Joseph D. Zizzo

Principal, Goldberg Kohn Ltd.

40 Under 40 Category: Legal Services

Joseph Zizzo is a principal in Goldberg Kohn’s Commercial Finance Group.  Joe joined the firm directly from law school and became a principal in 2015.  Joe’s practice focuses on representing banks and other commercial lenders in structuring, negotiating, documenting and closing a variety of finance transactions, including syndicated and single lender asset-based and cash-flow senior secured loan transactions for leveraged buyouts, working capital, refinancings and recapitalizations, split collateral secured transactions, unitranche financing, technology financing, second lien and mezzanine loan financing, debtor-in-possession financing and workouts and restructurings. Joe’s experience includes cross-border financing transactions in various jurisdictions.  Joe is also chair of Goldberg Kohn’s technology committee.

Joe received his law degree from Stanford Law School in 2007 and was named Nathan Abbott Scholar for graduating with the highest-grade point average in his law school class.  Joe served as an editor on the Stanford Law Review for two years and as an editor on the Stanford Journal of Law, Business & Finance for two years.  Joe received B.A. and B.S. degrees, summa cum laude, from the University of Notre Dame in 2004.

What advice would you give on how to self-advocate?

Work hard and exhibit excellent performance with all of the responsibilities currently on your plate to build credibility and demonstrate capacity.  Find ways to be helpful to motivate people to have confidence in you and want to work with you. Having earned respect by doing great work, be vocal about your interest in taking on more.  Stretch and do what you can to take the new opportunities that you have asked for when they are offered.  Work hard and produce great results when given the opportunities that you have asked for.  

What advice do you normally give to the junior talent you mentor?

In addition to the items above, I advise junior talent to feel encouraged, not discouraged, when work seems difficult.   Be pleased and not upset if it feels like you are doing more work than your peers – that likely reflects strong performance that resulted in partners and clients being eager to work with you, which will result in additional growth and opportunity for the future.  Do not feel discouraged if you from time to time feel like your job is suddenly getting harder or you feel less confident in your performance – this likely means that you have earned the right to take on more challenging work and more responsibility and are grappling with new tasks and issues.  Progress in your career will come only from working on tasks that will initially be new and challenging, but that you will ultimately master with experience.  Finally, while you should always ask a senior team member for guidance with an issue that you do not know how to handle, you should do your best to work through and analyze an issue first and present your thoughts and analysis as opposed to simply asking what to do.  You will learn more thinking through the issue, your colleague will appreciate the work and thought that you put into the issue, and you will be surprised how often your senior colleague will agree with your analysis, building both their and your own confidence in your abilities.

When interviewing newcomers to the industry, what do you say to pique their interest on why they should accept a position in this industry?

A significant benefit of practicing law in commercial finance is the opportunity to develop strong relationships with clients at an early stage in one’s career by virtue of working with the same individuals and teams at our lending clients on successive transactions.  Legal practice is demanding but much more rewarding when you have the opportunity to develop a direct personal relationship with clients that you are working for.  Some newcomers fear that working in finance will be uninteresting due to working on the “same” type of transaction over and over again.  But finance lawyers encounter financings with very different structures and represent lenders that have vastly different perspectives, depending on whether they are asset-based lenders, recurring-revenue-based technology finance lenders, senior cash flow lenders, high yield lenders, etc. And as a lending lawyer, one will work on credit facilities provided to borrowers in wildly different industries with businesses that look very different from one another, affording the opportunity to learn about many different types of businesses.  Finally, working on cross-border finance transactions provides the added benefit of working with interesting lawyers from all over the world and learning about differences between the US legal and business systems and legal and business systems in other countries.