Welcome back to Our American Stories, where we often explore the big choices that shape a life. Today, we delve into the inspiring journey of Jim Park, a man who, as one of ten children, set his sights on becoming a lawyer from a young age – a first for his family. While clerking at a prestigious firm during law school, Jim faced his first true ethical dilemma. He received a dream offer in litigation, but a stark reality check made him question everything: Was the demanding life of a litigator, often leading to broken families, truly the path he wanted? This story, brought to you by the Daniels Fund as part of our ‘Do the Right Thing’ series, explores how one man prioritized what truly mattered over a lifelong career ambition.
Jim’s decision wasn’t easy: he chose a less glamorous path in tax law, believing happiness came more from ‘who you’re with than what you’re doing.’ This choice eventually led him to a remarkable opportunity, representing the founders of OtterBox. But the story takes another surprising turn when OtterBox’s founder, Kurt Richardson, presented Jim with an offer he never saw coming: the role of CEO. As his attorney, Jim felt a professional obligation to advise against it, highlighting his lack of executive experience. Join us as Jim Park navigates these profound career choices and unexpected leadership roles, always striving to do the right thing when faced with life’s biggest ethical challenges.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 2: I come from a family. I’m the ninth of ten children.
Speaker 3: Prior to my generation, nobody had gone to college. And, you know, I read a book in fifth grade about the law and decided that I wanted to be a lawyer. I’d never met a lawyer and thought that maybe that would be a good thing to do in my career. And I had really supported parents that never discouraged me or said, “Well, you know, that’s kind of unrealistic.”
Speaker 2: But while I was in law school, I was.
Speaker 3: Clerking for a big international law firm, and things were going really well, and I received an offer to be an associate attorney and work in the litigation area, which is what I had always wanted to do since I’d been in fifth grade. And I had this kind of moment of clarity because I was about to graduate from law school. I’m married, I’ve got two kids, and I look around and realize all the attorneys that I would be practicing with have kind of broken lives. And that’s not me trying to be judgmental. Many of them are on their second or third marriage. They had significant challenges in terms of their relationships with their kids. And I had to ask myself, “Is that really what I want? Is that the life that I’m aiming for?” The life of a litigator is brutal, and I have so much respect for people that can do that and everything together. But you’ve got to have a fierce competitive side to do that, and it’s a very contentious lifestyle, and the hours are—it’s feast or famine. You either have no work, or else you’re busy and around the clock. It doesn’t lead to a predictable life where you can be there at the times that your family really needs you to be. You know, when I sat down to talk with my wife about it, I realized that there were some things that for me were more important than doing exactly what I wanted for my career. There was an opportunity for me to maybe do something that I was slightly less passionate about so that I could spend more time and put more energy into the people that I truly loved. So, for that reason, after law school, I decided not to go immediately into the workforce, but to go and get a postgraduate degree and focus in tax law. You know, one of the hallmarks, I think, of real sacrifice is that a sacrifice should get—
Speaker 2: you more in the long run.
Speaker 3: It’s giving something up to get something better, and it requires a little bit of patience and setting some things aside. But I think this is a really great example of that: setting something aside that I wanted in that moment for something that I wanted a—
Speaker 2: whole lot more over a longer period of time.
Speaker 3: I could have been very happy as a litigator, but at the same time, I couldn’t have been very happy without my family. I’ve learned that happiness comes more from who—
Speaker 2: you’re with than what you’re doing.
Speaker 3: I think that’s an important lesson in life. So, I was practicing law in Denver and I was referred to a client up in Fort Collins, which is about an hour north, and so started working with a wonderful couple, Kurt, Nancy Richardson, who are the founders of OtterBox. And after representing them through my law firm for a couple of years, at what point, Kurt pulled me aside after a board meeting and asked me if I would be willing to leave my law practice and come and just be the attorney for their family of companies. And found that I really, really enjoyed it. You know, four out of every ten phone cases that are sold in the country have our label on him. That’s a pretty cool thing because there’s a lot of people here in the U.S., and we even have higher market share in some countries throughout the world. And about a year into that, we were having another board meeting. Kurt Richardson walked into the room, and I could just tell he was kind of beat, and he said, “I’m tired. I want to retire.” And I thought, “Oh my goodness!” I left my legal practice to come and work for this guy, and now a year into it, he’s going to retire and I don’t even know who I’m going to be working for. They said, “Well, you know, we should probably get started on finding who that next person is going to be. Do you have any thoughts?” And he looked at me from across the table, and it was a fairly long table, and I got this weird feeling, and he kind of smiled and he said, “I think I’m looking at him.” And, like, in that moment, my heart sunk because that’s not something that they teach you in law school. As his attorney, I have an obligation to tell him the truth. And I had to say, “Kurt, as your attorney, I’ve got to advise you, that’s a really, really bad idea.” And he laughed a little bit and he said, “You know, I’ve thought about it, but I think that’s what I want to do.” And he knows that I’m a person of faith, and so he said, “Why don’t you go home and talk to your wife about it and pray about it, and then we’ll talk about it on Monday when we have more time?”
Speaker 2: And I said, “Okay, but I really think this is a bad idea.”
Speaker 3: Immediately pulled out my phone and called my wife and said, “Megan, I think Kurt’s having a stroke. He just asked me to be the CEO.” She said, “Yeah, that’ll never work. That’s just not who you are.” And I’d been on the phone with her for less than a minute when I got another call, and I looked down, and it was Kurt. I just left the room with him. So I flipped over, and he said, “Hey, I just talked to Nancy. She loves the idea. We’re going to announce it later. Congratulations. I got to go,” and he hung up. And so I flipped back over the call with my wife and I said, “Well, we were going to talk about it tonight, but I think the decision just got made. I’m the new CEO, and I have no idea what to do.” So I think I’m the world’s first involuntary CEO. Not anything that I had ever aspired to be. But I’ve often wondered why he would have chosen an attorney, and a young attorney. I mean, I was thirty-one years old, and here he’s got this family of companies that are worth lots and lots and lots of money, and he’s willing to put it all in the hands of somebody that has literally no business experience. You know, when I’ve asked him about it, his response was, “I trust you.” I’ve tried to live true to that: be humble enough to admit when I need help and when I need to bring in experts on things that I don’t know, but also to put in the time and effort to really figure out how to do this and to be guided by not just what works best in the situation, but principles—principles that guide behavior and keep people out of trouble.
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Jim Park tell his story, and what a story it is, folks! And he talks about principles right there, and trust, and trust in the end. Without it, I don’t know what other principles even matter. When we come back, more of Jim Park’s story, part of our “Do the Right Thing” series, brought to us by the great folks at the Daniels Fund. Here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button. And help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and with Jim Park’s story for our “Do the Right Thing” series. And let’s return to Jim on the ethical dilemmas that he and his colleagues faced now that he was CEO of two international companies.
Speaker 3: Now, we work with factories all over the world, and we don’t do our own manufacturing. We have contract manufacturing partners, and that puts a burden on us that we’ve got to make sure that we are doing everything that we can to ensure that they are living by our same ethical values and standards. And every once in a while, we’re surprised when they fail to live up to that. And we got reports that one of our factories had some allegations of child labor. Well, that’s not something that we’re going to mess around with, and so we immediately pulled away from that factory and said, “We’re not going to work with them any longer.” Well, they decided to send a delegation of people here to Fort Collins, Colorado, to convince us that they had changed their ways and that everything was going to be great going forward. And with it, they brought gifts for people, and it was just a small box of cookies. And we have a corporate policy that people can accept gifts, but something that’s de minimis in value, like a box of cookies, is an exception to that. Well, the head of our supply chain got home, and when he opened his box, he saw that not only were there these cookies that he was excited to share with his kids, there was ten thousand dollars in crisp, uncirculated bills. Now, that’s a challenging situation for somebody. I mean, you think you’ve got a mortgage, you’ve got student loan payments, you’ve got college to pay for for your kids, and that money is not going to be reported by anybody.
Speaker 2: You don’t have to report it.
Speaker 3: The people that are trained to bring IBEW are never going to report it. It’s money that you can put in the bank. And it seems like the perfect crime. All that’s ever going to cost you is your integrity. And I wonder how many people get caught in that type of a situation where, for something that seems to be a big deal in that moment, ends up being the thing where they choose to sell out. You know, the reason I love to tell this story is because this employee did the right thing. He called up our legal department, and he said, “I don’t know what to do here. Like, I opened this box, there’s all this money in it. I’m scared to death. I didn’t even eat the cookies. What do you want me to do with it?” And we were able to get that money and return it. And it’s actually a lot harder to return a bribe than you might think. Our financial system and our banking system isn’t set up to really facilitate that type of a transaction. So, filling out the IRS disclosure forms on that was a little bit interesting because we had to disclose that we were returning money from a failed bribe, which I’m sure raises some alarm bells in the government somewhere. But it’s so gratifying to see employees that do the right thing. And when I heard this story, I thought, “We’ve got to use this as a teaching experience for our employees.” The next company meeting that we had, we had this employee come up on stage, and I was able to tell this story, and then we pulled out a check, and we gave this guy a check for what, after taxes, would amount to ten thousand and one dollars to share the example in the story that it will always pay more over the long run to do the right thing. And I think that that message. You know, it’s a costly lesson. I mean, that’s ten thousand bucks, but at the end of the day, that’s the best ten thousand bucks we ever spent.
Speaker 2: I would do it again in a heartbeat.
Speaker 3: The other fun thing is, we had introduced a new celebrity spokesperson—
Speaker 2: at that meeting.
Speaker 3: It was Peyton man. You know, Peyton Manning gets a lot of applause, and that’s pretty exciting for employees when Peyton Manning walks out on stage. But do you know who got the bigger round of applause? It was the employee who got the check for doing the right thing. And I think, if we really look at it, the heroes in our society, the heroes in our lives, are not the people that throw touchdowns in Super Bowls. They’re the people that live the values that we all hope to stand by. And, you know, that’s my goal to try and live at a level where I can be one of those people, to raise kids that can be those people, to lead a company where, you know, we have a company full of people that make the right decision, that can look in the mirror and be proud of what they see.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: The other thing about it is, if you look at it from the perspective of that employee, he sacrificed the chance to get some money in the short term, but by doing that, he gained something far—
Speaker 2: more valuable over the long term.
Speaker 3: I mean, now that the company knows his character, what can’t we trust him with? And how many, you know, I don’t even know how many times he’s been promoted since then, and how his careers advanced. He actually has moved on to a different company, but his career has progressed in a really phenomenal way, and it’s been done in a way that is completely regret-free. You know, that’s the goal of success in life: to accomplish your dreams and not have anything to look back and regret. At the end of the day, we were negotiating a contract, and, you know, one of my good friends is now our chief legal officer. But we were negotiating a contract to buy a company, and as we were working through this deal, we noticed that the attorneys on the other side had made a mistake, and the mistake was going to make it so that we didn’t have to pay about a million dollars of what we had agreed in kind of a handshake on the front end that we would pay for this company. And it’s typical that people make mistakes when you’re putting a deal like that together, and that’s why you trade drafts of documents back and forth. And so we kindly pointed out, “Hey, you made a mistake here, you might want to fix it,” and they declined and said, “We don’t want to make that change.” There literally would have been no consequences for them saying, “Yeah, it was a scrivener’s error, we changed it.”
Speaker 2: Everything’s good now.
Speaker 3: But they were so afraid to make a mistake that they were willing to let the contract just be signed with this million-dollar mistake in it. So we had to go back to them and say, “Hey, look, we really need you to change—”
Speaker 2: this,” and they said, “No, we’re not going to make that change.”
Speaker 3: So I had to call up the person that ran and owned the company on the other side and say, “Look, here’s the problem. We’re not going to go through and sign this deal with contracts the way that they are right here. Your attorneys are not representing you well, but I’m not going to put my name on anything that looks like I’m trying to do anything unethical, that I’m trying to take something from you. And I realized that that’s a million dollars that would go into our bank account. But that’s not how we do business here.”
Speaker 2: You know. It’s a funny thing.
Speaker 3: They got on the phone with their attorneys, and pretty soon the documents got changed. But, you know, I tell that story to illustrate that even doing the right thing sometimes gets met with negative reactions, and it’s, it’s because people are often more concerned about not getting in trouble than they are about doing the right thing. If being ethical and doing the right thing were always the easiest thing, we wouldn’t have to talk about this.
Speaker 2: Everybody would do it.
Speaker 3: If it was always the most immediately profitable thing, we wouldn’t have to teach classes on ethics. It would just be a natural incentive that existed, and everybody would do it all the time. It’s always more nuanced than that, and so we’ve got to figure out what are the situations where people are going to get trapped. They’re going to get trapped when there’s an opportunity for them to compromise in a way that they don’t think anybody else knows about it, where they can make more money or they can accomplish some goal, and all it takes is them lowering their standards a bit. The result is always regret, and that’s what you want to live without.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: One of the other lessons I’ve learned in my career is you’ve got to hire people that have at least as high of a level of ethics as you do. If you surround yourself with people that make bad decisions and are willing to make compromises, eventually, like weight around your ankles in a swimming pool, it’s going to pull you down. And so I knew this guy well, but I wanted to test him a little bit, and I said, “Okay, so they’ve given us the draft of this agreement.” You know, we could make a lot of money here. My million dollars is nothing to gloss over.
Speaker 2: What should we do?
Speaker 3: And his immediate reaction is, “Well, we got to tell him that they made this mistake,” and I thought, “That’s awesome!”
Speaker 2: I’ve got the right person here.
Speaker 3: And then when they refuse to change it, and I asked him, “Well, what do you think we do here?” The reaction was, “Well, I think we’ve got to walk away from the deal. We can’t do this.” And, you know, it’s a lot easier to do the right thing when you surround yourself with people that are going to support you in that. Peer pressure is a real thing, not just on the playground in fourth grade, but as an adult and in business as well, and so many people make bad deci—
Discover more real American voices.
