Introduction
C. Todd Navrat, JD, CPA, CFA is Vice President and General Counsel at JE Dunn Construction Company, where he oversees legal aspects of the company’s geographically diverse real estate development portfolio, investment management, and corporate operations. With over 25 years of experience across diverse industries—from publicly traded energy companies to iconic consumer brands and major construction firms—Todd has built a career at the intersection of law, business, and finance.
Todd’s path has been anything but linear. He’s transitioned from tax attorney aspirations to business law, navigated pivots across vastly different industries from energy and geo-construction to greeting cards and streaming video platforms, and even stepped out of legal at one point to run a $40 million digital media business as Chief Operating Officer of Hallmark Labs.
What sets Todd apart is his relentless curiosity and his belief that strong business fundamentals transcend industry boundaries. Armed with a CPA and CFA alongside his law degree, he approaches legal work through a business lens, focusing on acceptable risk, financial implications, and strategic outcomes rather than theoretical legal perfection.
His philosophy is grounded in practicality: if you understand how businesses create value and can assess risk intelligently, you can advise effectively across any industry. Whether structuring real estate deals, clearing 200 songs in three months for a greeting card business, or investing in a women’s professional volleyball team, Todd’s framework remains the same: understand the business model, balance the risks, and find the path forward.
The Foundation: From Tax Dreams to Business Reality
Zac: Tell me about your career journey and how you got to where you are today at JE Dunn.
Todd: My background has always been a mix of business and law. Even when I went to law school, I knew I wanted to be on the more business side of the practice. Coming out of law school, I thought I wanted to be a tax attorney. I had my CPA and wanted to do that. But I quickly realized I didn’t want to do tax work or estate planning. I wanted to do more of the business side of things.
After I finished law school, I worked at a couple of law firms in the Kansas City area and quickly gravitated toward business law. But I knew ultimately I wanted to be in-house.
That’s how I navigated my way in the late ’90s to Layne Christensen Company, a publicly traded energy resource and geo-construction company. I started as a staff attorney there, and by the time I left, both of the two more senior attorneys had left, and I was reporting directly to the CEO for about six months. I was there just over two and a half years, and I did a ton of transaction work, employee benefits, and some international law. It was kind of all over the place. Layne was really great exposure from that end.
Early in my career, when I was at Layne Christensen, our CEO, Andy Schmidt, and I were looking at buying this oil resource company. I’m sitting there as a young attorney with all the risks of why we shouldn’t do this. He ultimately stops me and says, “Okay, you can tell me all the risks of why we shouldn’t do this. If I want to do it, is there something compelling that would say you absolutely shouldn’t do it?”
Basically, he’s telling me, “I get that you can tell me all the risks out there. How likely are they to occur? Because if I think there’s a good business reason to do this, unless there’s something crazy I’m missing, I may make a business decision that accepts all those risks.”
Acknowledging that early in my career helped frame the advice I’d give. Even if I put out something like, “This is the really bad scenario,” I’d say it’s probably highly unlikely to occur. I could see you accepting that risk if you feel like the benefit overrides it. Sometimes, we as attorneys get locked into positions where the unlikely drives our recommendations, whereas if you can balance that and say the more likely scenario is this benefit, maybe that allows you to move forward.
The Hallmark Laboratory: From Generalist to Operator
Zac: When you look back at your career, is there one defining shift or experience that really shaped where you are today?
Todd: I think it was probably around 2005 at Hallmark. Within about a three-to-four week timeframe, I helped organize and lead a large team to sell off one of our operating businesses to a third party. At the same time, we were trying to spin up what became our sound card business, figuring out the commercial music licensing space.
That really taught me the ability and power of working with teams, but also having a strategy to lead through influence over position. We had hundreds of leases we needed to review for the transaction. Getting it all set up, marshaling resources, but having those folks as a direct report to me taught me a lot about leadership. You lead not just because you have people under you. You lead by influence, having a vision, and trying to get people on your team.
Right after we closed that transaction, my General Counsel came in and said, “The leadership team wants to put 200-plus sound cards in the market by June.” This was December. I’m like, “Are we talking June of 2007?” He says, “No, June of 2006—seven months from now.”
We had spent the better part of a year clearing 20 songs for our sound card program. So I just sort of sat there in my office and said, “Okay, how much risk are we willing to take? Because we can do this.” I then outlined a strategy on how we’d go about doing it with a mix of full clearance and conditions to proceed without full clearance.
We came up with a plan on how we were going to try to clear 200 songs, which required probably 400 or 500 inquiries. This was popular music, so you had to go both sides of the equation—the publishing rights, sometimes multiple publishing rights to a song, and then the recording rights from a record company.
Our procurement organization was trying to figure out how to get the sound chips ordered, and all the creative was working on the cards. There was a large team doing it, and our work was a small part, but it was a critical part because the entire value of the product was that you open a card, and it’s the original recording of some really cool song.
We hit the number—200 cards, right on deadline. That exercise over that time period—doing one transaction at hyper speed and then pivoting right on top of that to clearing the sound card side of things—taught me a lot about putting teams together, risk assessing, and structuring things that may not be 100% perfect but where you take acceptable risk. I think that has served me well going forward.
Zac: So, at what point did you cross the line from advising the business to actually running one?
Todd: In 2010, I was asked to join a small cross-divisional group to design a new strategic alliance Organization for the company. That organization ultimately led to the acquisition of a company in the streaming video business that I ended up running when we got to a leadership transition point. I ran that business for about two years, where I was still technically a lawyer for Hallmark, but I was the Chief Operating Officer—effectively the leader of this organization on the West Coast. We had about 100 folks out there and a Multi-million dollar operating budget, building streaming video and other digital products. I actually really enjoyed this work as it fully utilized my diverse skill set.
Zac: Was there a learning curve in making that change?
Todd: For me, it wasn’t too bad. It was a pretty quick transition because I had been so close with the leadership and the team existing. The biggest thing was trying to get the team comfortable that I wasn’t just the lawyer being risk-averse. I had to really show that I was willing to take risks and willing to honestly stand up for my team and advocate for them internally.
That was an important thing to navigate—the connectivity between our team out in Los Angeles and leadership back in Kansas City. If I hadn’t had the time supporting the organization before taking over, I think it would have been really difficult.
Zac: So the relationship and trust you had built were really important?
Todd: Absolutely. Even though I had worked with and known some of those folks, I had to sit down and quickly build trust-based relationships. I had very frank one-on-one conversations with people. I told them, “This is my objective. This is what I want to do. There are things I can share with you, and I’ll try to be as transparent as I can. There’ll be some things I can’t share with you, but if I can share something, I’ll share it in terms of where we’re going and what we’re doing.” Then, more importantly, I work to demonstrate this promised approach daily.
Developing Business Fluency: The Language of Value Creation
Zac: It sounds like that ability to step into the business side, not just advise it, was a big part of what made those roles work. How much of that do you think comes from your financial background, the CPA and CFA?
Todd: I think it’s been invaluable for the roles and the path I’ve taken. I would think it would be hard for somebody to be a business lawyer if they don’t have that background or haven’t self-educated themselves to have that background and be able to speak the language of business.
When I got my accounting degree, I didn’t necessarily like studying accounting, but it’s the fundamental language of business. You understand that you can read a P&L, but the business school subjects I was most curious about were marketing and economics, and I didn’t study a ton of finance. That’s why I did the CFA mid-career, to beef up on the technical skills of the finance side of things.
I’ve worked in a bunch of different industries, and the reason I’ve been able to do that is that the framework of what makes a good business is the same everywhere. The details change—what your key metrics are, what your business model is—but how are you going to make revenue? What are the costs of doing that? What’s your competitive advantage? That’s common among any enterprise. If you’re inherently curious, you shouldn’t be afraid to go to work and learn about a new business and be a legal advisor to that enterprise.
Zac: For folks who want to develop that financial muscle but maybe going back for a CPA or CFA isn’t practical, what would you recommend?
Todd: I’m probably not the best person to answer that question because my background has been so much in that space. But I think doing is learning. The analogy I’d give is I didn’t have education in the magazine publishing space when I worked on that at Hallmark. So what I did was find people who knew First Amendment rights and things applicable to it. I educated myself, and then I used the tools I’ve always used—developing forms and checklists so I can create repeatable systems for the common work of a given subject area. I would think that the same approach works for somebody who doesn’t have a finance background. Find that resource, learn from them.
Making the Leap: Career Pivots That Work
Zac: You’ve made some remarkable career pivots—from Hallmark to JE Dunn, two very different businesses. What advice would you have for those thinking about that kind of pivot?
Todd: I think you’ve got to be inherently curious. Sometimes, as lawyers, we want to have stuff in boxes and want to argue things. I think you need to be open and curious about how stuff works, and also be willing to balance risk.
The thing I learned when I was asked to run businesses directly was the ability to sift through the risk counsel you get, weigh that, and make actual decisions. When I was operating a business, I developed this ability to say, “Yeah, there’s a risk here, but is it a real risk? And I think I’m willing to go forward from a business standpoint.”
The Future of Legal Practice: AI as Strategic Enabler
Zac: I know you’ve been using AI tools in your practice. Would you be interested in diving into that?
Todd: Sure. I think the way I’m applying AI right now—and I think it’s easier for experienced attorneys to do this—is that you can ask AI tools to do things you would ask paralegals or young associates to do, and then you can evaluate the work that comes out of there.
I’m using Copilot, which we have as a company. It’s powered by some version of ChatGPT. And then inside Adobe Acrobat, they’ve got a really good AI assistant tool. Those are my two principal AI tools in practice.
I view Copilot as being pretty good at taking information and extracting it. If you’ve got a pretty well-developed checklist, you can put that checklist into the AI tool along with the documents you want information extracted from. So if you’ve got a good checklist, maybe a good form document, maybe a good instruction document, you can ask the AI tool to extract information out of that document for you that you can then analyze.
The other use case is limited document drafting. I’m a big believer in good forms, especially for repeatable transactions—having a good form along with a set of instructions. I use that in Copilot to ask it to draft a document for me. I’ve found that to be somewhat successful.
I’ve taken simple loan agreements or lease amendments and said, “Here’s my lease amendment form. These are the amendment changes I need made, but you’ve got to populate that form with all the right parties.” It’ll go create the document. It can get to about 80% of the way there. It saves the time of having to search and find and replace yourself or have an admin do that.
The final thing I do is what I call chatting with documents, and that’s what I use the Adobe tool for. I’ll open up a large, complex document, and the things I normally think of when I’m reading a document, I’ll just ask questions of it. Or I’ve developed a set of questions that I use as a checklist—I’ll ask that tool to find those in the document or summarize or synthesize provisions.
The AI tool in Acrobat I found to be really useful for that. Those are the three principal use cases: limited drafting, limited extraction of information, and the ability to chat with documents.
Zac: How much time do you think you’re saving with those three different tasks?
Todd: On the drafting of simple documents, it’s probably taking what could be an hour to an hour and a half down to maybe 15 to 20 minutes. So it can be a significant change.
The review of docs—the extraction—it’s probably accelerating that by hours sometimes. If I’ve got a really dense limited partnership document and I don’t have a lot of ability to influence it, I’m really just trying to risk-assess. That methodology of having the document compared to a good baseline and extracting the information saves a lot of time.
But I definitely think it is a time saver. It’s also a way to be more confident in your practice that you’re getting to the right answer. Sometimes we’re all human, and you can read something and not interpret it correctly. If you’ve asked the AI tool to synthesize something and the synthesis is similar to what you think the provision means, odds are it’s probably right. But if the synthesis is way different, then you need to take some time to study that provision.
It’s Ronald Reagan’s approach—I’m a huge fan of Reagan. It’s the old Russian proverb he used with Gorbachev: trust but verify. That’s what my view of AI is. Trust it’s going to give you good information, but by God, verify it.
And candidly, it’s one of our obligations as attorneys. You have to verify. You can’t have a paralegal or an associate or an AI tool that you’re not responsible for. That’s a fundamental obligation under the canons—you are responsible for the work product that you produce or that you have third parties produce for you. AI is in that same boat. It’s a third party that’s producing the result for you, so you’d better know it’s accurate.
Zac: There’s this principle in a book I recently read—the 10-80-10 principle for delegation of highly creative work. The first 10% is you giving the prompt, 80% is the work being done, and then you verify and do the final 10%. Do you think that’s how legal work is going to be done in the future?
Todd: I don’t think AI is going to replace attorney jobs at the end of the day. I think it’s going to change the approach and probably put more on your plate that you need to do.
At our attorney retreat back in October, we had a large AI discussion. One of the things our Chief Legal Officer brought up was a quote by Albert Einstein. It was essentially: if I was given an hour to solve a problem, how would I use that hour? I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and then five minutes writing the solution to it.
The point he was making was that we, as attorneys, are paid to think. The “do” side of things we sometimes get caught up in. Take time to think. Take time to step back. Maybe that’s what this book on creativity you were talking about is trying to get to.
I think that’s the power of the AI tool—it can help you produce the final product more quickly, but thinking about what you need and spending that time is the attorney’s time side of this. The examples I gave of how I’ve used Copilot to draft documents or extract information—I spent a lot of time thinking about the pieces I needed to assemble, the questions I needed to ask. I iterated that a little bit. Ultimately, the work of the AI tool was quick at the end of the day, but it took meaningful time to think about what I wanted that tool to do.
That’s the important thing to think about. We all get in this rush of quick, quick, quick. A lot of times, you’ve got to go slow to go fast. I use that a lot with our team. If you don’t go slow and have your process and understand where you’re trying to go, you’re going to make mistakes. When you make mistakes, that’s going to slow you down. So if you want to go quickly, spend your time upfront thinking, planning how you want this, what are the scenarios that play out?
I think that’s equally applicable to AI in terms of the tools you would use.
Zac: The teams that are going to win in the AI age are the ones that have the forms and processes built out, right?
Todd: Yeah, that’s where thinking time comes into play. You could use AI tools to draft processes or things like that, but that’s where our thinking time is.
Zac: How do you budget in thinking time in your week-to-week schedule?
Todd: I do try to time-block. It’s interesting because you start the year with tons of meetings and things like that. I do try to find blocks of time during the day where I don’t have meetings. It’s tough with office interruptions and things like that. I always want to have an open door, but blocking times on your calendar to think, plan, and execute the work you need to get done—that’s invaluable.
The Place Where It All Comes Together
Zac: You’ve gone from Layne to Hallmark to JE Dunn — three very different companies, but you clearly feel a deep connection to each one. What is it about JE Dunn that resonates with you the way it does?
Todd: It’s a fantastic Kansas City-based company with a national footprint—one of the top construction companies in the country. I feel blessed to be on the team here, helping on our investment and real estate side. I’m not directly involved in the construction business. I’m indirectly involved to the extent we invest in some of the deals that we’re building.
What I think is interesting and fascinating about this company—I’m looking out the window into downtown Kansas City—I can see the history of Kansas City through the lens of things this company has built over the last 102 years.
As I think about JE Dunn, it’s a relationship-based business that leaves these monuments in our communities around Kansas City and around this country. It’s schools, hospitals, city halls, sports stadiums, hotels—it’s where we live and play.
Curiously, the last two companies where I have worked are connected by a core human need of connection. Hallmark’s mission is to help celebrate our special social connections, and JE Dunn’s mission is to provide those places where those special moments can occur. I think that’s really special.
