All the Right Turns: A Clear Voice in Service of Others

Lindsay Walker Hobson (’07 J.D.) has worn a lot of hats. She’s been an oil and gas litigator, a pro bono immigration attorney, a campaign communications director, a crisis communicator, and in-house counsel. This patchwork, as she calls it, was never quite the plan. But she’s seen all her professional experience come together as director of legal and administration at Alaska’s largest natural gas utility, and as of this spring, vice president and general counsel.

When Hobson arrived at Gonzaga, she was convinced she’d go into immigration law. She’d studied Spanish in college and worked in a migrant education program, spending time with families from Mexico who’d come to Alaska for work. The lawyers she saw moving through those communities inspired her. While at Gonzaga, she also interned for World Relief, a refugee resettlement organization with an in-house legal clinic.

“There’s no bigger high than learning that a client has received their green card,” she says. “But there are a lot of lows, and I found I wasn’t able to separate myself from the work at the end of the day.”

Realizing immigration law wasn’t her future was a shock, but she took it in stride. She moved back to Alaska and took a job at her father’s firm, practicing oil and gas law. When he decided to run for governor, she became his communications director, and helped guide him to victory in 2014. She has since landed at the Enstar Group, a global insurance provider, where she built the communications department essentially from scratch.

Hobson was tested early. A major earthquake hit their entire service area not long after she started. Suddenly the job wasn’t theoretical: Safety information had to reach customers, media had to be managed, and the legal and communications functions had to operate in tandem. She found that having a lawyer’s instinct in a communicator’s role was “uniquely valuable.”

“When people are scared, like after an earthquake or when their heat goes out or when they don’t know what’s happening, our communications are the public’s only window into what we’re actually doing,” Hobson says.

But she’s never been able to shake her initial passion for immigration law. In 2017, Hobson went to Dilley, Texas to perform pro bono work, helping detained women and children prepare for their immigration hearings. The experience was so moving that she organized a trip for the following year, this time with a group of other attorneys from Alaska.

“The traumas they were escaping were just a steady flow of nightmare fuel,” she says. “I don’t know a better way to put it.”

Today, as Enstar’s vice president and general counsel Hobson is navigating a looming transition from domestic gas supply to imported gas, a situation Alaska has never faced. She also serves on the board of the Alaska Institute for Justice, a nonprofit providing immigration legal services in a state where the need is urgent and federal support is increasingly uncertain.

“If you have the skills and the resources to give a voice where there’s a void,” she says, “you have an obligation to do that.”