the states from economically regulating the rate for services of a certified air carrier. After the Supreme Court declined to hear the regulator's appeal, the trucking industry joined Federal Express in a successful push to pass federal legislation prohibiting the states from economically regulating the operations of interstate carriers.
This was a collective effort of which Richards is particularly proud. "The U.S. economy benefited from greater efficiency in our collective trucking opportunities, and costs were lower than they would have been as a result of that litigation."
Richards says she's relished all of the opportunities she's had to take creative approaches to problems that are significant.
FedEx really encourages you to use all of your abilities and skills, to be curious, to grow and expand your knowledge. [The legal team] gives advice and counsel not only on the legal issues, but also on the running of the various operations," said Richards. "It's a good place to work if you like complexity, change, and challenges.
And the unusual. Having long been in charge of protecting the company's intellectual property and brand, Richards gets to read movie scripts when the company is approached to allow its logo to be used in a production–such films as "The Addams Family" and "Runaway Bride" got the go-ahead. A more unusual request came, said Richards, when FedEx was offered what amounted to a co-starring role in the 2000 Tom Hanks vehicle, "Cast Away." The plot involves the crash of a FedEx cargo jet en route to an Asian hub; the sole survivor, Hanks' character, a corporate executive, spends a period of years marooned on a remote island, his only company a volleyball–removed from a sodden FedEx package–and an unopened box with its shipping label intact.
"Up until that time, no operating air carrier had ever allowed an aircraft accident to be portrayed in a movie using its name, and what would appear to be its airplane. We had a discussion about that. The filmmakers had to convince us that this was a good thing for the storyline and the script, and once we looked at it, and talked it over, we thought it was. The story is about the people involved, the reliability of the service, and the fact that folks go above and beyond to deliver and meet our customers' needs. We had just a wonderful reaction to it."
For fun, Richards raises horses and competes, as an accomplished adult amateur, in show-jumping competitions; she keeps six horses on the property she shares with her husband, Dan Richards MBA '80. Richards travels widely in her work but says that while it may be for business, it's always a pleasure.
"The neat thing is that when you work with FedEx, it's like family. So when you go to foreign locations, and you go to the operations there, you talk to the people and we have a common culture and common bond."