GC Sidebar: Theresa Shea, Chief Legal Officer at Utz Brands

In this GC Sidebar Season 2 episode, Paragon Legal CEO Trista Engel speaks with Teresa Shea, Chief Legal Officer at Utz Brands, about planning for the unexpected, earning a seat at the executive table, and what it means to bring your whole self to the GC role.

Teresa shares why “special situations prep” has become a growing focus for her team—building the muscle to respond to everything from weather events to shifting nutrition regulations, so that when a crisis hits, the company can stay calm and act from a plan rather than react in a panic. She discusses how the most valuable thing a legal leader offers often isn’t legal expertise at all, but judgment, steadiness, and the ability to help people find their way to the right answer.

She also reflects on a pivotal shift in how she shows up in the room—introducing herself first as an executive at Utz, not as the company’s lawyer—and why building a legal team from the ground up taught her to think as much about where the business needs a thought partner as where it needs outside counsel.

Full episode now available.

Read the Full Conversation

Prefer reading over watching? Below is the complete transcript from our GC Sidebar interview with Theresa Shea, Chief Legal Officer at Utz Brands.

Trista Engel: Welcome to GC Sidebar, a short and sharp conversation series with leading general counsels about the decisions, the reflections, and the people behind the title. I’m Trista Engel, CEO of Paragon Legal, and today I’m joined by Teresa Shea, Chief Legal Officer at Utz Brands, the publicly traded snacking company bringing us Utz, Boulder Canyon, On the Border, and Zapp’s.

Teresa’s career has crossed airlines, hardware, and now snacking companies, and she’s also maintained a deep commitment to Chicago’s Lurie Children’s Hospital, having helped raise more than $200,000 through the Aidan Shea Foundation. Teresa, I’m so excited to have you here. Thank you so much for joining me.

Teresa Shea: Thank you! I’m really excited to be here, and it’s great to be part of this. I think it’s such a cool idea that you guys have, and I’m excited to join.

Trista Engel: Thank you so much! Let’s dive in. What’s one thing you’re most focused on for 2026, and why?

Teresa Shea: I feel like we’re living in a surprise-around-every-corner kind of world right now, in part because of so many changes in the administration within the United States, which has led to a lot of different thinking about planning. My team, and my company, have been investing a lot of time in what we don’t call crisis prep—we call it “special situations” prep.

We’re really preparing for all the special situations that can hit us. An obvious example—and I’m bundled up today because we’re in the middle of a winter storm—is a weather event that can affect whether people can get into work to make our chips. That’s something we’ve planned for before, but we’ve gotten a lot more robust about putting together a corporate team to think through and practice how we’re going to handle it.

A less obvious example would be changes to nutrition requirements coming out of Washington. For a food company like ours, that’s really important, so we created a whole team that tracks state and federal changes on a daily basis so we can respond as a company. Preparing for what you might not be expecting is becoming a much more critical skill for the GC seat—helping your company think holistically about how they’re going to respond, because we all know what happens: if something goes wrong, if there’s a safety emergency or an accident, immediately your people turn to the legal team.

When people don’t know where to go in the company, they come to legal—what do I do, what am I supposed to do? So I think it’s created a lot of calm for us as a company to have legal leading an initiative where we’re trying to think through all the situations that might arise and create really deliberate planning around it. There will be things we don’t think of, but we at least have a structure to fall back on. That’s become a much bigger focus of my time, and it’s part of what I’m being looked to for from a leadership standpoint—being a thought leader within the business, because it’s all about managing risk and the various ways those risks can be managed.

And really importantly, keeping the company calm—that’s really important, because people get frenetic when something happens that they’re not expecting, and that can lead to a lot of inefficiency. It’s not the sexiest answer, but I think it’s really what GCs are thinking about a lot more than they ever have.

Trista Engel: I think that’s a great point. The two things that come up constantly when I talk to other GCs this year are AI and regulatory change. It’s smart to plan ahead for what might happen—you won’t get everything right, but such a huge measure of the GC role and the legal team’s success is: what risk have you avoided?

Teresa Shea: Totally.

Trista Engel: This is such a great way for you to thrive in that arena—planning ahead and thinking about what risks might come, and how to avoid major disruption.

Teresa Shea: Absolutely. And it’s really rewarding to be proactively working on these things. We had a tabletop exercise three weeks ago about a forecasted weather event, and everyone was like, “Ugh, do we really have to?” And then this weekend we had a massive storm, and we were like, “Oh my gosh, we just did this—we know what to do!”

Trista Engel: Timing is everything.

Teresa Shea: It’s comforting to people, and they feel calmer because they’ve already gone through the exercise. New things always pop up, but the basics of what we want to do have already been thought through—we have the emails drafted, we have the list of who in our community we want to contact about resources. All of that is already covered, so it makes the situation much smoother and less stressful.

Trista Engel: That’s fantastic. What’s something that surprised you about the GC role?

Teresa Shea: I bet most GCs would say this—I’m surprised by how small a percentage of my time is actual lawyering, as opposed to managing, mediating, connecting cross-functionally to help people work through issues, board dynamics, all of that. There is lawyering in there, but it’s much less about technical legal skills and much more about people skills and leadership skills.

I don’t think I fully appreciated that as a young lawyer, or even as a more junior in-house lawyer. I think what makes the most successful person in this chair is being the place people feel comfortable talking about the things they otherwise aren’t comfortable talking about—saying, “This isn’t really working for me, I’m having issues engaging with this other department.” You become kind of the ombudsman for the company.

That’s really rewarding, but not as legally focused as I thought it would be. There is technical legal work happening throughout the company—the lawyers on my team and the outside lawyers I rely on are doing it—I’m just doing less of it in this chair than I did when I was the subject matter expert in my own chair, in labor and employment. Then, I was doing labor and employment work all day, every day. This job is much more like being a general practitioner—I’m spotting issues all the time and saying, “You need to see the dermatologist,” but I’m not the dermatologist anymore. I need to direct people the right way, and a lot of my job is helping people be comfortable enough to be honest about the problems we might be having, so we can get to the best solution.

Trista Engel: You’re definitely not alone in that sentiment—that’s true even in my own experience. Outside of the general counsel function, I think that’s a truth of leadership: the skills that got you to this role aren’t necessarily the skills that will be most prevalent in the role. It becomes less about execution and a lot more about people.

Teresa Shea: And the how, as much as the what. You have to get the what right—I have to provide the right legal answers, and they have to trust that I have them—but how I deliver those answers makes such a difference in terms of effectiveness. That’s become much more of what I think about and focus my energy on: okay, we have a problem—how are we going to deliver this in a way that lets us deal with it most quickly and effectively? As opposed to just laying out the problem, which is what you’re more likely to do as an outside lawyer at a law firm, or even as the in-house expert on regulatory or wage-and-hour—you’re not thinking as much about the delivery, the how; you’re thinking more about the what.

Trista Engel: Yeah, absolutely. What’s the best career advice you’ve received or given?

Teresa Shea: Definitely received. I’ve grown so much in the last three years under my current CEO. For my whole career as an in-house lawyer, from the beginning, I heard, “Teresa, you need to get more comfortable taking risks”—which is so classic for a lawyer to hear. I was like, no, that’s not how I’m trained.

So I worked on that along the way—not taking inappropriate risk, but getting more comfortable taking appropriate risks, because there are risks taken every day in every decision we make. What I’ve found really interesting, and really helpful as I continue to develop, is the advice my current CEO gave me early on. He said, “I do not want to hear you say, ‘In my legal opinion’ or ‘The legal view of this is, here’s what legal thinks.'”

He told me I needed to introduce myself as an executive at Utz who happens to run the legal department. “I want your whole brain on this, I don’t want your legal brain on it. You are an enterprise leader, and you have to understand the whole business. You don’t get to say, ‘This is my legal view.'” He didn’t say it in exactly those words—I’m paraphrasing—but that’s been the consistent message, which is a step above just “take appropriate risk.” I had gotten there, but I was still couching and presenting myself as a leader in the boardroom as “legal.”

He wanted to know what I thought about a marketing campaign—as a consumer, as a whole person bringing all of my brainpower, not just my legal brainpower. That’s what he wants everyone in the room to do, because it leads to real enterprise thinking—you get the benefit of someone who isn’t knee-deep in a topic giving their candid point of view, and you learn the business in a different way. I found that really powerful, and a little scary—it takes you out of your comfort zone to comment on something finance is talking about that you don’t have technical expertise in, and to say, “Help me understand that more, because it’s not adding up for me.”

But it’s really helped me grow as a leader and feel much more a part of the business, because I’m expanding what I feel ownership and responsibility for in a really different way.

Trista Engel: That’s one of the biggest shifts in the GC role over the last five to ten years—not thinking about legal as advising the business, but legal as part of the business. The general counsel, or chief legal officer, as a member of the executive team, not an advisor to it.

Teresa Shea: The simple act of introducing myself as “an executive at Utz”—that’s how I do it now, and then I say I’m also a lawyer. But that is who I am—I’m part of this team running this business, not just an advisor to it. That simple shift in introduction has really resonated with me in terms of how I think about myself and present myself in the middle of the business, which is every day.

Trista Engel: Yeah, that’s a really good tactical mental reminder.

Teresa Shea: Exactly.

Trista Engel: GCs today have a wide range of resourcing options beyond FTEs and outside counsel. What’s your approach to resourcing your legal team?

Teresa Shea: Let me tell you my journey. When I joined Utz, I was the first in-house lawyer they’d ever hired—a publicly traded company with no in-house attorney. Just pause and think about that—it’s crazy. There was lots of legal work being done, and being done well, it just wasn’t centralized—it was all being done by outside counsel.

So staffing became a build-from-the-ground-up journey. When I joined the company, I basically was the legal team—just me, answering subpoenas, trying to figure out what was happening and where all the legal work was being done. I was lucky to come into a company that was a 100-year family-owned business, highly compliant, so there weren’t fires burning everywhere—it was more about figuring out where everything was going, and who was doing the actual work.

I found a few people who weren’t lawyers but were within the business, doing a lot of the support work, and pulled them in to help me understand what was happening and where. I then spent the next year sizing up my biggest needs—where I was spending the most on outside counsel, and where I was most gapped in my own expertise, so I wouldn’t miss issue-spotting that needed to happen. I wasn’t worried about labor and employment—that’s my bread and butter, I can spot those issues. But when you talk about food regulatory, or being a technical SEC lawyer, there’s a real gap, and the consequences of not having that training and missing something are high. So my first hire was an SEC lawyer.

After that, I hired a food regulatory lawyer and a real estate lawyer, because real estate isn’t my expertise, and as a national distribution company we have about 175 leases across all our facilities—high-volume work. So what I’ve done is reduce outside counsel spend while insourcing the biggest areas of work. I’ve also added a government affairs and corporate communications person to my team.

Now we’re carefully looking at our full outside counsel roster and thinking about alternatives that might be more efficient, effective, and less costly for the spillover work—areas where we don’t have internal expertise or where the volume is just too much. We’re exploring alternative fee arrangements—in some cases we still have traditional arrangements, but we’re doing flat fees in others. We know we’ll have a surge in a couple of areas this coming year, so we’re investigating alternative legal providers who have a roster of lawyers they can bring in to help.

My advice: when you come into an established department, or you’re promoted within your own organization—which is what happened to me at True Value—you have a much better sense of where everything is and where you can become more efficient. If you’re starting from scratch, which is fun, you have to pause and really figure out who’s hiring lawyers and where they all are. My journey is a little different because of that, and we’re a bit more on the front end of exploring alternative options now that we’re more established.

Trista Engel: Well, regardless of whether you’re the first legal hire or part of a large legal team, the framework you laid out makes a ton of sense—understanding where your major costs are, understanding what your current team can do and where the gaps are, and then figuring out how to fill those gaps or shift spend into something more cost-effective. That framework is helpful no matter where you are in your legal journey.

Teresa Shea: Yeah, and I think you’re also trying to size up not just what we’re spending on special situations—a big piece of litigation or an M&A transaction—but where the business needs a thought leader alongside them. When we put someone into real estate, I wanted them to understand how we’re figuring out where we’re putting our next warehouse and how we’re sizing that, because that’s where you can really make a difference—being proactive with the business rather than just reacting to needs.

It depends on your industry, too. I didn’t come into this role thinking I’d need a real estate lawyer—it was only after I recognized the size and complexity of our portfolio that I realized we needed someone in the middle of that, helping the team be more effective and proactive rather than just reviewing the leases they land on. I want that person helping figure out the strategy behind it. So it’s both the actual spend and the potential for where you can have the most impact on the business.

Trista Engel: Yeah, and that’s where alternative legal service providers—flexible talent, technology, and others—can fill the gaps between your internal thought leaders managing business-critical strategic items and your outside counsel for major special situations and litigation.

Teresa Shea: Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve been leaning into that. When I started at Utz, we didn’t have a contract management system—our contracts were all over the place. Now we have one with some AI capabilities, and we’re cautiously embracing some of the tools out there, testing and learning.

I say cautious because I still want our brains on everything we’re touching, but there have been some really positive results from leaning into AI on the routine work we do over and over—that’s been really beneficial too.

Trista Engel: That’s great. If you weren’t an attorney, what would you be?

Teresa Shea: This is so easy for me—I was a teacher before law school. I taught high school English for a year. I think I chose labor and employment law because it involved a lot of training, and I think I went in-house for a similar reason—a big part of my job is explaining things to people, breaking them down, making them understandable and manageable.

I love that. I love the teaching part of being a lawyer, because the law is so intimidating to so many people—if you can make them comfortable and make things bite-sized in terms of learning, you can really have an impact that helps them not just in the business, but in their career. If people can get more comfortable understanding basic legal concepts and knowing when to ask questions, that helps them all along the way. So I’d be a teacher.

And actually, I’m going to start teaching as an adjunct law professor next semester, this fall, which I’m really excited about. Once you’ve done it, it’s an itch you always want to scratch a little. There’s a real fulfillment that comes from that work, and I’m excited to get back into it in a different way—it’s really part of my day-to-day, and I like that a lot.

Trista Engel: That’s very cool—it’s not a common path, teacher to attorney, but I love the way you drew that thread. It seems extremely relevant to how you describe your role, especially when you’re the only lawyer at a company.

Teresa Shea: Yeah, I was an English major with an advisor who said, “Maybe you should get a teaching degree in case law school doesn’t happen.” That’s how it happened—I became an English and education double major so I’d always know I could get a job. Little did I know it would have such an impact on my legal career—it’s really shaped a lot of things.

I strongly recommend taking a teaching class if you can, even if you’re not an education major. Learning how to teach and how to explain is something that benefits everyone, in business and otherwise.

Trista Engel: That’s very cool. And the bonus question—Paragon turns 20 this year. What’s one memory from 20 years ago that still stands out to you?

Teresa Shea: Twenty years ago I had four-month-old twins, and I’d just found out I was pregnant again.

Trista Engel: That’s a memory!

Teresa Shea: I was a little overwhelmed and excited, but also a little consumed with my life at home—it’s such a fun time to look back on and barely remember in some ways. A huge part of who I am, I bring to work too—we’re all people. So that would be my memory of 20 years ago. It’s a little fuzzy—I wasn’t sleeping much—but it was…

Trista Engel: Yeah, four-month-old twins—it must be hard to remember much of anything.

Teresa Shea: But it was a really positive time. What’s funny is I had just returned to work around then, after having the twins, and everyone was like, “Oh my gosh, we didn’t know if you’d come back, you must be losing your mind.” But I found the rhythm of work so calming. I was tired, but it was controlled—I had a schedule. I always knew I’d go back to work, and everyone has their own sweet spot; the real joy is figuring out what works for you, and that’s true freedom. For me, this worked.

Having that part of my life—it all intersects at different points—having my days have some quiet, even though it was chaotic. I was at United Airlines, and they were bankrupt at the time, so it was certainly chaotic.

Trista Engel: Wow, a different kind of chaos.

Teresa Shea: It was a different chaos, and it was a really good match for me at that point and it has continued to be, quite honestly.

Trista Engel: I love that. What a great memory. Well, that was really fun, Teresa. Thank you so much for joining me, and for sharing all the detail on your amazing journey.

Teresa Shea: So great to meet you and chat with you.

Trista Engel: Alright, that’s a wrap on today’s episode of GC Sidebar. Catch more great conversations on our website at paragonlegal.com. Thanks for tuning in.