College of Science alumni spotlight: Eric Graben

Eric Graben had every intention to go into what he affectionately calls “the family business” when he decided to attend Clemson University and major in physics.

Graben’s father, H. Willingham Graben, was a long-time faculty member in the department, landing a tenure-track position the year before Eric was born and serving until his retirement in 1993.

“When Dad joined the physics department in the 1960s, it was during the space race and they decided they were going to build a big department,” Graben said. “By the time I had graduated from high school, there were probably two dozen professors, most of whom had come around the same time and were roughly age contemporaries with my dad. They were all kind of like uncles to me, and they all had kids within a few years of my age. I planned on being a Ph.D. physicist like my dad. It was kind of like going into the family business.”

He earned his bachelor’s degree in three years and then enrolled in graduate school at the University of Virginia. After a year, Graben switched to political science, a transition he said started during his senior year at Clemson when he took a course in American defense policy. 

“I still thought I wanted to be a professor like my dad,” said Graben, who did his dissertation on U.S. nuclear weapons strategy.

Going back home

After he received his master’s degree and Ph.D. in foreign affairs, he was pursuing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the atomic bomb was designed and tested. But seven months in, the political science department at Clemson advertised for a visiting assistant professor. Graben jumped at the chance to go back to his alma mater.

He taught at Clemson for two years before he decided to go to law school.

“I really enjoyed teaching, but I didn’t really like academic research very much,” he said. “My best friend from high school had started law school, and he said he thought I’d be good at law and that I would like it. I decided I thought so too and applied to law schools.”

He attended the University of Virgina School of Law and got a job at Wyche law firm as a corporate and securities attorney.

Graben has spent most of his legal career at Wyche. He recently returned to Wyche after spending three years at an AmLaw 100 firm. AmLaw 100 is a list of the country’s 100 largest law firms.

“I don’t do trials. I do deals,” Graben said. “Going into law school, I thought I was going to be a litigator, a courtroom gunslinger. But instead, I got involved doing deals. One of the main goals of doing a deal is making sure you don’t end up in court because if you’re buying a company, you want to buy a company, not a lawsuit.”

Tying it together

“Doing deals is a lot like diplomacy and negotiation, which is what attracted me to political science. And one of the things you learn in physics is rigorous problem solving of very complex problems. When you’re practicing law, particularly business law, you’re doing a lot of that, so my training in complex problem solving at Clemson always served me well,” he said.

Corporate law ties into all his degrees.

He represents public and private companies in corporate and securities law matters. He advises clients on a full range of corporate and commercial matters, including company formation and choice of entity, raising angel and venture capital, negotiating complex contracts, going public and strategic transactions, including mergers and acquisitions.

Several of his clients have been Clemson science and engineering professors who wanted to license their inventions from the Clemson University Research Foundation (CURF) and commercialize them through their own companies.

Going to court for children

While he rarely has to go to court for corporate and securities law, Graben does find himself in the courtroom doing pro bono child advocacy work in Department of Social Services abuse and neglect cases.

 “The stakes are high,” he said. “They’re just not as much measured in money.”

He said he got into child advocacy work in a roundabout way. When he was teaching at Clemson, his church asked him to be a leader for the junior high youth group. Somewhat to his surprise, he enjoyed it. After he started law school, he became involved in a law student-run youth mentoring program. 

When he started practicing law in South Carolina, he had a choice of whether to be put on a list of potential court-appointed attorneys for criminal defense work for indigent defendants or for pro bono guardian work for children involved in abuse and neglect cases. He chose the children. He also volunteered for cases through the Greenville County Guardian Ad Litem program that recruits non-lawyer guardians.

“It’s completely different from my day job, and it does allow me to go into court and feel like a real lawyer some of the time,” Graben said.

Graben said that although he didn’t ultimately go into “the family business,” he’s never regretted having been a physics major at Clemson.

“I think that’s been a pillar of every success that I have enjoyed since then,” he said.