Alumni Profile

Mitchell D. Stocks: BA, 1982
Theme: Non-Traditional Approach to His Career

by René Bogan – Communication

Mitchell Stocks has taken a non-traditional approach to his career. After graduating from the University of Washington, he received his MA from the University of Southern California in 1985, worked in the computer and telecommunications industry for five years and then enrolled at the Northwestern University Law School at the age of thirty. Interestingly, Stocks says, “he suspects that he will eventually do something much different than what he is doing now.”

Stocks is a law partner in the Hong Kong office of Latham & Watkins and is a managing associate of the firm’s finance department. He also has the credentials to practice law before the Washington state bar and is admitted to the High Court of Hong Kong.

The web page from Stocks’ firm reports that his practice focuses on international finances and corporate transactions in Asia, as well as general corporate, telecommunications and private equity matters. Stocks represents developers, lenders, and multi-lateral institutions in connection with many of the landmark project financings throughout Asia. In 2003, he represented a group of Thai and international commercial banks in the $1.34 billion dollar financing venture of the Map Ta Phut plant called the BLCP Power Project, in Thailand.

Stocks attributes his success to his family. He met his wife of 21 years in a Japanese foreign language class in China and she has helped him learn Mandarin Chinese, which he uses daily in his law practice. In addition, Stocks finds his involvement on the board of his son’s international school to be both challenging and joyful. “I have begun to develop some sense of the challenges that educational institutions face and the rewards that they offer. Cool stuff to stumble across in one’s mid-forties.”

Stocks believes because of his non-traditional approach to his career, he could provide an “odd perspective from which someone might benefit” that may be just starting out.