After years on the East Coast, Keith H. Williamson has returned to the Midwest to live and work in the city where he grew up. Last November, Williamson was named senior vice president, general counsel, and secretary of Centene Corporation, a St. Louis-based multi-line healthcare enterprise that provides managed care programs and related services to adults and children receiving benefits under Medicaid. “It’s not like I went looking for a job in my old hometown,” says Williamson, “but there is definitely an aspect of homecoming.”
With his father running The Sentinel, one of St. Louis’ African American newspapers, and his mother the dean of admissions for Washington University’s School of Social Work, Williamson grew up more attuned to St. Louis civics than most of his contemporaries. Nonetheless, he went east for college, where throughout four “relatively happy-go-lucky” years at Brown University, he studied economics and sociology. After graduating, Williamson went on to earn both his J.D and M.B.A. from Harvard University. He later added an LL.M in taxation from New York University School of Law to his vitae.
A career in the legal profession first caught Williamson’s imagination in high school, when a teacher advised the occasionally argumentative teen that he ought to become a lawyer. Now general counsel for a company that went public in 2001 and reached its first $1 billion in annual revenue in 2004, Williamson is helping Centene build its internal legal resources and adjust to the new challenges that come with rapid and aggressive growth.
Prior to Centene, Williamson spent 18 years with Pitney Bowes Inc., a Fortune 350 leader of mailstream solutions based in Stamford, Connecticut. There he served as a divisional general counsel before crossing over to running the business side of the division in 1999. According to Williamson, because much of a general counsel’s work requires problem-solving and being a supportive team player, his skills have translated quite smoothly from job to job.
“Moving into the health field has definitely been interesting,” says Williamson, who began his career as a tax attorney at Covington & Burling and then continued at Reavis & McGrath (now Fulbright Jaworski) in New York. “It’s a complex and different area of the law, and one which I was eager to learn.”
Today Williamson is also eager to assist in providing a better level of healthcare and delivering it in a more efficient manner. At Centene, he is doing just that—and doing it in St. Louis. Who says you can’t go home again? DB
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From the September/October 2007 issue of Diversity & The Bar®