Meet Ooma’s Wendy Giblin—an attorney equally adept at sparring in courts and boxing rings

While the pandemic was a period of jabs and low blows for many, it was a time of exciting changes for Ooma Corporate Counsel Wendy Giblin. She embarked on a new career journey that brought her to Ooma and got hooked on a new sport. The first was strategically planned, the second was sort of happenstance. Both rely on her skills to be nimble.

Setting and achieving goals

Before joining Ooma, Giblin spent the majority of her legal career working for firms litigating lawsuits, which meant spending a lot of time in court. After nearly 20 years and many multi-million dollar wins, she began seeking an in-house role. "The transition to a corporate counsel is something I had always wanted to do," Giblin said.

Mid-career she went back to Golden Gate University, where she received her law degree, and earned both a master's and a doctorate in business administration. "So it's seven years of business school and I really wanted to apply that in a role where I could make a difference as a businesswoman, as well as an attorney," Giblin said.

Ooma checked all her prerequisite boxes. "It's a well-established company with a long history, yet still small enough so that I have the opportunity to do a lot of different tasks within the company," she explains. "Every day is different because we have a small legal team. We don't specialize or have one person focused on a particular department, so I get a wide variety of tasks every single day." At Ooma, a publicly traded company, those tasks range from working on corporate governance, to advising HR about employee issues, to reviewing contracts and approving how Ooma responds to telecom regulations.

Floating like a butterfly

Because each attorney is a generalist, "it helps us balance the workload and it also makes sure we can respond to requests in a more timely way because they aren't being held up by one person, who may have a backlog of tasks from a particular department." Giblin admits, "I love working with our sales team. So, I tend to gravitate toward a lot of their projects, but I could do anything to serve any of our departments on a given day.

"Fun fact, I wake up at 4 a.m. every day, so I'll do a round of emails or other focused tasks, and then I'll go to the gym for a few hours. Then when I come back, I've already gotten responses back from the round one emails." Being a morning person is especially helpful when working with the sales team members in the Eastern or Central time zones. If Giblin kept to regular Pacific Coast hours, half the sales team's day would be over by the time she logged on her computer at 8 or 9 a.m.

Punching it up virtually

The flexibility of Giblin's work day is not only a win for serving Ooma's East Coast team, it also allows her to pursue her newfound sport-amateur boxing, which demands an intense training camp before a fight.

"When things shut down at the beginning of the pandemic, I approached a coach, a professional boxer I knew from my old boot camp gym. I had no interest in boxing, but when I asked him if we could do some online or park workouts for what we thought would be just a few weeks, he told me that his boxing gym was starting to do classes on Zoom."

So they started doing Zoom boxing. When asked how that worked, Giblin quipped, "Not very well. In the beginning of the pandemic, you know, everyone was just looking for random things to do." The instructor would lead the class from his computer screen while Giblin practiced jabbing and punching into the air from her dining room. "Ultimately, I got a heavy bag that I used to hang from a hook in my doorway, and it kept getting more involved from there."

Stinging like a bee

When the pandemic restrictions let up, Giblin began boxing in person. "Somebody started a rumor that for my 50th birthday I was going to start competing, and then the rumor just took off at our gym. It definitely wasn't me that started it, but then I felt sort of committed to doing it. So that fall I entered my first competition and have been competing ever since."

Giblin won that competition in San Francisco and two others since. She is a registered athlete with USA Boxing, the same organization in charge of the U.S. Olympic team. In September 2023, she participated in the Title Boxing Masters' Tournament in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and became the national champion in the women's 110-pound weight class.

"There's usually a pretty intense training camp in the two to three months before a big fight," Giblin says. But even when there isn't an upcoming fight on the calendar, she can be found in the gym a couple hours in the morning, a couple at night and then on the weekends.

Parallels of pugilists and legalists

Being a title-holding boxer and an Ooma attorney have more similarities than you might think. "A lot of boxing is just being disciplined and focusing on the right things. I try to do that with everything I do at Ooma, too," Giblin adds. One example is how she's able to prioritize which points in an Ooma Enterprise sales contract are critical for Ooma, versus those that may be negotiable.

"For me it's also the discipline of just showing up and being able to turn off distractions in my head and to be able to focus on what I'm there to do."

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