Samantha Shipp Warrick, ’07, hasn’t achieved her high school dream of being a rapper. But given all that she has achieved so far, don’t count out her music career just yet. With a shoutout on a D’Angelo album and a former client who has promised to feature her on his next project, anything is possible.
“My career journey isn’t an arc,” she acknowledges. “It’s the Marie Kondo phase of my career: I do whatever sparks joy.”
In 2023, that brought her to LVMH Inc., the North American office of the global conglomerate LVMH SE, whose 75 brands (“maisions”) include Louis Vuitton, Moët Hennesy, Dior, Fendi, Givenchy, and Tiffany, among many others. As chief strategy and operations counsel, Shipp Warrick works with the 35 maisions that operate in the US, Canada, and Mexico.
Her responsibilities include managing outside counsel relationships, supporting maisions lacking their own in-house counsel, and advising French and American colleagues on what can and can’t be said these days about diversity, equity, and inclusion.
As the first to hold her title at LVMH Inc., she says that when she came on board, “there was a lot of white space.” In many ways, the environment feels like a startup. “The job is what I make it, and I have the freedom to pursue projects I find meaningful.”
As a creative, that environment suits her best.
From aspiring rapper to representing rappers
Shipp Warrick decided she didn’t have a lengthy enough rap sheet, if you will, to provide the source material for a rap career. So she attended law school with the hope of working in the music business.
She joined Simpson Thacher after graduation while networking her way toward her long-term goal. Kevin Liles, the former president of Def Jam Records, became a mentor. He introduced her to his lawyer, Paul Rothenberg. Eventually, Shipp Warrick took a week’s vacation from her firm to shadow Rothenberg.
“I sold him on the idea that I could do the corporate work for his entertainment clients and he could teach me entertainment law.”
She quit Big Law to practice with Rothenberg, then started her own practice, also focused on entertainment law. “As a lawyer, I appreciate hanging my shingle and helping people I’ve made friends with over the years, people doing cool things that I want to be part of,” she says.
One former client became a business partner. Together, they launched The LS Group, which invested in entertainment and energy projects in the US and Africa. When Senegal decided to privatize its internet service provider business, LS Group’s consortium was one of three companies to receive a contract.
The company they eventually formed, WAW Telecom, led to a full-circle moment: Shipp Warrick’s mother took her to Gorée Island, off the coast of Senegal, as a young child to understand the history of the slave trade. Returning as part of LS Group’s partnership with Facebook to bring Wi-Fi to the island “was a really humbling moment,” she says.
Samantha Shipp Warrick, ’07My career journey isn’t an arc. It’s the Marie Kondo phase of my career: I do whatever sparks joy.
Pitching ideas and papering deals
In 2020, she became head of brand partnerships and general counsel for the lifestyle-brand startup Phenomenal, launched by a friend from her undergraduate days, Meena Harris.
“I should have been some kind of creative; that was my initial career desire,” Shipp Warrick says. “So Phenomenal was great because the brand partnerships aspect allowed me to develop and pitch ideas, and as general counsel, I was able to paper the deals as well.”
Beats was one brand that approached Phenomenal about collaboration. The electronics company wanted to create a customized product tied to Kamala Harris’s historic vice presidential candidacy.
“They pitched us a cool idea. But I stayed up most of the night thinking about it,” Shipp Warrick says.
From those late-night ruminations, she developed a concept for two products: a speaker, representing the power of women’s voices, and headphones to symbolize that women deserve to be heard. She sketched out packaging that looked like broken glass to represent the glass ceiling a female VP would shatter. Bingo.
Beats sent the final product to trailblazing women who were continuing to push the envelope. As the internet circulated images of high-profile figures using the products, “it was crazy to think that just a few months earlier, all of that had just been in my head,” Shipp Warrick says.
New opportunities and challenges at a global powerhouse
As Phenomenal shifted from lifestyle to media, Shipp Warrick moved to BET Plus, the streaming arm of Black Entertainment Television, before a headhunter friend of her husband’s suggested she meet with the chief legal officer of LVMH Inc.
Now, nearly two years later, she enjoys laying the path as she walks it. She is working with Belmond to bring back 21 Club, a legendary New York dining and entertainment venue. And she’s leading legal efforts for LVMH’s new executive production company, 22 Montaigne, a conduit between the conglomerate’s maisions and Hollywood.
She’s also developing LVMH’s pro bono program, which she hopes will connect lawyers with emerging young creatives to provide legal and other start-up support—from attorneys within the company and from LVMH’s network of outside counsel.
“I build relationships with law firms who are willing to invest in LVMH in all the ways that are important to our company, not just provide a transactional service,” Shipp Warrick says. “Sure, some pro-bono projects are potential business opportunities. But they’re also in service of creativity and excellence in design, things we are fundamentally interested in as a company.”
And then there’s DEI. It’s a complicated problem for US companies right now; there’s added complexity when you’re one arm of an expansive foreign-based enterprise. In February, Shipp Warrick gave a company-wide presentation on the legal state of DEI.
“We operate in over 80 countries and across many different industries, so diversity is inherent in what we do,” she says. “The group has global goals and initiatives. Our job is to adjust in ways that comply with all applicable regional laws and also keep our values in mind.”
