San Diego has always been a city of booms and busts, and Valerie Paz has borne witness to all of it for the last 65 years, starting in Coronado before there was even a bridge. She was born at Balboa Hospital and raised in the days when crossing the bay meant boarding a ferry; she can still hear the creak of it. Her father was a Navy jet radio intercept officer serving two tours of duty on aircraft carriers to Vietnam and sat on the tarmac in Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It turns out that risk runs in the family. 

Valerie’s parents also ran a TV repair shop in Coronado. Her island childhood was idyllic: she walked everywhere, occasionally helped herself to provisions from the Hotel Del Coronado, and roamed the streets with confidence. From a little pocket park on the bay, she could see the San Diego skyline across the water, specifically an 8-story building shimmering in the distance that she fully planned on working in one day. 

During that time there was Brutus, the family’s 170-pound mountain lion. Her father kept him as a pet, which in Coronado in the 1960s was apparently a manageable situation. Valerie’s photograph shows her standing next to her kitty, Brutus, age eight, calm, unbothered, as though standing next to a top-line predator was the most natural thing in the world. Her dad would walk Brutus down Orange Avenue for strawberry ice cream after a swim at the beach. It would be decades before she fully appreciated how much those early years formed her character and calibrated her tolerance for risk.

In high school, Valerie took early courses at Southwestern College and picked up a bookkeeping job at an import/export company at sixteen. She graduated from Bonita Vista High School in June 1979, and by September was hired by Callahan & Little, a downtown San Diego law firm, to do legal administrative work. Over the next three years, she learned trust and estate planning, probate, real estate, and bankruptcy law from the inside out. She also learned tax preparation, which proved to be an extremely reliable skill. Her first daughter’s birth on April 15th, was sandwiched between completing a complex client tax return the day before and her own the very same day, from her hospital bed.  This firm was headquartered in the old Bank of America Building in downtown San Diego, before Horton Plaza existed, the very 8-story building she had stared at from across the bay as a girl. From her desk she watched the Gaslamp District begin its transformation.

After eight years at a firm in Chula Vista (to work close to home), where she added immigration and real estate litigation to her toolkit while moonlighting for a tax CPA, Valerie landed at Gray, Cary, Ware & Freidenrich, now DLA Piper, currently one of the largest law firms in the world. She spent more than six years in the tax, trust, estate, and corporate department located at the Wells Fargo Building, operating at a level of sophistication that most paralegals never see. She was part of the team that took Qualcomm public. She worked on estate matters for some of San Diego's most prominent families. She handled hundred-million-dollar transactions for the top one percent of professionals in the region. San Diego's tech and biotech sectors were exploding in the early 1990s, and Valerie was at the center of all of it.

In 1995, a private wealth firm in La Jolla recruited her in-house to manage their family office. She worked from Prospect Street with an unobstructed ocean view and loved every minute of it, particularly the challenge of imposing legal and corporate rigor onto the organized chaos of a family's multiple nationwide legal operations. The role ended when her second daughter arrived in June of 1996 and the firm had no room for a nursing mother. Valerie shrugged, returned to private practice, stepped into the role of Vice President of Development at Rainshine Resources, where she identified, acquired, and financed a restaurant and nightclub project in the Gaslamp Quarter. Her two daughters, Sharyn and Destiny, are fourteen years apart, a spread that maps almost perfectly onto two very different eras of their mother's working life.

The boom years rolled on. Gateway, Inc. brought Valerie in as Senior Corporate Paralegal, where she handled legal operations and more than thirty subsidiaries worldwide, including a sweeping tax reorganization of the entire enterprise. What became typical, she pivoted into Gateway’s Global Treasury Operations, managing one billion dollars in daily cash flow and banking relationships across the company's worldwide footprint. It was big, fast, and exhilarating. It was also, like most things in San Diego's economy, temporary. When Gateway downsized its San Diego operations to move into Orange County, Valerie found herself back on the open market, a place she had come to know well and fear not at all.

What followed was a sequence of legal and financial operation positions spanning the entire San Diego business landscape. She managed operations for a large wholesale car dealership in La Jolla. She gave two years of financing activities to Atlas Integrated Systems, for installation of supervisory control and data acquisition systems for municipal critical infrastructure, waste treatment plants, fiber communication rings, and energy generation facilities. Her family’s business installed fiber optic infrastructure for El Centro’s education and prison systems.  Then came Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton and two years of sophisticated multi-state mergers and acquisitions work and SEC filings. San Diego's securities market was shallow, but Valerie had been trained at a depth that most of her peers hadn't, and she understood her position in the ecosystem: rare, specific, and quietly invaluable. 

Then came Woodfin Suite Hotels, where she served as Manager of Legal and Development Services, managing a portfolio up to one billion dollars, financing, franchising, construction contracts, land-use negotiations with government agencies. It was exactly the kind of high-altitude strategic work she was made for. And then the 2007 financial crisis hit San Diego like a wave. Woodfin downsized, attorneys flooded the paralegal market and the whole ecosystem contracted. Valerie had watched San Diego boom and bust before. She knew what came next.

She went back to school. Alliant International University in Scripps Ranch offered a program in International Strategic Management for Disruptive Technologies that was ninety percent international students, an environment that suited her perfectly. The program included an immersion trip to India, where Valerie was the only business student among a cohort specializing in social welfare. That perspective reoriented everything she saw: the daily power outages, the workers in rice fields, the raw infrastructure, the gap between what the economy promised and what it delivered on the ground. Her capstone project focused on India's port systems and the mechanics of international trade. While completing her studies, she joined Breakwater Equity Partners in 2010 as Business Partner for Legal Strategies Management. The assignment: help rescue over four billion dollars in distressed commercial real estate held by tenants-in-common, fractional owners scattered across the country who didn't know each other, didn't trust the banks foreclosing on them, and needed someone to bring them together. Valerie provided the legal administration to align them to implement defense strategies and preserve their wealth. Three years of that work, and the market had stabilized enough for her to move on.

The years that followed are best understood as proof that Valerie's skills are genuinely industry-agnostic. Taylor Guitars brought her in to automate forty years of paper-based legal operations; she moved everything online, negotiated vendor contracts, managed corporate governance, and, because Taylor asks this of everyone, built a guitar from scratch in her first week on the job. She also was the merger and acquisition paralegal for the purchase and sale of two Gulfstream aircraft, because some job descriptions simply defy summarizing. After Taylor, she flew to Las Vegas every week for eight months to modernize the Cosmopolitan hotel's contract management systems and technology infrastructure. Then came Tandem Diabetes Care, where she was hired remotely during COVID as Contract Administrator and rose to Senior Corporate Paralegal, eventually adding Corporate Disclosures for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) financial reporting to her commercial insurance work. She spent nearly five years there. The company's stock declined sharply and Valerie, once again returned to her perennial advisory firm, Volitional Dynamics.

She earned her Certified Risk Management Professional designation, underpinning her enterprise risk management expertise to emphasize and focus on serving estate administrators and their legal and finance advisors with the complexities of the succession and post-transfer strategies for business assets. This is the work she was always pointing toward. Valerie identifies what a company needs before it knows it needs it, builds the systems and structures to get there, and then steps away, leaving the organization stronger and entirely capable of running without her. She calls this "taming transitions risk." And refers to herself as a plug and play resource.

Valerie has also spent decades contributing that expertise as a volunteer leader. She served on the Board of American Youth Hostels from 1990 to 1996, was on a working Committee for the San Diego Zoo from 1989 to 1993 and served on the San Diego Youth Services Board from 1999 to 2001. For 23 years, from 1995 to 2018, she volunteered with Landmarks Worldwide, working across thirty global locations to train leaders and build teams towards a world that works for everyone with no one left out. It gave her a working understanding of international business cultures that no degree program alone could provide.

Valerie’s partner of twenty-five years runs a construction business and serves as a Deputy Special Inspector for the City of San Diego, certifying seismic and structural installations, a man who also has a professional relationship with risk. Both daughters are doing well in San Diego: one as an office manager for a commercial plumbing company, the other as Facilities Manager for Live Nation. The elder of the two is nurturing three robust grandsons, ages 25, 19, and 17. Valerie has trained horses for thirty years. She is a current member of the San Diego Marlin Club.

One more thing worth mentioning: Valerie is in her Golden Years. When I asked her when she plans to slow down, she did not hesitate. "Ask me in ten years," she said. People who grow up walking a mountain lion to get ice cream do not tend to have a conventional relationship with the concept of winding down.

Valerie Paz has been an active member of the San Diego RIMS chapter for 3 years and plans to join the board as an Associate Advisor in the new year. She is looking for her next adventure and would love to meet you.

“I eat risk for breakfast. Then feed the lion. And then we go for a walk."  - Valerie Paz