Career Footprints

About Career Footprints

In each episode, we’ll ask our guest, a Reed Smith alum, to share their career story, how their time at Reed Smith contributed to their success, and their advice for early-career lawyers. Our goal is to surface insights from these inspiring professionals’ careers that will help you find your way to professional success, however you define that.

Publisher

Reed Smith LLP

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

11 Jan 2024

Latest episode

22 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

16 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   22 Sept 2026

   Addison DiSesa: From litigation associate at Reed Smith to counsel and legislative policy advisor at DoorDash

   Addison DiSesa shares his journey from litigation associate in the Los Angeles office of Reed Smith to his current role combining politics, policy, law, and business as counsel and legislative policy advisor at DoorDash, pausing to reflect on the importance of mentoring, staying calm, being curious, and taking time to figure out what you really want from your career.

2. 

   23 Jun 2026

   Yoni Fix: Committing early to mastery

   Yoni Fix shares insights garnered from a career spanning roles at PWC (M&A Taxation), Reed Smith (State Tax) and now as a partner at Armanino (State and Local Tax), including committing early to mastery, the value of being a work in progress, and recognizing that preparation leads to success.

3. 

   1 Jun 2026

   Chrystal Mauro: How passion projects can help you stand out from the crowd

   Founder of non-profit The Legal Mentor Network, Chrystal Mauro talks mentoring, bankruptcy law and the ongoing importance of stepping outside your comfort zone as she describes a career spanning over 20 years, taking in clerking, life as a Reed Smith associate and more recently work as an in-house counsel.

4. 

   21 Apr 2026

   Sam Hill: Confidence in the face of novel issues

   As the sole UK counsel of Stockholm based Acast, the world's largest independent podcast marketplace, Sam Hill faces novel legal and business issues with confidence in his ability to deliver practical outcomes and solutions. In this episode of Career Footprints, he shares his lifelong passion for media which began growing up and carried through to his career as paralegal, associate, in-house secondment, and now in-house counsel. In every role, he has focused on developing close working relationships with senior lawyers, embracing work projects that broadened and deepened his expertise, and not shied away from offering a fresh take in strategic discussions.

5. 

   11 Nov 2025

   Zoe Bucknell: Leading a business from a place of deep customer and self-understanding

   As the CEO and co-founder of Kuberno, an innovative corporate governance technology solutions company, Zoe Bucknell has thought deeply about leadership and trust-building with stakeholders, customers, and her team. In this episode, she shares insights from her career path, from law firm associate to general counsel and corporate secretary, and now as the CEO of a rapidly growing company where she has applied all her learnings. As a British lawyer and entrepreneur who has worked extensively “across the pond” with Americans, she also shares observations on UK and U.S. legal and business cultural nuances.

6. 

   10 Sept 2025

   Yoni Tammam: Creating value and building a career through a unique skill set

   Throughout his career, Yoni Tammam has cultivated a unique skill set and strategically applied it to drive success for both teams and clients. In this episode of Career Footprints, Yoni traces his journey from undergrad business major, to tax associate at Reed Smith, to vice president at the tax insurance practice at CAC Group where he advises clients on managing tax risks in high-stakes transactions. Yoni focuses his practice on using tax insurance to accrete value to his clients. In the episode, he offers practical advice for law firm associates – especially those aspiring to move in to business roles – on making the most of their law firm experiences, building a marketable skill set, and asking the right questions when exploring their first business opportunity after Big Law. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Welcome to the Reed Smith podcast, Career Footprints. In each episode of Career Footprints, we'll ask our guest, a Reed Smith alum, to share their career story, how their time at Reed Smith set them up for success, and their advice for early career lawyers. Our goal is to surface insights from the careers of these inspiring professionals that will help you find professional success, however you define that. Lauren: Greetings, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Reed Smith's alumni Career Footprints podcast. This is your host, Lauren Hakala, Reed Smith's Global Director of Learning and Development. Today, I'm excited to be speaking with Reed Smith alum Yoni Tammam. A lawyer by training, Yoni currently works in a business role, serving as vice president, tax and insurance practice at insurance broker and advisory firm CAC Group. He started his career as a tax associate in Reed Smith's Global Corporate Group, based right here in our New York office, where I also sit. Yoni, welcome. How are you today? Yoni: I’m doing well. Thanks for having me on, Lauren. Lauren: Thanks for being here. So if it's okay with you, we'll jump right in because there's a lot to cover. Yoni: That sounds great. Lauren: Okay, so you currently work in a specialized area of the transaction insurance industry. How would you describe what you do and the product you sell to like a total layperson? Yoni: Sure. So I work as a tax insurance broker for a company called CAC Group. CAC Group itself is a leading insurance broker and advisor that provides expertise and placement capabilities across the spectrum of insurance. Within CAC Group, I work for one of the entities called CAC Specialty, which is an industry-leading specialty broker dealing a lot with transactional insurance. And the subset that I deal with is tax insurance. So at a high level, what I do is help clients, again, protect against tax risk in high stakes transactions. The product is now actually evolving such that you don't need a transaction for tax insurance anymore. You can use it in a whole bunch of different variety of ways. And basically what it does is it protects a position that a taxpayer is putting on a tax return. So for example, if a company is undergoing a merger and they structure it to be a tax-free merger, and there's a question as to whether or not the analysis will be respected by the IRS, me and my team will work to help our clients come up with a insurance solution to mitigate that risk and allocate that risk amongst the transaction parties. Lauren: Got it. So you mentioned that your customers are companies engaged in transactions. How do you spend most of your days with them? Yoni: Sure. So tax insurance really comes down to high level three buckets. There's our tax credit insurance, there's M&A transactional insurance, and then there's call it ordinary course of business, which is really helping companies protect their balance sheet when taking on certain tax positions in the ordinary course of business with internal restructurings and things like that. Most of my time is spent talking with clients and or underwriters, our trading partners,

7. 

   11 Jul 2025

   Jamie Welborn Knauer: The power of relating to clients primarily as people

   The power of personal relationships has been transformative at every stage of Jamie Welborn Knauer’s career – from law school student, to global commercial disputes litigator at Reed Smith, to his current role as senior counsel, Product & Regulatory at DoorDash. Jamie discusses how people’s investments in his career and in him, as a person, have been invaluable. Whether it was the gift of feedback as a means to improve his core legal skills or informational interviews as a catalyst to explore new career opportunities, Jamie explains how this people-first mindset translates to aligning himself with the mission of his DoorDash colleagues and customers and how the power of personal relationships influences how he hires and works with outside counsel.

8. 

   11 Jun 2025

   Cara DeCataldo: Thinking strategically about things to come

   Cara DeCataldo discusses the pivotal role of mentorship in her career, from a regional firm to Eisai Inc, highlighting unexpected opportunities and valuable lessons learned in this interview.

9. 

   10 Apr 2025

   Stuart Kuntz: Becoming a collaborative and agile deal lawyer

   Reed Smith alum Stuart Kuntz shares his path from senior M&A associate to associate general counsel of a public company, including what drew him to in-house practice and the mindset and approach to client service that contributed to his success. He shares his insights from two decades of dealmaking on how outside counsel – from partners to junior associates – can make a strong impression, and how junior associates can prepare for a career path that leads to success like his. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Welcome to the Reed Smith Podcast, Career Footprints. In each episode of Career Footprints, we'll ask our guest, a Reed Smith alum, to share their career story, how their time at Reed Smith set them up for success, and their advice for early career lawyers. Our goal is to surface insights from the careers of these inspiring professionals that will help you find professional success, however you define that. Lauren: Welcome to another episode of Reed Smith's Alumni Career Footprints Podcast. I am your host, Lauren Hakala, Reed Smith's Global Director of Learning and Development. And today, I'm excited to be speaking with Reed Smith alumni, Stuart Kuntz. Stuart is Associate General Counsel, M&A, and Ventures at a company that many of our listeners will be very familiar with, and that's Foot Locker. He joined Footlocker two and a half years ago after spending about 17 years in legal roles of increasing responsibility at Verizon. Earlier in his career, Stuart practiced as a transactional associate here at Reed Smith. Stuart, how are you today? Stuart: Hi, Lauren. I'm doing great. Thanks. Lauren: So I'd like to start by asking you just about your current role at Foot Locker. How do you spend most of your time and who do you mainly interact with during your work days there? Stuart: You know, I spend most of my time, I'm a transactional lawyer, spend most of my time on M&A transactions. I spend some amount of time on international franchising transactions. as well. I also, as part of my role, I support our treasury group. So I do spend some time, not as much, but some time supporting treasury, either with regard to our credit facility or other agreements or questions they have. So that's, you know, that's the bulk of my practice at Foot Locker. There's an occasional, you know, occasional commercial contract I need to help out with, you know, a little this, a little that. But I would say the bulk of it is disposition work, international franchising, and some treasury support. Lauren: So it sounds like you are a real deal lawyer. And I'm curious, how would you describe your style or your approach to helping your clients get transactions done and closed? Stuart: You know, it's a lot of, you know, we talk about style and approach, you somewhat want to mirror your client's style and approach. And it can change from deal to deal. There are transactions that, you know, we got, you know, we have to take one for the team. Essentially, this is something We got to get done and, you know, we're going to have to bite our lip and do it because it's, it's critical and, you know, generally, you know, disposition of business that just isn't strategic, for example, you know, you're going to have to get done. There are others that are more nice to have where you can take stronger negotiation positions. It also depends on the counterparty. There are people who are very easy to deal with commercially reasonable professional people. There are people who, you know, are, it can be very difficult and, you know, everything's a fight and there can be people who, you know, maybe they're not difficult, but they They're not particularly sophisticated, and there's a lot of almost educating the other side when you're doing a deal. So it varies from transaction to transaction, but you try to get a feel for the deal. I try to be collaborative. I try to generally be fairly reasonable. I don't start from where I think I'm going to end up

10. 

    17 Feb 2025

    Molly Campbell: Mastering complexity

    Reed Smith alum Molly Campbell shares how her passion for learning novel and complex subjects and her powerful interactions with mentors enabled her to excel as a litigation associate and then partner at Reed Smith. She details how careful reflection and strong professional and personal relationships paved her path from trial lawyer to in-house counsel at Astellas Pharma advising on cutting-edge regulatory issues. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Welcome to the Reed Smith podcast, Career Footprints. In each episode of Career Footprints, we'll ask our guests, a Reed Smith alum, to share their career story, how their time at Reed Smith set them up for success, and their advice for early career lawyers. Our goal is to surface insights from inspiring professionals' careers that will help you find your professional success, however you define that. Lauren: Welcome to another episode of Reed Smith's Alumni Career Footprints podcast. This is Lauren Hakala, Reed Smith's Global Director of Learning and Development. Today, I'm really excited to be speaking with Reed Smith alum Molly Campbell. Molly is currently the Legal Regulatory Lead for Gene Therapy at Astellas Pharma. She joined Astellas from Reed Smith’s Washington, D.C. office, where she most recently was a partner in the Global Commercial Disputes Group. Molly, welcome. How are you today? Molly: Hi, thank you so much. So nice to be here. I'm doing quite well. Lauren: Awesome. So let's dive right in. We've got a lot to cover. So I'd love to start by asking you about your current role. What are your main areas of responsibility at Astellas? Molly: Well, you touched on one. So I am the legal lead for the Astellas Gene Therapy Division, but I actually have quite a diverse role here at Astellas. I also support our government pricing and state transparency teams, and I'm the global social media subject matter expert and serve as the legal representative for the U.S. Specific committee dealing with sort of any novel social media initiative. And finally, I've most recently taken on the role of providing any legal guidance and support necessary for any independent medical education grants. Lauren: That sounds like a very wide area of responsibility. I'm curious, what do you like best about the role? Molly: Well, like you mentioned, I love the variability. I'm never, ever bored. Sometimes I do feel a little bit like whack-a-mole. I'll be thinking in one area of the law and then have to pivot to something completely different. But I think my favorite part is really the relationships I've been able to build since coming to Astellas. It's interesting, of course, I had good relationships with clients when I was at the firm. But as a litigator, you also have some fairly adversarial relationships. And as professional as those may be, you certainly don't want the same thing as your opposing counsel. But in-house, the business partners that I work with every day know that I want the things that they want. And it's really our process together, finding the best solution to balance risks and getting to the great answer and the good outcome that they want. That's been my favorite part of being in-house. I set sort of a goal for myself originally that I would be an attorney that people want to include on the calls and I think based on some of the feedback that I've received to date I've made some very good inroads into developing that reputation because I know it can be so difficult everybody knows right the lawyers are the people that they love to hate and that was something that I just didn't want to have happen in-house. And it's been wonderful to try to make sure that people value what it is I can contribute to the conversation and know that it's my goal to do everything I can to support their, you know, all of the opportunities and all of the desires that they have as a business. Lauren: That's so cool how intentional you were about, I want to be a lawyer that people want to hav

11. 

    11 Dec 2024

    Doug Sayranian: From M&A lawyer to general counsel working in cyber threat intelligence

    Reed Smith alum Doug Sayranian shares his journey from M&A lawyer to general counsel at Intel 471, where he leverages his skills to solve business problems and drive strategic growth.

12. 

    17 Sept 2024

    Naz Sachedina: From structured finance associate to director in asset management

    Reed Smith alum, Naz Sachedina, shares her journey from qualifying as a lawyer at Reed Smith to her current role as a director at WisdomTree Asset Management. Naz discusses her diverse experiences at Reed Smith, including two secondments, and how these shaped her career. Naz also offers valuable insights on transitioning from private practice to in-house roles and the skills needed for success in the legal industry. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Welcome to the Reed Smith podcast, Career Footprints. In each episode of Career Footprints, we'll ask our guest, a Reed Smith alum, to share their career story, how their time at Reed Smith set them up for success, and their advice for early career lawyers. Our goal is to surface insights from inspiring professionals' careers that will help you find your professional success, however you define that. Lauren: Welcome to another episode of Reed Smith's alumni Career Footprints podcast. This is Lauren Hakala, Reed Smith's Global Director of Learning and Development. Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by London office alum, Naz Sachedina. Naz qualified as a solicitor at Reed Smith and then practiced for about five years in the structured finance team of our financial industry group. Her time at Reed Smith included two secondments, one with Barclays, and then with Merrill Lynch. Since then, Naz's career has included two senior in-house legal posts, first at counsel at Pinebridge Investments, and then as associate director and now director at WisdomTree Asset Management. Naz, welcome. Naz: Thank you, Lauren. Thank you for having me. Lauren: I’m very excited for this conversation about your career. So I wanted to see if we could start by you telling us a little bit about your current role at WisdomTree and what you're doing now and what you like about it. Naz: Yeah, sure. So as you mentioned, I'm a director. I'm actually a director in the product legal team at WisdomTree. So that kind of means I cover the products and platforms rather than the kind of the corporate legal matters, which is covered by another part of our legal team. So WisdomTree in Europe has a very wide range of platforms and asset classes. So underlying assets kind of range from equities to commodities like oil and gold to crypto assets. We have physically backed platforms we have synthetic platforms where swap counterparties provide exposure to the underlying assets through a swap and all our kind of all our platforms are all slightly different so which means the mechanics the way they operate are slightly different. That means a kind of in my role I cover the kind of lifespan of the product so right from when you launch a product to when you do maintenance like doing the prospectus rollover if you have to make amendments if you have to do security holder votes right to the closure of a product so it's kind of cradle to grave as it were for products and I also want to take kind of wider projects within the with the WisdomTree so if we're making changes to a platform rather than specific products. So that's in a nutshell what I do at WisdomTree. Lauren: And keeping in mind that many of our audience are are newly qualified lawyers and lawyers in their first three years of practice and knowing that you've been in their shoes. What's the best thing about your current role? Naz: I never get bored, ever, just because of the range of assets and platforms. There's always something new happening, which is still a little terrifying. I remember asking Andrzej, shout out to Andrzej at Reed Smith, like, when do you feel comfortable? And he was like, you never do, Naz. So even though it's slightly terrifying, there are always new things to do, new things to learn. I love learning new things. I'm one of those really sad people that gets very excited by it. And also just, you know, WisdomTree, not just the legal team, but the wider team are great as well. I love the legal team. They're awesome. Everyone I deal with are j

13. 

    11 Jul 2024

    Wendy Jephson: Leveraging Gen AI and other technologies to help people think brilliantly

    Alum Wendy Jephson (https://uk.linkedin.com/in/wendyjephson) shares highlights from her very successful and varied career, taking in her time at Reed Smith predecessor firm Richards Butler, as a senior in-house counsel, in several posts as a behavioral psychologist (including at NASDAQ) and more recently as CEO and co-founder of Let’s Think – a behavioral science-led tech company focused on how to elicit, capture and transmit knowledge and understanding within organizations. Wendy demonstrates the ongoing value that her legal training delivers to her business career, not least in building an understanding of deal drivers and blockers. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Welcome to the Reed Smith podcast, Career Footprints. In each episode of Career Footprints, we'll ask our guest, a Reed Smith alum, to share their career story, how their time at Reed Smith set them up for success, and their advice for early career lawyers. Our goal is to surface insights from inspiring professionals' careers that will help you find your professional success, however you define that. Lauren: Welcome back to another episode of Reed Smith's Career Footprints podcast. This is Lauren Hakala, Reed Smith's Global Director of Learning and Development. And today I'm thrilled to be joined by firm alumni, Wendy Jephson. Wendy has had a really interesting career path that started at the law firm of Richard’s Butler, which merged with Reed Smith in 2007. And since then, Wendy's career has included two in-house legal posts, several posts as a behavioral psychologist, including at NASDAQ, all leading up to her founding of Let's Think, a behavioral science-led tech company. Wendy, welcome. Wendy: Pleasure to be here. Lauren: So you've had such an interesting career, and I was wondering if we could just start by you telling us a little bit about your current project at Let's Think. Wendy: Absolutely. So Let's Think we're a behavioral science led technology company and our purpose is to help the people of the world think brilliantly. We're really focused on solving the problem of expertise, how you elicit it, capture it and transfer it to people within an organization like a law firm. So we all know people with lots of knowledge and expertise and know-how in their heads. And when they leave the firm, it's gone. It's not written down. It's not transferred. And actually, that happens at the end of working on a legal matter or project as well. It's got a broad challenge. And then, of course, at the other end, you've got more junior people who would love to tap into that knowledge and know-how in order to develop their own learning and understanding and be more productive and more effective in their working lives. So that's the problem that we're looking to try and solve. And leveraging the latest in Gen AI technologies along with others as well in order to elicit that knowledge, capture and transfer in a really usable way. Lauren: Wow, that sounds like such an interesting project and one that really gets to like the core of some of the challenges that we struggle with in law firms. So just to tell us more about how you got to this project, and we'll ask you, of course, more about it later, but I was hoping that we could rewind back to the beginning of your career story. We'd love to hear a little bit more about your time at Reed Smith, which of course then was Richard’s Butler. Could you talk to us a little bit about when you joined the firm and what kind of work you did while here? Wendy: Sure. And it kind of is interesting to think that, you know, all those many years ago now has kind of led back to the current path that Let's Sink is on right now. And so it really did start a long time ago in the summer of my second year at university doing a law degree, where I got an internship at Richard's Butler and did a three week round robin sitting in a number of places, one of which was a shipping seat where I had to write a letter talking about charter parties and actually great advice from the partner then who said just write it as if you're writing to your brother which was a great tip actually because it kind of you know defers the the process of writing a letter like that seemed to do a reasonable job and I was invited to interview for the trainee contract and so started there after you know your obligatory five months of traveling after law school and started in February ’93. So 31 years ago, coming up to next week, really. Lauren: Wow. So so you mentioned that you got an internship at Richard's Butler and then moved on to a training contract. Could you tell us a little bit more about your time as as a trainee and and sort of how that progressed and how you ended up deciding to move to your next role? Wendy: Sure. So I started in a property seat with Paul Johnston, who I think became chairman at Richard’s Butler at some point in time, which was great fun and hugely educational. Next seat was competition. I particularly remember Katherine Holmes in that role. And that was really good grounding, actually, for the next seat that I had, which was actually going in-house. It was the first secondment that was set up with Xerox. It was actually then Rank Xerox, but Xerox, which actually, you know, involved a trip over to Brussels looking at competition law issues. So it was great grounding to then go and see it in practice in an in-house setting. I came back from there having really got some eye-opening understanding of how law works in the organizational setting. I think one of the biggest learnings I had was right really early on when somebody came to me for a contract and And I've taken the details for that. And I said, so when do you want it to start? And he said, oh, no, we started about a month ago. I was like, what do you mean you haven't got a contract? How could you possibly have started? So it's that, okay, so really we're part of a system here. And, you know, this is the way that the world works. Learning, you know, what are the implications of, you know, business is always going to move forward. So how do you ensure that they get the right advice at the right moment in time and the risks get managed effectively? So that was great learning. I came back for a brief corporate seat. And then the final seat was property litigation with Roger Parker, who I think was managing partner at some point at Richard's Butler as well. And at the end of that, in fact, Xerox offered me a job in their Central and Eastern European team. And I have to say, I loved being in-house. So I took up that opportunity at that moment in time. So it was a short but sweet stint at Richard's Butler, which I learned to keep him out from. Lauren: Yeah, no, it's so interesting to hear about, particularly for such a junior early career lawyer going in-house that you learn those lessons about the differences between in-house practice and law firm practice so early in the game. And one of our audiences of this podcast, of course, is our most junior lawyers at Reed Smith. So I was wondering if you could talk more about when you did end up landing at Xerox so early in your career, what did you kind of miss about being at the law firm. And I asked that partially just so our audience will know what are the kinds of experiences that they should soak up while while they're at the law firm. Wendy: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, one, you're no longer in a fabulous cohort of trainees and fellow junior lawyers. You're still in touch with them, but that social side of it is different. And even just learning from, clearly your colleagues are in different parts of the organization. And whilst litigation was never entirely my bag, you learn an awful lot from the litigators of what can go wrong if you're trying to set something up to go right from the get go. So having access to, at your fingertips, colleagues across an organization that are working on very different projects, but you can begin to understand the richness of the picture that you're operating in. I think that that is immediately a challenge when you're cut off from that to some extent. You get some of it by being able to go out and work with your external legal providers, because obviously internally you develop your own area of expertise. And particularly when I moved into pharmacy schools at Lilly, you know, developing a regulatory expertise and some level of employment law expertise and that side of things. But, you know, you're never going to be a construction law expert and you're going to go out to your external lawyers or indeed, you know, employment lawyer partners for tricky cases and competition law. You need to get the latest insight. So you have access to those providers of the expert knowledge whilst trying to apply it internally. So it's quite a different beast. I didn't miss the timesheets. I'm sure nobody would be surprised to hear that. Although I think some in-house firms do now start to monitor that sort of thing to some degree, I believe. But yeah, I mean, they are very significantly different organizations, that's for sure. And clearly, you know, you have training programs which are beneficial and they're structuring and supporting your career in quite a different way. So, yeah, there are, you know, significant benefits for being in private practice that I certainly see the way that law firms have developed over the time since I was in there, too. Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. No, I love that image of when you're at the law firm, not only having sort of these peers who you can call and share experiences with and ask questions that you might be afraid to ask someone more senior, but also then you've got the whole resources of the firm. But I'll agree that a few people have told me after going in-house that they miss timekeeping, as important as it is. So you mentioned then that you went from your time at the firm to Xerox and then moved on to Lilly and loved being in-house. I'm hoping that you could tell us a little bit about that sort of learning curve of landing as an in-house lawyer fairly early in your career and maybe five years into that developing success and moving up. What skills did you hone in that position? And why? What was it about the in-house role that allowed you to kind of excel? And what were the key skills you built? Wendy: Yeah, I mean, I suppose because you have your clients at your fingertips. So it's very easy to join in their meetings and sit in. And as you're going forward, you start to go into the more senior management meetings and board meetings. So you are beginning to learn how the business works, what matters to the business, what risk is it willing to take and what is it not. And particularly was very much, look, if the law is black and white, we absolutely don't step over the line, regardless of whether there was like a one pound, one dollar fine to a massive upside. Absolutely no way. But actually, as we all know, law is really mainly gray. So it's understanding the risks of taking any opportunity. Is it the right thing to do? Will it pass the red face test? Understanding what that really means, especially in an environment with pharmaceuticals and products that are impacting people's lives. And so it's the rounded understanding of how the business works from R&D, compound discovery and development, clinical trials and the ethical side of patient work, all the way through to licensing and sales and marketing and pricing of all of that. You know competitive issues that come along the way with all so you get to touch so many different areas of the business that you really begin to learn how it works so you have a much better understanding of a really good understanding of what it is that matters to your your internal clients and therefore how to support and deliver the services to them. Lauren: Yeah, no, I, I love what you said about spending time with clients. And I've never heard that expression, the red face test before, right? But but what what I think you meant by that is just developing judgment, right? Like, how can you put all of these factors together and help help the client reach a good decision? So I want to, I want to pick up on that when we move on to sort of the next stage of your career of going back to school. But but before we leave your your time in in these these two in-house roles. Could you give us, our listeners, a few tips about great things, like times when your outside counsel just were really impressed you? What were a couple of things that they should be keeping in mind when they're supporting their clients of how to impress and please inside counsel? Wendy: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I always really enjoyed working with the experts from outside counsel. And what that expertise over years of doing the job is they've seen many times examples that may not be identical to the problem you're posing to them, but similar. So they understand the nuances of it and they can give you a really good idea of what's the likelihood of success or the risks that you're taking and what are the key steps that you need to pay attention to versus the ones that aren't going to deliver as much value. So those were the things that I really enjoyed getting the pointers of how to go about something. Now, it's not so difficult to know what the law is now, particularly with all the level of support we've got. It's knowing how to apply it and the experience to apply it. That is difficult to get without actually practically doing it many times over. So in some respects, for junior lawyers, it's to try and understand applied work to go and dig into, well, how, you know, what was different about a particular past case. Sometimes that's by asking questions of people who, if you can get them to spend time talking to you about what was it you noticed? You know, what are the cues in that particular scenario that led you to a certain course of action? and trying to learn from, you know, what people are noticing that matters in this scenario, because that's what you want as a client. You really want to understand, look, I can't be the first person that's experienced this particular scenario. Give me the range. I can interpret for myself because I know my own business better than, you know, whoever's advising me. But give me the scenarios so I can understand the risks and the strategies and the tactics that are going to be most suitable for my particular case. So it's understanding that your client needs a practical outcome. They need a solution. They need to make recommendations to their board about the risks that are going to be taken and the actions that are going to be taken. So it is that interpretation of the law and to spend as much time understanding what is it likely in your business environment that you're going to need and what's going to be acceptable and where the red lines are. Lauren: Got it. So looking to outside counsel to bring that sort of view across many similar experiences is faced by many clients, whereas recognizing that you're the expert in your business and helping, you know, what's important to your clients. Wendy: And the benefit of being in a law firm is that you see across industries. So you will see similarities and differences, and therefore you can draw analogous conclusions. And that's really valuable because sometimes if you're stuck in one industry, you can't see it from a different angle other than your own industry. And that's certainly what I've learned from changing in different industry domains. Domains that they're the same problems, but from a slightly different angle and different viewpoints. So there is definitely a benefit to being private practice and being able to get that broad overview and what they might see is actually quite potentially a narrow window of expertise. And yet they are seeing it more broadly than maybe they realize. Lauren: Absolutely. So two complementary skill sets of the in-house lawyer and the external lawyer. I think that's really helpful to understand as a junior lawyer on a transaction, sort of understanding the dynamics of the people you're directly supporting in the firm and the ultimate client. Yeah. So at this point in your career, after being a trainee at the firm and two in-house roles, you spend about, I think, just over a decade in those three roles and then went back to school. So can you tell us a little bit about that decision and what you did next? Wendy: Yeah, some people might think it's slightly bonkers, but really it was about, so the role in-house is really about providing advice on risk, as I say, and decision-making and supporting the decision-making of those you're advising. And it was fascinating watching different people in the organization, how they cope with that risk-taking and decision-making. I really enjoyed providing supportive solutions to the clients. And, you know, Lillian Pharmaceuticals did a lot of work in mental health, looking at depression and schizophrenia. So again, that was interesting to understand a bit about neuroscience and that side of health. And also they have a scientific approach. They're really understanding the evidence-based way of working, which is, you know, actually in a lot of ways, not dissimilar to law in that we work from precedent and we're establishing and, you know, you're working from an evidence base of what's gone before and interpreting and applying. So they're quite well nicely aligned but I was really fascinated by that decision making process and how you might be able to support that and at the time I had a brother who was a fund manager who was talking about investment decision making and saying you know it's you have a disciplined process and and yet when you come under pressure it can be a highly emotional environment as you're being perhaps potentially losing money because markets trick thing and people start taking risks when they shouldn't, and thought maybe there's something around data technology and behavioral science. I thought that sounds fascinating. And whilst I didn't think I would spend the rest of my kind of social time reading law books, I thought I might spend it reading behavioral science books, and I do. I actually love it. So I did go back to university to do a psychology degree and then a master's in occupational organizational psychology, so business psychology, really with a view to mind of how can you improve decision making in the workplace? And that was goal. And from there, I came out and was co-founder of a FinTech, RedTech startup, which was really looking at decision making of fund managers. And the RedTech part of it was compliance officers looking at the decisions of fund managers and looking for market abuse and any potential insider trading decisions that might have been going on. So that particular part took off rather nicely and attracted the the attention of NASDAQ, who decided to make us an offer we couldn't refuse and bought us in 2017. Lauren: Wow, that's amazing. Congratulations on growing a successful company. And it sounds like you, after growing this company, going back to school, making a career change, you landed back at a large institution at NASDAQ. So could you talk a little bit about that? What was it like sort of being Being back at a big organization, but now in what I think was a non-legal role, and how was that different? And what skills did you have to sort of tweak and sort of evolve in order to be in that new sort of capacity as a professional? Wendy: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, in the startup, it was very much, although, I mean, interestingly, law never leaves. It's always very useful, whatever you're doing, to be able to write your own contracts and shareholder agreements and think about data protection and all of these things. And in fact, in looking at, you know, compliance and market abuse rules, it's just a useful skill to be able to read legislation if you're trying to understand and write an algorithm to detect some kind of market abuse or other factors that go into it. So at NASDAQ then, it was very much a research and product design role. So using the behavioral science skills to interview experts, to elicit their expert knowledge and the cues and the pieces of data that they were using to make judgments about is somebody doing something they shouldn't be doing or not. That was an a we could encode that into rules-based algorithms to detect trading according you know using trading data and also to bake into heat scores so to begin to categorize the kind of behavior according to how risky it seemed or not based on how just you know these experts were deciding so we could codify that and it's also useful to understand how you design technology that makes it easy and engaging to use as well. So that's what we were doing. We were developing and designing tech. And I was running a team of behavioral scientists, data scientists, and technologists, and liaising with marketing and sales in order to understand whether or not there was any appetite for the kind of products that we were coming up with. Lauren: Yeah, no, when you were describing the research part of the role, speaking to people who were experts in what they do and making decisions and figuring out their thought process and what's important to them. It just sort of echoed both when you were talking about being a trainee and calling on senior colleagues and as an in-house lawyer asking your outside experts. Does that resonate? Is that sort of a skill that you've enjoyed in all of your roles? Wendy: Absolutely. And I think that's one of the things about being in-house. You can't be expected to know everything. So it's okay to ask the questions of the experts. It's easier to do it, plus you're paying them. So all of that makes it easier. And it's difficult in an industry where you're paid to know, to admit you don't know something and to ask those questions. I mean, this is really something that we're looking to try and help solve with Let's Think technology, to improve the collaboration in a way between the experts at the partner and the senior lawyer end, And how can we share that knowledge in an easy way and a psychologically safe environment? So junior lawyers can perhaps ask the questions via technology in a way that it's a bit trickier to walk into a partner's office or indeed impossible if they're either working from home or they're in another country. Lauren: Yeah. So talking about how that skill across all of these sort of amazing roles you've had, you're bringing to Let's Think, I'd love to sort of switch to what you're doing now and how this all has built up to it. So when we were talking before, when we first met, we talked a little bit about how as someone myself, who's been in leadership roles at a number of law firms, I've seen two pretty consistent challenges that I think you also have seen in your career. And the first one is really just how a firm can keep its busy and specialized experts aware of what everyone else is doing when everyone is so focused on their own clients and their own practice. But of course, you also need to be focused on what your colleagues are doing. And the second challenge, which has been so acute for so many of us after the pandemic, is how partners can help more junior lawyers develop into senior lawyers when the day-to-day practice is so different from when I think we were both coming up, right? People are on Zoom, they're remote, they're not necessarily observing each other. So kind of long lead up to, please, we'd love to hear you talk about how Let's Think is sort of trying to help the industry with those two challenges. Wendy: Yeah, absolutely. So if we start with how do you kind of help get expert knowledge out of people's heads, actually, lots of the time, especially once you become an expert, you don't realize how much you know, which means it's difficult to articulate. You don't realize other people can't see what you're seeing. And that's part of the kind of training that I've gone and undergone as a behavioral scientist in how to ask the questions to elicit that knowledge. It's been used a lot in high-risk industries, particularly when they're doing post-sacral reviews of events that have gone wrong. And they're trying to understand what people were noticing. To understand whether or not you can identify those cues of something about to go wrong sooner and put in better systems to prevent that from happening. And what you realize, you know, this is when you start to have these interviews and you dig deeper into how things occurred and what those experts noticed, you start to capture knowledge in this new way and in a way that people quite often at the end of it say well one they really enjoy the conversations because people don't ask them questions like that typically two they don't realize how much they do know and it and it helps them articulate it and write it down. And then you can begin to see the difference between, well, junior lawyers don't even notice, they don't even see the cues because they haven't been pointed out to them. You know, for them, there's so much information, it's difficult to spot the things that are the high value add elements of a particular legal matter, for example, and the places to focus. Focus and what those signals are telling you you know you might get something that comes in and if somebody's experienced with the the law firm on the other side for example they instantly have memories of of what it's like to work against or with them and therefore you start to develop your strategies of how you're going to approach it and the kind of risk tolerances that might be involved so all of that is in their heads and being activated and that's some of the stuff that we want to try and capture. Now, what we know is, you know, we get great information, but it might take, you know, an hour and a half, two hour interview. So we want to turn that into micro-elicitation, micro-interviews via some kind of Gen AI chatbot that asks you questions rather than currently we ask the chatbot questions, don't we, and it provides the answers. So if we can actually get a chatbot that begins to ask questions of our experts as they're doing the work, captures it in an engaging way that's useful to them. You can build up the kind of knowledge base and a process map of what they're doing and why and when. So it's, you know, know how is really know what, when, why, who. It's all of those different elements that people are thinking about. So we can visualize, if we can create that database in a way, that means that junior lawyers can then access, or indeed just people who've got a slightly different angle on a legal matter could tap into what was it that Roger was thinking about when he was working on that particular matter with that client at that moment in time? Why did he take that particular action and decision that he took? I can get to see a bit more of the context and I can understand what that would mean for my own practice and how I might notice that and recognize that when I come to it quicker of going forward. And the other key element to this, actually, which somebody pointed out to me today, that, yes, you want to make people more productive and effective faster, especially as technology is coming along to eat away that work that typically junior lawyers were training on. So you need to get them upskilled faster. But also anyone who's worked with Gen AI will kind of say, well, yes, it looks great. Actually but the people are getting the most value out of it at the moment are the ones that have got some expertise and knowledge and know how to tweak it they know where it's good where it falls down you need expert knowledge to be able to stay on the safe side of Gen AI you need to be able to interrogate it so there's a challenge if you've got junior lawyers coming up who aren't developing the expertise or is there going to be a point at which they can't challenge the AI and keep us safe. So we need to still keep building up that expertise and keep developing it so that it can keep pace with what Gen AI is bringing, which is the junior lawyers are the first who are going to have to deal with that particular challenge. And it's coming at us fast. Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. So wow, hearing you talk about Let's Think, it almost sounds like like the product and the product that the process that you're undertaking is attacking both parts of that, that challenge, right? So it's, it's on the one hand, an organized process to get know-how from senior lawyers. And, and on the other hand, it'll be a way that junior lawyers can sort of tap that. Am I understanding that correctly? Wendy: Yes, absolutely. Lauren: So just, I'm so curious in, in the process of, of working with the, the senior lawyers to design this product and figure out how to build it. What has come out of that for you about the best sort of mentors and the people who are the most thoughtful about how to transmit that kind of know-how? What guidance would you give to sort of other senior lawyers that you've gotten from those folks? Wendy: That is a good question, because it doesn't work for everyone. Not everyone is great at downloading their kind of know-how and knowledge. But actually, people who are really just interested engage still. And quite often, nearing to the end of their careers, and they want to leave a legacy behind, they're always the best people to speak to, because, you know, they're keen to share what they've learned and they know. And even though the world of law has changed dramatically, having that knowledge and understanding about businesses and how they've worked, it's not as if what they know has gone out of date. They've updated every single time they've worked on a legal matter. So they have plenty to say. And the process that we take them through is pretty structured. So they're well supported in how we ask the questions and we capture the information. But, yeah, I think it's the ones who are curious, enjoy what they do, love the details. Tell I mean tell me a lawyer who's not like that get engaged with it and enjoy what they they realize they know at the end of the process and it's a lot easier actually to go back and reflect when somebody's asking those sorts of questions the benefit of it is people who are busy and don't have time to spend mentoring junior and junior lawyers I mean it's a skill to ask the questions so actually some of those junior lawyers don't know what questions to ask task but if we can download it it means you can transfer it to many as opposed to one-on-one conversations so there's a benefit to it to doing that as well. Lauren: Yeah and in answering that you you sort of jumped ahead to what was going to be my my next question so so in you know as we've talked about in all of these stages of your career it seems like a key to to what you loved about the job and what made you so successful was being really good at at being with people listening to them and asking the right questions. So for today's junior lawyers who maybe are struggling a bit more with figuring out how to engage with seniors and how to learn what they think is important and how to really learn what how they can be helpful. What would you say to them? Like what would have been the lessons of your honing this skill of working with experts? Wendy: Yeah, I mean, I think it's that don't be afraid to ask open questions. You know, what is it that you're noticing about that client? How are you assessing the risk and their willingness to engage in risk? What did you really notice in that particular interaction with them that are your key pointers that guided your next steps? You can keep it short and sweet. week, you start asking just a couple of quick questions to start to build up your own know-how of what those key things, and then you look out for them the next time you're interacting and see if you spot them. Because once somebody's pointed them out, they suddenly become far more obvious. Lauren: Absolutely. So that curiosity and asking open-ended questions and just really kind of showing interest sounds so important. And from everything you've said about your career, It seems you've been really just passionate in what the business was doing at each stage. Am I reading that right? Wendy: Yeah, absolutely. And the fact everyone's coming from a different angle. I mean, you're always trying to, especially in the startup world, you're pitching, the people you're pitching to in the room got more people in it than you've got in your business sometimes. And each one's got a different angle. So you're trying to understand, you know, what is it that you want to hear from me that is going to get you to saying, yes, I want to get involved with whatever this is. So it's having an understanding of the drivers and the potential blockers for different people and who are the pieces in any kind of deal that you're setting up or any kind of element of your legal matter. And I mean, I think that's the key thing that lawyers have an advantage of. We know you can read the same sentence in multiple different ways. So I have to be so careful about drafting and depending on what you're trying to get out of it, you'll get a different interpretation. And it's getting a really good understanding that that happens. It happens all the time in the world of work. And the better you are at realizing that and understanding how it can join together, the better lawyer you'll be, in my view. Lauren: Thank you so much for that. And thank you for sharing your really interesting career path from being a brand new trainee or really just intern at Richard’s Butler to being a founder after taking so many steps to get where you are and have the knowledge to build Let's Think. Thank you so much, Wendy, for joining us. It was so interesting to hear about your career and what you're doing. And thank you all for listening to Career Footprints. We're so glad to have you with us. And please join us again when we talk to another Reed Smith alumni. Outro: Career Footprints is a Reed Smith production. Our producer is Ali McCardell. This podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, PodBean, and ReedSmith.com. To learn more about Reed Smith's alumni network, or if you're an alum of the firm who wants to share your career story, contact me Reed Smith's global senior director of alumni relations Laura Karmatz at alumni@reedsmith.com. Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for educational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice and is not intended to establish an attorney-client relationship, nor is it intended to suggest or establish standards of care applicable to particular lawyers in any given situation. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Any views, opinions or comments made by any external guest speaker are not to be attributed to Reed Smith LLP or its individual lawyers. All rights reserved. Transcript is auto-generated.

14. 

    20 May 2024

    Stacey Heyman: Building legal and commercial acumen, one opportunity after another

    Alum Stacey Heyman (https://www.linkedin.com/in/staceyfheyman/) shares highlights from her successful decade as a Reed Smith global regulatory enforcement associate, and in the senior in-house roles she has held since then. Stacey built professional acumen and confidence through trial experience as a new associate, an early-career client secondment in London, and working with detail- and client-service oriented partner role models. Stacey also shares how she secured the advice and support of her Reed Smith mentor during her transition to her first in-house role, setting the stage for an ongoing professional relationship. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Welcome to the Reed Smith podcast, Career Footprints. In each episode of Career Footprints, we'll ask our guest, a Reed Smith alum, to share their career story, how their time at Reed Smith set them up for success, and their advice for early career lawyers. Our goal is to surface insights from inspiring professionals careers that will help you find your professional success, however you define that. Alicia: Welcome back to our Career Footprints podcast with our incredible Reed Smith alumni. I'm Alicia Millar and I have the great, great pleasure of introducing, talking with, discussing the career footprint of Stacey Heyman who has been part of the Reed Smith family for actually a significant chunk of time and in her career beyond Reed Smith as well. Stacey, welcome. Stacey: Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. Alicia: Wonderful. We are looking forward, I am certainly looking forward to hearing more about your career to date and the time at Reed Smith. So why don't we jump straight into it? I know that you are Senior Commercial Counsel at Atlassian. But way way before that, um you were part of the Reed Smith uh family and I understand was it 2009, all the way through to 2020. Is that correct? Tell us, tell us about your time at Reed Smith. Stacey: I was, yeah. So I was a summer associate in what was then the Falls Church office of Reed Smith is now the Tyson's office, um, in the summer of 2009 and then returned full time as an associate in 2010 and then, uh, was there until 2020. Yeah. So I, I grew up at Reed Smith. I was a baby lawyer and learned so much uh for the first decade of my career. Alicia: Amazing. And um it, it was a decade that that's quite, that is a significant chunk of time. Give us a flavor about why you chose Reed Smith in the first place. What was it that really drew you to the firm? Stacey: Yeah. So, um during on campus interviews while I was in law school, I was specifically targeting law firms that had satellite offices in um in specifically suburban to Washington DC, which is where I am now. That's home for me. But I really wanted the reach of a global law firm, but the feel of a smaller office. Um And so I, I knew going into OCI, that was, that would be a good, sweet spot for me. And I was interviewed by Rick Holzheimer from our Falls Church office and he had a good poker face. I did not think the interview went well, I had articulated all the reasons why I thought I would be a good fit and, um why I was attracted to apply to Reed Smith. And he just sort of sat there very sternly. Um, so no one was more surprised than me to hear from the recruiter to hear that I had been invited for a callback interview. And then I was thrilled to join as the, the only summer associate in that office for 2009. It was great. Alicia: Amazing. And you know, that a decade is a significant chunk of time. I mean, you know, were there some really key points during that time that you kind of think? Wow, that was, that was a genuine learning moment for me. That was a, a sort of got caught out there or, you know, what, give us a sort of some of the smaller footprints of, of your time at the firm. Stacey: So many. Yes, I, so I actually was slated to start, I, you know, graduated during an economic downturn in 2010. And so our entire class had been deferred until January of 2011, but, um, the Falls Church office was going into a big trial. And so I got called up a little bit earlier than my classmates and started in the fall of 2010. And Joe Luchini and Rick Sullivan were the partners in the Falls Church office leading this trial. And they like to joke that I walked in the door and they said, drop your bag and please join us in the courtroom. Um, we went right into trial, a very intense two week trial here in Maryland, which is where I now live. There was a Snowmageddon in DC. The court was called off for snow. Joe had to sleep in his office one night because the roads are a disaster, sort of memorable from that perspective. But also, um, it was my first trial and getting to be, you know, in the war room with the trial team in court every day for two weeks. Everyone kept saying at the beginning, gosh, you're getting such valuable experience right out the gate and, you know, it's sort of one of those things you can't really appreciate at the time until you realize how long you go in between trials and how rare it is, um to actually go to those big trials. So, uh right off the bat watching Rick and Joe, you know, conducting opening and closing argument, cross examining witnesses and I got to be there for all of it. It was just invaluable experience right out the gate and I, they put me in, in the courtroom right out the gate too. I, um, I was, I think I had my first trial within the first year or so. I certainly was preparing witnesses and doing like true litigation work. Whereas, you know, some of my peers at other law firms were still doing doc review for many, many years. That was not the case. I was, I was practicing law. I was using my law license right away. Alicia: That's incredible. And what a, what an amazing start, what an amazing start when a career, the expression which I'm sure transcends no matter where you are. But really jumping into the deep end and learning those few strokes of swimming and learning. It sounds as if learning from some pretty incredible people around you really getting the chance to observe, to be part of it, to be alongside them. What incredible experience that must have been. Stacey: Definitely, Joe had a knack for, he would scour through every line of an Excel sheet. He retired from the firm a few years ago, but I think anyone would commend his sort of impeccable attention to detail. Um And he, he won many, many times on that detail and he would spend hours sort of scrolling through documents, finding the needle in the haystack and then great gotcha moments on the stand that I felt very privileged to watch growing up as a lawyer in the firm. Yeah. Alicia: Sure. Sure, of course. And now, um I'm gonna fast forward a little because I understand. Did you have a secondment? I mean, you know, from my accent, you can tell that I'm, I'm not based in DC where you are. Did you, did I hear that you had a secondment in London? Um talk us through that. How, how did that even come about? And what was your greatest learning there? Stacey: I did. Yeah. In 2016 I was able to secondment with one of our life sciences clients in London, which was incredible. I was there for three months and I would spend four days a week with the client and Fridays in our London office. Uh, office-sharing with Nicola Beasley. It was so nice to get to know Nicola a little bit better while I was there. And Emma Williams, my other pal from London. I, I know she's um at the other office at Leeds now, but I'd be or miss if I didn't shout at Emma as well. Um But it was so fun to, to work with them and um to be embedded with a client at the time, they were re revamping their ABAC whistleblower program and sort of their global um sorry, ABAC stands for anti bribery anti-corruption. And so trying to better capture conduct of their employees globally and making sure it's bubbling up quickly that the company is able to track, able to remediate and just sort of have a better handle when you have a global life sciences company. These are the things that keep you up at night. It was really interesting to see what technology they were incorporating, to help them work a little bit faster, a little bit smarter and just to see how these things rolled out on a global scale. You know, a lot of times at a law firm you're getting called in when there's an emergency. You don't really get to, sometimes you get to build these things from scratch, but especially at the larger corporations that have powerhouse in-house counsel. Um, it was really exciting to be focused on one client for that period of time and helping them to sort of just better do day to day operations within the company. Alicia: Mhm. And was that your first taste or sense of oh, this is, this is slightly different, this is not private practice. This is in a different environment, different ways of working is, was, is that fair to say? Stacey: It was, and I, I think any law firm associate would tell you, oh, I wonder what it's like to be in house if you haven't experienced it. So it was very nice to be in house for a little bit and get a sense for what that looks like. They, you know, they very kindly at the end offered me a spot if I wanted to join and I wasn't quite ready at that time. I still felt there was more to do at the firm and I still liked the pace of helping to put out those fires, you know, changing client to client each day. So at the time I wasn't quite ready, but it certainly laid the groundwork for getting a sense for in house life and then eventually making that move. Alicia: Well, it's quite, it is quite a thing you sort of think, you know, I do wonder how it, how it operates. I wonder what the wider context is. You know, this piece of work that I'm doing when I'm in-house, how does that fit in with a broader sort of commercial sense of the organization? So, having even, you know, just a three month stint, being able to really have your eyes open to that is powerful learning, I'm guessing for you. Stacey: Definitely. Yeah, I think there are also things you uh tend to appreciate um more getting the secondment experience because you're privy to a a lot more day to day conversation, obviously that you wouldn't get. So you have better context for the customer, for their culture, for their true pain points. What you know, what their leadership is focused on may be totally different than the enforcement trends that you would have been advising them on. So there are certainly nuances that you gather through secondment that you wouldn't get as traditional outside counsel um posture. But it's also fun because you working with the client after my secondment, I had such better sensitivity to, you know, this person in the back of their mind is thinking about maybe that promotion one day or things like that. So, um yeah, to the extent a secondment opportunity comes up, I would highly recommend it. And do you also you know, not just specific to the client, you get a better sense, law firms have such a, a structure that you understand, especially I had never been in-house. So getting to appreciate the differences in house is completely focused on the business, right at the firm, you're focused on the client, in-house you're focused on the business, how to make the business better, smarter, more compliant, more profitable. And it gives you a better business sense, I think as outside counsel later to appreciate those differences once you've experienced it. Alicia: Wow, no, I can, I can definitely hear it and, and sort of hear it in the way that you're, that you're describing your experience there. And it is, it's sort of this breadth of understanding as a, you know, being a, being a practicing lawyer is it, it can feel perhaps, you know, I'm doing this piece of work, which is so, so desperately integral to what's coming next to the organization, but then actually seeing it in practice building those relationships and go, okay this person's having a really bad day. Uh I know why they, they, they might be on a sort of a very different preference or way of working right now and equally just, you know, coming back to the fact of you belong and you're part of something quite big and quite exciting. I definitely heard you saying you weren't ready yet. Um So I'm, I'm sensing back to the states, back in practice at, at Reed Smith where that was, what, 2016, 2017 And you know, how were those, how were those sort of last couple of years of, of your time at the firm before, before stepping into something different? How were they? Stacey: I did. Yeah, it was, it was fun because I left the Falls Church office to go on secondment and I came back to the brand sparkly shiny new Tyson's office when I returned and it all felt different. There was just a shift, you know, I felt, you know, intrepid that I've been on this international secondment and, um sort of coming back with a refreshed sense of what our, what our customers and clients need and how to better serve them. And so, uh, yeah, I continued as an associate for three more years. And in the fall of 2019, I had my first son and that, you know, of course, life shifts, uh for many reasons when you become a new parent. So I, I had my son in December of 2019, went on maternity leave. Obviously March 2020 COVID happened and I returned to the firm in May of 2020 in a remote environment. Sort of not. I was adrift in many ways, you know, navigating, working as a parent and um through COVID and sort of all the things that people were struggling with at that time. And I certainly felt more ready than to go in-house. I found myself really longing for using my brain from 9 to 5 and then switching gears and being able to sort of more focus on parenthood in the evenings and on the weekends. And that was, that was sort of the first inklings of, I think I'm ready to go in-house. And then I saw an opportunity, um, at Slack, the, um, software company that I thought would be a good fit and I figured, why not? I should apply. Um Just see kind of what happens. I went through about seven rounds of interviews. Alicia: Seven? Seven rounds? They must have been really focused on what they wanted. Stacey: Yeah, pretty intense. Alicia: That’s intense. Stacey: Yes, I think they were, I found out later they were pretty far down the line with someone else. So they were trying to rush me through and sort of get a good panel going um to make an informed choice. But uh and Rizzy Qureshi in the DC office, you know, as we were getting towards the end and they were asking for references. I opened up to Rizzy and said, um I'm interviewing for this job. Would you mind serving as a reference for me? And he was so kind about it. Yeah, so I um was offered that job and so I left Reed Smith in August of 2020 to join Slack. Alicia: Amazing. I mean, and you know, I, I love those moments when you, when you sort of think, oh, I kind of have to tell somebody here and I need their support as well. And, oh, that's just, that's a hell of a conversation to have. Right. I mean, that's, that's a moment of, please don't hate me, but this is happening and to hear that it was such a wonderful experience. Actually, a positive moment actually, with you for the firm. Stacey: It was, I had such a pit in my stomach as I know anyone can appreciate when you're contemplating leaving an organization that, you know, I had never worked anywhere else as a lawyer. I felt so deeply embedded and committed to the firm and Rizzy could not have been kinder, you know, he's a strategic businessman. He knew that this could mean business for Reed Smith. So he certainly stayed in the mentor role, just switching from partner associate to outside counsel, inside counsel and in-house council. So yes, he very kindly said, I'm sad we're having this conversation, but I fully support you and your professional goals. And so, yeah, and you know, and when I got back to Slack, I hired Rizzy and his team. Alicia: So there you go. Stacey: Yeah. Alicia: It does pay off. And it's, it's quite a thing. A lot of people sort of say, you know, we, we've got alumni coming back and they're going to talk about life outside of the firm. And it's like, well, they left us well and they talk about the firm. Well, so let's hear what they have to say. So it is heartening to have had such a great experience of, of leaving us. But also looking back so fondly. Tell us a bit more. So you're in Slack, 2020 you're in the remote environment. Now, there was a sort of acquisition 2021. All of a sudden as I understand it, you're sort of in this big team, um, you know, sort of, it's, it's, you know, Slack moves to become Salesforce, you know, is, is that the environment that you kind of go? Okay, now I've made it, this is it, tell us the next stage of your career path. Stacey: Yeah. So I was at Slack for about four months before they announced that Salesforce had intended to um acquire Slack and then we, we went through a pretty truncated closing process. Um DOJ conducted some antitrust review, you know, it's a big, big acquisitions um come with some heavy regulatory review. So once we got through that, um it was summer of 2021 and then we had some integration time with the Slack and Salesforce teams. And so at Slack, I had been hired to um act as the commercial counsel for the public sector business, which was really exciting. They were building it up and just sort of needed someone who understood FAR and DFAR and could speak that language and negotiate those contracts with the government. Salesforce had about 40 of me. So while I own a function at Slack, they had a very robust public sector sales commercial counsel team at Salesforce. And I also joked, I think anyone who's gone through an acquisition can appreciate, you end up with a job you didn't apply for at a company you didn't apply for. Alicia: I can imagine. Stacey: The team was very, very kind at Salesforce, but I really missed owning that function, being that partner and helping to build something new. And a few of my colleagues from Slack had gone over to Atlassian and said, oh, you should take a look at Atlassian. I think you'd really, I think you'd really like it culture. Um You know, Atlassian was founded in Australia. It has sort of this great Australian tech company culture. So, yeah, I applied and uh um I'm very grateful to be here and helping them sort of recreating what I did at Slack also helping them, they have a pretty good public sector sales function. Um But they didn't have dedicated legal counsel to it. So, yeah, helping build that up and getting us into more public sector hands is the goal. Alicia: Got it. Got it amazing. And you know, I, I think um so for those of us who don't know Atlassian particularly, well, tell us a bit more about the culture, tell us a bit more about the people and I'm going to ask you about your day to day as well. But yes, give us, give us a sense of what it's like to work there. Stacey: Sure. So Atlassian creates collaboration software and sort of way better ways to work with your team. Jira and Confluence are sort of the two major products that most people associate with Atlassian. Jira is a way to track projects and ticketing and sort of assign assignments and track them and see who's working on what and get answers on discrete issues. Um Confluence is like a, a virtual document software but it's, it's cool, you can put tables in it. It's hyped up, you can add hyperlinks, images, things like that. It's very cool. And as part of our commitment to collaboration software, we're a fully remote company which II I think it's getting harder and harder to find these days. So we have this thing called Atlassian Anywhere you can work in any country where Atlassian has a legal entity up to 90 days. So, you know, one of my colleagues did a work vacation from Paris for a few months and it's just there is a very nice emphasis on the company culture, making sure the employees are happy and feel, you know, excited about their work and excited about their teammates. And I really appreciate um I appreciate that. I very much value those personal connections with the people that I work with. So working at a company where it's so important is a very nice fit for me. Alicia: Mhm. Mhm And you know, hearing that sort of the values driven, the fact that, you know, what, what the, the ultimate product is of the organization is mirrored in the way in which you work in the way in which you can interact with, with everybody else at the organization. And that sort of collective feel. It sounds, it sounds incredible and fully remote goodness, you know, especially when, you know, we hear so much in, in the press, uh, you know, as we're coming back to office, you know, some organizations mandating 2, 3, 4, even 5 days these days. So, gosh, it must feel quite different actually bearing in mind, you know, sort of some professional services and what's going on in the wider world and just that, you know, the, the, the commentary that we hear in the news a lot. Stacey: Yeah, definitely we do. They're great about team meetings. So, uh we went, we met in Austin in May at the Austin, Texas office to be all together. I recently was in San Francisco. I'll be back in San Francisco in February and then they do region based activities. So in DC, we'll be doing a putt putt for Atlassian folks in DC and things like that. So, yeah, they do uh day to day, you know, it's sort of seamless working on our software, which is great, but then still providing the opportunity to get together and connect in person when possible. Alicia: Absolutely wonderful. Because of course, you know, as what, what what I'm sensing is, you know, something that really does drive you, is that relationship building? Is that sort of human connection? Um, the sort of team environment? Stacey: For sure. Alicia: Wonderful. We would know, you know, this is a Reed Smith podcast. We would know what, you know, sort of a day in the life of a lawyer. Reed Smith. Be that on the litigation side, be that transactional. Tell us about, you know, sort of your day. What is the day of a day in the life of, you know, the senior commercial counselor at Atlassian? Stacey: Yeah, so I in the mornings it is logging on and sort of checking what crises have popped up overnight. That is one of the sort of nature of a international software company. Sometimes I'll have, you know, my APAC colleagues or EMEA colleagues who have issues come up for questions. Um So in the morning it's just triaging and then sometimes, uh we have set customer calls, um, to negotiate through, you know, we're trying to enter into a new agreement or, um, we've, you know, had an issue pop up and we need to jump on a call with the customer um, and we'll work through those. A lot of broader projects are always like revamping our terms, revamping our contracts. Are they easy to read? Do they make sense for us? And the customer, one thing I really appreciate about Atlassian is we want to bring that customer voice to our contracts. So, yes, there are things that we need to protect the company, but we also want to make sure if we're getting a lot of feedback from customers about a specific term or something that's causing them friction. Uh, we really do want to make it easier, um, on our end to use our software, procure our software. And so that's what the commercial team is trying to do, trying to protect the risk of the company while also making it easy to buy our products. Alicia: Mhm. And you know, something that I don't know when you take a step back, you think actually that's pretty integral to um the way in which we do business and the way in which we maintain incredible client relationships, you know, by really being able to lean in to say what is going to work best for you, how do we make sure this is a genuine fit, not just, here's a document, sign it, let's hope for the best, you know? Stacey: Right. Exactly. Exactly. I think one of the things that I learned at Slack and for any contract nerds out there, I would encourage you to look at Slack’s sort of standard terms that live online. They have taken what usually, you know, you see these dense software terms, they've taken them to be incredibly customer friendly and incredibly easy to read. And so, you know, when I think of sort of the big lessons that I've pulled from you know, Reed Smith or Slack or Salesforce, from Slack it is definitely, there is always a way to convey what you need in a way that someone can read it and even maybe enjoy reading software terms if that's possible. So, I, I try to remember that as I'm drafting even today. Alicia: Awesome. I love that. Someone once told me if your grandmother understands what you're doing, you're onto a winner and I, I still hold by that. I absolutely do. One thing I'm always curious about I mean, you know, in private practice in a Reed Smith context. In fact, you know, most law firms time is money, right? You know, you've got to be billing every six minutes counts. What is the concept of time when you're in-house? I mean, how does, is it such a commodity and such a sort of rigorous recording as, as, as you would have experienced at Reed Smith? What does that feel like? Stacey: Yeah, it's so funny. I still find myself from time to time going to switch my timer and it just creates that muscle memory after 10 years. Um, it's a tough one to break, but the really nice change beyond, you know, not having to worry about the constant timer is people are much more willing to just touch base and chat. And, um, it was so funny to me when I joined Slack. A couple of my colleagues were saying, hey, you know, we haven't met in a while. Let's, let's set up a recurring one on one because I kept thinking, oh, I'm taking your time, you know, I know you need to get back to work. But when you're in-house that is built in and that time and connection and mentoring is built into your day. And so my manager and I meet once a week, not only to run through tasks and things, but to talk big picture, you know, are you happy? Where do you want to go in your career? Um Are you observing things we need to change and then, you know, other counterparts within legal, within the business, we just set up recurring one on ones and sometimes it's just, you know, the 30 minutes you would have grabbed a coffee with a friend um when you were in person, but it is so nice not to feel like I'm stealing their time or um you know, keeping them from getting back to billing it. Um It, it takes the pressure off to sometimes you get wisdom that you wouldn't ordinarily get just because the time is there, which is so nice. Alicia: Absolutely. And often, you know, especially if we are remote from our colleagues, those corridor conversations, those moments of, you know, how, how is, how are things going? Those moments with those who perhaps are more senior to you? And do you know, they, they hold the intel about how promotion looks and how hierarchy works, you know, having that time is, is can be quite precious. Um If you don't have it automatically, as you said in the coffee line. It's good to hear that those exist. It's something I'm in a learning and development function. Of course, I'm going to be preaching about this, but it's lovely to hear that it does, it does live and breathe. I'm really curious because the, the journey that you've given us today, the sort of the learning that you've had, what would you say has been the sort of highlights, those moments as you look back um over an incredible career if you know, 2009 and you know, we're about to head into 2024 and whatever goodness, whatever that's going to bring, you know, what are, what are those moments of learning that you say actually, uh to tell my younger self or absolutely, to tell the, the colleagues that we have here at Reed Smith who are listening in on, on those podcasts. What would you say about those, those moments of learning throughout this career so far from Reed Smith? Stacey: The one thing that I always go back to is don't bring problems, bring solutions. And I think as a young associate, it's very easy to say I had a problem. But one of the things that I learned from the partners at Reed Smith is finding the problem is always gonna happen. What sets you apart is the solution that you bring and being able to come saying we found this, but we have an idea is what is always gonna set you apart as a good lawyer no matter where you're practicing. And then that attention to detail sort of what I was saying about Joe ferreting through Excel spreadsheets to find the one missing number that could win the case. I mean, having that impeccable attention to detail will always serve you well, whether you're drafting contracts and think I could make this a little bit more precise or crisp or it's the winning paper document in a deposition or litigation, no matter what your practice is. Bring solutions, not problems and attention to detail are certainly the, the most important I think. Alicia: Mhm. One thing I would, I would emphasize, um, again, hearing from you and certainly the, the early lessons of attention to detail, as you said, the problems and, and solutions. I guess for our, for our younger associates, for our younger population, our younger attorneys really stepping into their 1st, 1st and 2nd years, it can be quite daunting to sort of say, okay, I think I've had a problem, let alone saying, I think I found a solution. How do you, how do you have that courage? I mean, what is it about, you know, the sort of the, perhaps it's a human interaction? What is it that gives you that moment of going? No, I'm gonna do it. This is what it's gonna set me apart. Stacey: Yeah, I, I can completely appreciate how that feels, being a junior associate and sometimes you're thrust into it. Sometimes you are not ready. And, um, a partner says I need you to do x, y, and z, even if it feels daunting and scary, that's where you're going to learn. Those are the best moments. Also, we, as, um, clients of the firm are, are paying you to look for those things. So I'd much rather you flag it and bring your also possible solution than be too timid because it may, it might be something we didn't even think of. You know, part of the reason we bring in outside counsels for the fresh set of eyes, we get into our day to day and we are relying on you to sort of remind us of the pitfalls or maybe see something flag something we haven't done before. So it may be scary, but it also might be your moment to be bold and look really good to your partner, your client, whoever that may be so and of course, run it by your colleagues. Um, if you're not quite confident enough to bring it to the client, but that's what they're there for and that's where you'll learn so. Alicia: No, I think that's, I think that's, that's wise advice and, you know, I certainly, I certainly appreciate hearing you are a client. You are, you are in-house counsel, an amazing organization. Um, so to hear it direct from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Um, thank you for that. I guess I'm, I'm on to final words. I'm on to sort of what are the, the sort of key takeaways. And as I listen to you, I'm sort of hearing this again. It's coming back to the human connection, the relationships that you've built up and, you know, to a certain extent, I, I, you know, if I put it into more business speak, you know, the network that you must have now, the people that have crossed your path, would you say that's, that's sort of a big part of your longevity to date and will continue, you know, sort of for the next 10 years going forward? Stacey: Definitely. I always, when I'm talking to younger associates, um to the Reed Smith transactional associates that I talked to in September, I always encourage you to just be kind or at least professional slash cordial if kindness isn't the tone of, um, the conversation, but you just never know when you're going to cross paths again. Careers are long. And it is so funny to me how many people you just don't expect that you will hear from pop up and they might need something from you or you might need something from them. So I always try to encourage just be times be professional, be cordial because you just never know. So keep in the back of your mind. Alicia: Yeah, Absolutely. Absolutely. So, look, Stacey, this has been wonderful uh talking with you again, hearing about your career journey to date. And, you know, I'm seeing so much more to come from whether it's in-house, whether we tempt you back in at some stage, I'm sure because it seems like you are a great friend of the firm, a great advocate of the firm and certainly something that our younger associates can, can really look up to thinking beyond just the sort of first five minutes in the firm, but a longevity career, that's clearly one that you're cherishing. Actually, I would say that's how I really feel. Stacey: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It's, I love talking to Reed Smith associates. So I encourage you to reach out if you have any questions or want to chat. Alicia: Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you, Stacey. And I certainly look forward to the next Career Footprints podcast. Outro: Career Footprints is a Reed Smith production. Our producer is Ali McCardell. This podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcast, PodBean, and reedsmith.com. To learn more about Reed Smith's Alumni Network, or if you're an alum of the firm who wants to share your career story, contact me, Reed Smith's Global Senior Director of Alumni Relations, Laura Karmatz at alumni@reedsmith.com. Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for educational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice and is not intended to establish an attorney-client relationship, nor is it intended to suggest or establish standards of care applicable to particular lawyers in any given situation. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Any views, opinions, or comments made by any external guest speaker are not to be attributed to Reed Smith LLP or its individual lawyers. All rights reserved. Transcript is auto-generated.

15. 

    14 Mar 2024

    Adam Tachner: Becoming a trusted advisor to Silicon Valley

    Alum Adam Tachner (https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-tachner/) traces his path from junior IP associate to a senior business and legal role at AI chipmaker Groq Inc. Adam shares how his unrelenting curiosity about his clients’ businesses, and cultivation of a deep professional network in the tech community, have contributed to his ability to “see around corners” at the leading edge of tech across a 30-year career. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Welcome to the Reed Smith podcast, Career Footprints. In each episode of Career Footprints, we'll ask our guest for Reed Smith alum to share their career story, how their time at Reed Smith set them up for success and their advice for early career lawyers. Our goal is to surface insights from inspiring professionals careers that will help you find your professional success however you define that. Alicia: Welcome back to Career Footprints, our podcast series at Reed Smith, looking at or listening to the incredible career stories, the career footpaths of our amazing alumni. I'm Alicia Millar and I am delighted to welcome my next guest that is Adam Tachner with the most impressive job title I have to say that possibly the largest uh business card you'll ever find. So VP Corporate Development, Finance and Chief Legal Officer over at Groq. Adam, welcome. Adam: Thank you so much. You know, they say that the shorter your title, the greater the power. So don't be impressed. Alicia: Well, I still am, but thank you. I still am. Welcome. Absolutely, Welcome to our podcast. I can't wait to share your career journey uh with our listeners and especially the times that you're going to be talking about your experiences at Reed Smith or actually Crosby Heafey, as I understand. So, not necessarily full on Reed Smith, but don't let me talk about it. I'd love to hear more about you. Talk us through it. Adam: Sure. It's, uh, so, first of all, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. It's, uh, it's a little humbling to realize I've reached that stage in my career where I have to spend some time reflecting uh backwards. Uh I tend to focus more on what's next and what's come to pass. So I appreciate the moment to take a breather and look back. I, I actually grew up around the law in a sense, not big law, but my father was a, was a patent attorney uh who came to it relatively late in his own career. He went to night school in the seventies. He had been an engineer on the Apollo program in the sixties and, and then became a patent attorney because he was an engineer who could write. And um and so he had this great solo practice that he really enjoyed and probably wanted me to follow in his footsteps. But, but when I went to law school and saw what was going on in Silicon Valley, I was really inspired after leaving University of Oregon or even before I finished, actually, I did my third year at what was then the Hastings College of Law, uh the UC Law School in San Francisco. And uh got a 2L job which extended into a full year internship at a little patent boutique in San Francisco. And they knew uh an attorney at Crosby Heafey and they referred me over and he brought me into this kind of nascent intellectual property team and I was really uh honored and privileged to be kind of a, a co founding member of that group. There were maybe three or four of us. They had maybe a year or two under their belts thus far and, and then had some opportunities to help bring in clients and sort of build practice Alicia: Amazing. And that sort of first time in, um, in Crosby Heafey, what was it like, sort of walking in? What was your sort of first year or two? Like, what was that sort of moment of, you know? Oh, my goodness I'm here, I'm a patent attorney, New practice. Ok. Where's the deep end? Am I jumping in? Adam: Yeah. Well, you know, joining Crosby Heafey at that time was actually a wonderfully, uh, stimulating set of circumstances because it was a, a good size firm as they went. Uh, at the time, we were not a boutique, but, you know, a specialist California firm we probably had on the order of a couple of 100 attorneys up and down the coast and the heart of it was in the Oakland area in the Lake Merritt area of Oakland. I don't even know if the firm still has an office there. And uh Ed Heafey had started that firm somehow related to the fact that his father was one of the founders of Farmers Insurance. And so there was an arrangement whereby the Crosby Heafey team would have a kind of a no settlement policy on any litigation that they launched. And so it was this wonderful place to learn how to be a litigator at a very practical level. And often the stakes were not particularly high for farmers and they would just go for it even on a case that was only worth thousands of dollars. And so you had an opportunity to, you know, to really get in there, understand the case uh and, and make mistakes if, if, if that was unavoidable um kind of on the clock. And there was a formal litigation training program and there was just a lot of super capable people. I remember the firm had a full time editor, uh and sort of writing instructor who would work with you. We had an amazing appellate department and it was just a very high quality large boutique firm. And, and in, in, in, inside of that middle, we had this small group, Scott Baker, Ed Lynch, Mal Wittenberg, Morgan Tovey. These are names that will probably be uh I mean, other than Scott, of course, I'm sure as well still well known at the firm, many of them have already moved on. Of course, but it was a great place to learn all aspects of the trade at the same time, though, none of them was particularly technical. Certainly not in my field, which was electrical engineering. And so you had this kind of strong base of support and folks that knew intellectual property was something that was really important to their clients, but also, you know, weren't fully familiar with how to service it. And, uh, and, and basically, just to sort of background that a little bit because I think there's intellectual property has changed so much. It's probably worth spending just a couple of minutes to overlay that sort of broader economic history in that around 1981 or ’82 Ronald Reagan, as president had signed on to the formation of the CAFC, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. And before that, patent law had just been one of, you know, many fields that would go to any of the numbered Federal Circuit courts of appeal in the United States. And so you had often a, a venue uh determination, a race to the courthouse to figure out who would actually win the case. And so, you know, you had absurd situations like in Kansas City, if you filed in Kansas City, Kansas, you'd effectively pursue your case under one perhaps defense favoring a set of laws. And in Kansas City, Missouri, a completely other set, right. And so, uh it was kind of an untenable situation. This new court quickly consolidated all of that law as a matter of law and then really added more value to patents because there was, you know, the key to value in business in a lot of ways, a key value to value in business is um predictability, right? And now patents were a little more predictably enforceable, a little more predictably uh valuable. And a book came out. I remember, uh late eighties, early nineties called Rembrandts in the Attic. And it was about sort of finding these patents and really exploiting them. And in effect, that gave birth to the what became known as the patent trolling industry where they would enforce patents as a means of building profits independent of whether you are actually the innovator. And so all of that was going on and that was overlaid, of course, with the birth of the internet, the mosaic operating system, which became Netscape came out in 1994 the summer I graduated law school, I actually still have the issue of Wired Magazine that I was using when I should have been studying for the bar exam, I was instead reading Wired. And so it was just a really fun time to join the practice and a really great uh context in which to, to sort of bring this something new. I wasn't just another cog in an existing machine. I had an opportunity to sort of entrepreneurially build something new. And that was very, very exciting. Alicia: It sounds it. Adam: Yeah, yeah. And so, so one of the senior associates actually came to me just weeks after I joined the firm, I still hadn't even gotten my bar results. And he said, uh, so, uh, I have news, uh I'm leaving the firm, uh, and he was like the, there were two senior associates, so half of them had quit. And he said, I'm, I'm taking a job at Apple, which I thought was very cool. But by the way, I have this, I have this meeting set up with a tech company and um I want to bring you now because, you know, I can't do the pitch. It's, it's on Monday, this is probably Thursday or Friday and it's called Xilinks and figure it out. And so I didn't know what the heck to do. And so I called, I called my father uh of blessed memory, Leonard. And uh and I said, dad, I, I got this opportunity, I don't know what to do and remember this is before there were, there was really much in the way of the internet. Certainly there weren't accessible web browsers in every library um let alone in every home. And so uh he said, hey, look, you go to the engineering library and you do some research and you figure out what these guys are all about. I didn't know the first thing. And so I did that and uh and I found some sort of thematically, there was one particular guy, uh, who had published a ton of articles, uh, for that company in, in different technical journals. And I, I read up and I did my best to understand what was going on just to be conversant. And then, uh, and then drove down on Monday, I think, I didn't know how to get down there. I was probably 20 minutes late to the meeting. I mean, it was a tragedy in the making. And I met these two lovely ladies who were running the patent department there and they were sort of taking in the shock of having this, you know, first year associate pitching them instead of a very senior attorney. And I told them about the reading I had been doing and how fascinated I was by their FPGAs Field Programmable Gate Arrays. And that there was this one inventor, a guy named Steve Trimberger that I was especially interested in reading more about what could they give me any information? And they both laughed and they said, oh, Steve come in, and and it was actually that guy was literally sitting outside their office waiting to meet his new patent attorney. So I, I uh through it just a tremendous stroke of luck, I was able to sort of land, Xilinks as a first customer and a first client and uh probably unfairly therefore developed a reputation uh as being like a rain maker because here it was September of my, of my 1L my first year and I already had landed a, a significant Silicon Valley customer. But that just, just, you know, put me off on the right right foot, gave me the opportunity to start to um get more opportunities like that to cross sell, especially, which is a big piece of being part of a big firm and, and really building the practice. In ’97 we opened the San Francisco office and things kept accelerating from there. So it was a wonderful place to start my career. I feel incredibly fortunate. Alicia: It sounds it. And, and what a time and what a time when so much is going on in the world around you, you know, maybe before we even knew it, this sort of such fundamental change with something like the internet and what that means and think about even now, fast forward a few years and are overwhelming reliance on all things internet, all things, browser, all things being connected. So I'm thinking you're what sort of coming up to mid level, maybe senior associate time is that when you went in house? Talk us through that, that sort of moment in which you said, OK, I've done amazing things here at Crosby Heafey. It's time for something new. What, what was that, what went on for you? Adam: Yeah. So uh that's right. The first five or six years were really this combination of of landing uh my own clients um bringing in a lot of start ups watching, a lot of them get very rich watching a lot of them crash and burn. I just sort of getting a sense for the overall entrepreneurial experience from the safety of my uh of my Embarcadero center office. And then I got approached it was, I was coming up on my, on my sixth summer. So, yeah, senior associate, first time I would have been eligible for partnership and I got a call from, um and I had a, I had a nicely balanced practice. I was sort of a, a backroom guy on litigation and then did patent drafting and had three or four associates with whom I worked uh on different accounts and a lot of counseling and letters and opinion drafting. And I got a call from a uh from a recruiter and a VC who had just sort of uh been working together to launch this spin out from Stanford. It was called T-Span. That was kind of a working title. And T-Span had had come up with the idea of doing high frequency radio on CMOS technology. In other words, using the same sort of chip technology that was used to make uh memory and CPUs like Intel, you know, uh Pentium CPUs were the big brand back then. And instead use that to make high frequency radio, which previously had been much more complicated and difficult to fabricate and expensive to manufacture. And I was like, this sounds pretty cool. But what's, you know, what's the application that you have in mind? Are you going cellular? And they had this cool new idea that no one had heard of yet called Wi-Fi. And, and, and I had been trying to, I had been trying to network. I lived in this little Berkeley bungalow and would take the BART train to commute into the city and uh had been trying to network to gateway computers and was tearing my hair out with all the difficulties. And I just thought the idea of sort of being able to have that connected presence in this new internet era without having to find an Ethernet cable or drill a hole in the wall was just the, the best idea. And uh I, I just found myself sort of drawn to the big opportunity that that represented. And so, uh I found out after I gave notice that I had been on the cusp of being offered partnership. And so it was, it was probably viewed by my, my peers as an incredibly uh reckless move. I, I think in hindsight, it was probably a very low risk move in that, you know, the firm had decided they wanted me to be partner. And I'm guessing that if I had, you know, my start up had crashed and burned, they might have invited me back. But who knows, but I was, I was, I was super happy to become a client and, and work with the team after that, because the day that I started at T-Span, which became Altheros Communications, there were literally two patents that were in risk sitting on my chair. And so I think the first phone call I made was to Scott Baker to say, hey, you know, we're gonna have to do some defense work on this and we got, and we sort of got to work him and Jonah Mitchell and that whole thing. So it was, and Bovich John Bovich, so it was, it was a terrific next phase of my career and, and, and, and one in which uh I was able to begin to sort of indulge that desire to be a member of the executive team. It just kind of indulging this desire to not be the person that got the call when the crisis arose, but rather could sort of see around the corner, could understand the function of the law in the broader context of business. Um And that was, that was wonderful. And it my eyes to how much I didn't know to how much I didn't understand about the different functions in a tech company. I began learning about the operations side of it. We, we were what's called a fabless semiconductor company. And what did it mean to actually design a chip but not actually build it. And what was what were the sort of elements of trust? Why is it that every NDA gets negotiated? Why isn't there just a standard for this? All these questions that were new to me? And unfortunately, still haven't been answered, uh I think, universally, but, but you can come up with sort of your own processes for, for, for dealing with them. Uh And so it was a wonderful first in-house experience and it turned out to be a terrific career move. Wi-Fi was a great opportunity, but also just from a team and process perspective, it ended up being uh a really wonderful team to be a part of really the fabless semiconductor business had started in the, in the late seventies and early eighties. And then these, these sort of dedicated foundry companies like TSMC. And uh now we've heard of companies like GlobalFoundries, of course, Samsung is now in that industry that was kind of a new industry in the eighties and nineties. Before that, there was a, there was an adage that, you know, quote real men owned their own fabs and companies like Intel and AMD, you know, were fully vertically integrated from sort of silicon or from, from sand chips, right? And then there was this notion that no, you shouldn't have to build your own fab in order to build your own product. There's someone who specialized in that who can then, you know, amortize that investment over many more customers and that was working out very well. And, and so we had a bunch of folks in the team that were really veterans uh in building that industry and understood it really well. And I was able to sort of learn the industry from uh some incredible talent and more and more questions for more and more of a desire on my part to sort of better understand their functions led to me actually enrolling in a, in a, in an executive MBA program. At the time, UC Berkeley, the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley had teamed up with the Columbia University Business School. And so they had a, a 19-month MBA program and I started in 2007. Um by this time Groq had gone public, so I was learning about, you know, securities and such and I had been able to build a small team. Uh and when I started business school, uh I was still working, but I announced to the company and to my team that I would be stepping back to half time. That was actually the best management move I've ever made in my whole career because since I had been the only lawyer in the company for a long time, everything had sort of come to me and then it would push it down to my, to my team and I ended up becoming the bottleneck, I think for a lot of stuff. And by getting out of the way and saying, hey, instead of emailing me, you'll email the team and they'll let me know if there's an issue and they'll keep me informed. I just reversed the polarity of the workflow through, through legal. And that, that alone kind of allowed me not to have to worry about being caught up on things. I could focus on school and learning about these other functions and working on projects and it just uh it just played really nicely. And I think my, my team members were, were happier for it, like they had more autonomy and more of an ability to build independent relationships with, with their clients internally. Uh And the company just kept, just kept growing. We did a lot of acquisitions. I think we did on the order of a dozen M&A transactions during my tenure with the company, which was from 2000 until we sold it in 2011. And then in the two years after that uh uh as part of Qualcomm, um we did private acquisitions, we did some public acquisitions, we diversified our business and it was an incredible laboratory for learning again, uh that broader sort of function of law uh in business. Alicia: I’m loving the concept of the laboratory for learning. It's sort of, I hear as, as you're, as you're talking about your career, that this sort of continuous development is not only about the law uh that you obviously need to maintain your, your um your knowledge or what your awareness, your experience, your capability. But this breadth of understanding the business, understanding the commercial functions, understanding what you the guys down the corridor are doing and how to sort of integrate into that to be more than just the lawyer and as you say, sort of the bottleneck or, you know, part of the cogs in the wheel. And allowing others to step in and be the ones that are going to solve the solutions quicker rather than sort of, perhaps as you said, sort of standing in the way when there are so many other things that, that, that you are um focusing on that you're being asked to do and also allowing them to shine just as much. That's what I'm getting, that's what I'm getting from the conversation so far. Adam: Yeah, I think that's, I think that's an astute observation. I think that I think the opportunity for that kind of learning in-house is actually in many ways more accessible than it is in a law firm because in a law firm, even if you, as you know, as I did right out of law school, right? Even if you have direct access to your clients, you're still really only having that direct access typically to the legal department, the in-house legal department. And, you know, and they're working, they're, they're not a profit center, they're a cost center generally speaking. And so you're seeing things within a particular lens and not really getting access to the broader business context in which the issues are being brought to you. And typically also not having access to whatever transpired over the year or two that led up to the issue, whether it was the invention of something new, you know, some employee leaving and stealing trade secrets, uh when they took off and so on and so forth or even the sort of board level interaction, there are partners, of course, uh at law firms who have that level of access. But I think it's rare for the young associate to get that. Uh I do see tremendous value in both paths though. There's no question because what I missed when I went in house was especially when I was alone in house until I started hiring other lawyers uh to join the firm, which didn't happen for a few years. What you miss is the camaraderie, this sort of operation at the kind of the pinnacle from a quality perspective of the practice of law. You know, we had amazing attorneys at Crosby Heafey, I remember there was someone who was an expert in legal ethics, like he had defended law firms against malpractice claims and, and, and remember this issue came up with a client, they were going public, the underwriters had a concern about something and the client came to me and he was looking for a way out of this underwriter issue and I was actually able to confer with these ethics experts and get them to get the underwriters to admit that the particular opinion letter or whatever that, that was causing the hang up was actually outside the bounds that they should have reviewed in their underwriting effort. And, you know, I was, uh, uh, as my mother would say, a little pisher, I, you know, I think I had been out of law school. I had been out of law school for more than nine months when I made this observation. And there's no way there's no way even in the chat GPT era that I would have spotted this issue uh independently or through research, it was only by being able to sit down probably over lunch with, you know, with a senior attorney who had 30 years of experience and sort of just harvest that insight that I was able to solve a really a fundamental issue that was preventing a client from going public. So I, I missed that. Uh, I miss it a lot and, and you never really get that back when you go in-house. What you have instead though, uh is the opportunity to learn from any number of those sorts of teams if you have the discipline to always continue to have those sorts of lunches and take the time with all the different attorneys, because now I didn't have just one firm that I could call upon, but I had several and all of them had MCLE sessions and they all wanted me to participate. And so now I had more of a smorgasbord of, of different opportunities available, especially at the end of every MCLE year in January, February, when you have all those hours that are available, you can continue to learn, but you have to be a little more self disciplined about it. You also lose the network. You know, when you're in a law firm, you have uh you have all these colleagues, but you also have a professional network that you're always building because everybody feels obligated to put bread on the table and to win new clients and uh and you lose that when you go in house. But I really made a point of continuing to meet people to have lunches and to not just sort of sit and eat at my desk every day. And I would imagine that that at big law firms right now, that's something that you have to even remind folks of in the, in the post-COVID era where so much work is happening from home. I think it's really easy to sort of feed on your seed corn and not kind of continue to build out your network. Alicia: And it's, it's a curious reflection as well because, you know, it's something that we are trying to encourage, we are reinforcing and that's on the sort of learning side as well as you know, I, I hear our partners saying it just as much to our, uh, associate attorneys get out there, meet your client, they will want to have a coffee, they will want to have lunch. And by the sound of it you did, you know, this is something that you, you actually relish, you take the time for it is helpful to you. Yes, of course. You get to eat, fantastic. But you get to maintain that network. You get to find out actually this guy knows something. This girl knows that. That's, that's the expert. I'm going to bring you in when I need you. Adam: Absolutely. And, uh, I, it was, I think it was Benjamin Franklin who observed that whenever he wanted to get closer to someone, he would ask them a favor, you know, if there was someone who he respected but feared he would ask to borrow a book from the library, you know, something like that. Alicia: Yeah. Adam: And I, and I think that it's through that sort of exchange of information that, that actual exchange of favors as well. That's how Silicon Valley works. That's how I think in a lot of ways business works ultimately. And if you want to sort of break through and become a valued counselor, not just an attorney, but a valued counselor to your clients at the, even the most senior level, then they're gonna assume that you have that level of connection because when they come to you for, with a problem, they're not asking you for the, for the solution in the moment. They're asking me to think about this and to reach out to your network and, and then sort of build the right response, whether that response is, is a written response or is a process that's initiated, you know, by your efforts. Alicia: And, you know, it's, it's curious on that. I'm, I'm hearing a few things about, you know, your opinion and my question, I guess is that that's coming, is what is it that makes a terrific attorney in your eyes, given your experience? You know, I'm hearing, not necessarily the solution in the moment but actually using the platform finding out where the, the level of expertise is from that breadth of network that will sit in the firm around you. What else is it in your opinion that makes a good attorney? Adam: Yeah, that's a great question. So I, I think the theme, but we should sort of pursue it because it manifests itself differently in each, in each of the different branches of business. I think that if you look at the bar exam in California anyway, it's a three day torture test in which, and, and sort of one of those days is spent on what we, we used to be called, uh this was 30 years ago, practical, I think they were called practical sessions or something like that. And they weren't, they weren't testing your knowledge of the law at all. In fact, it was intended to be an area that you probably didn't study uh unless you happen to choose an elective and they actually cautioned, you don't call upon your knowledge of the law because what they wanted you to do is look at this, this sort of portfolio, this, they gave you this little stack of paper. It was good, good half inch of uh of, of materials, two sided and you had three or four hours to synthesize, you know, from those materials which were both facts and law, um memos and discovered information of some sort and then actual regulations and other relevant areas of law, it might have been something like landlord tenant or something like that. And in four hours you had to just kind of answer the sort of key memo question that came from a senior partner in a law firm or something like that. And to me that I think ended up best capturing what it meant to be a good attorney. Not that that's what a good lawyer does. They sit and write memos for a living, but your issue spotting, right? And you're doing that sort of constantly almost as a matter of habit. I didn't even think about it. Right. One of the hardest times I've been having as a, I mean, the reason I have such a long title, right? Corporate development and finance and CLO is that I've taken on more than just legal, more and more through throughout my career to the point where now in terms of the real time I spend on the law, it's maybe 10 or 15% maybe in a really heavy sort of potential litigation heavy week. I might spend 25% of my time on the law. But that is kind of a misrepresentation because I'm thinking about this stuff all the time. And if you were to kind of, you know, if, if I came up with an avatar that represents what I do for a living, it's probably like those um, the agents in the matrix. If you remember the early matrix where they're dodging bullets, I mean, you're, what you're trying to do is just kind of see around the corner what's coming next and how can we as a company sort of best take advantage of or avoid that particular situation with the least amount of energy and money and, and just stay focused on what we really want to do for a living. And so I, I've had a hard time actually fully empowering my, my, even my, my general counsel, right? The woman Cheryl Savage is an incredible attorney and she's, you know, really good at everything I just described. And then she's also, of course, dealing with everything else that comes up. The other 90% of her time is spent actually solving all these problems that I keep making. And, and so, but it's hard because I'm the one who's in so many of these business meetings, constantly spotting these issues. And I have to make sure that she gets the benefit of all those experiences from a legal perspective and sort of is able to evolve at the leading edge of the business in a way that, that, you know, compliments her depth and capabilities. So that's, I think what you're, what a great attorney is, is, is looking for you're looking for, for someone at least in-house that can kind of organically mix that sort of issue spotting and, and practical business perspective into a whole package. Uh And who understands that there's always this imperative to have that network available to always be on the lookout for the best thinkers in a particular space and have them on speed dial of the most relevant. Uh because, you know, time is always against you. Alicia: Isn't it just. In our, in our sort of closing moments, Adam, what, what advice would you give to our young attorneys? What is it that you would offer to them even if, you know, I think the, the phrase that we hear a lot is, you know, the, the advice to my younger self. But what is it that you would say to them, you know, given the potential longevity of this incredible career in this industry? Adam: Well, I, I do think that training in the law is just a wonderful basis for a career in business. I mean, you know, I, we haven't really given any time or credit, of course to other fields of the law. I've been completely focused on the, on commercial and business law, uh, because that's, that's always what I've done as an intellectual property attorney at first and then sort of more broadly as a general counsel. If you're gonna pursue, you know, public interest law, of course, or a criminal prosecution or defense, I mean, these all have their own sort of mission and vision behind them. And I don't claim to speak to those uh in any way. But if your interest is in, is in commercial law, then I think, always do your best to be mindful of the fundamental business interests. That's, that's really at issue because it's, it's probably not captured in your memo or your, you know, the way you're talking to your clients and your phone call, right? And the more I think you can prepare yourself to understand that context and to have a network that's available to help you with that. Um And to, you know, kind of quickly up to speed on what matters most to the client. Then I think the sort of higher that quality of service you're gonna offer also don't have lunch at your desk, like get out there and meet people and build a network. Um And really perhaps most importantly, because the one thing you'll miss if you go in house is, you won't have that just phenomenal network of, uh, senior peers, um, who have spent their whole careers doing exactly that. Right. Not having lunch at their desk and, and kind of getting out there and meeting people and, um, and, and want nothing more, uh, typically than to, uh, than to share the, the benefit of all that time and energy with you. That's why they're part of a firm. And so just kind of fully take advantage of that. I think people worry too much about making a fool of themselves. I, I'd make a career out of making a fool of myself and it's, it's working out great so far. I'm really enjoying it. Alicia: Absolutely is. It really, really is. And Adam, thank you so much for giving us a glimpse of your career journey of your career thus far. And I can't wait to see what new tech innovation is coming around the corner that you're going to be helping lead the way on. It's been absolutely fascinating. Thank you. Adam: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Alicia: And thank you to everybody else for joining the podcast. We look forward to welcoming you next time. Outro: Career Footprints is a Reed Smith production. Our producer is Ali McCardell. This podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcast, Podbean and reedsmith.com. To learn more about Reed Smith's Alumni Network or if you're an alum of the firm who wants to share your career story, contact me, Reed Smith's Global Senior Director of Alumni Relations, Laura Karmatz at alumni@reedsmith.com. Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for educational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice and is not intended to establish an attorney-client relationship, nor is it intended to suggest or establish standards of care applicable to particular lawyers in any given situation. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Any views, opinions, or comments made by any external guest speaker are not to be attributed to Reed Smith LLP or its individual lawyers. All rights reserved. Transcript is auto-generated.

16. 

    11 Jan 2024

    Jaimee Farrer: From litigation associate to assistant GC in pharma

    Reed Smith alumna Jaimee Farrer discusses her path from lateral litigation associate at the firm to assistant general counsel at GSK. Jaimee talks about how she landed her first in-house role, key differences between her law firm and in-house practice, and how the skills she developed as a Reed Smith litigator prepared her for the fast-paced, strategic work of managing major litigation at a global pharmaceutical company. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Welcome to the Reed Smith podcast. Career Footprints. In each episode of Career Footprints, we'll ask our guest, a Reed Smith alum to share their career story, how their time at Reed Smith set them up for success and their advice for early career lawyers. Our goal is to surface insights from inspiring professionals careers that will help you find your professional success. However, you define that. Alicia: Welcome, I am Alicia Millar and I have the great pleasure of welcoming our first guest. Jaimee: Hi, Alicia. Thank you for having me. My name is Jaimee Farrer. I am assistant general counsel in the litigation group at GSK and I am based in Philadelphia. Alicia: Wonderful. Thank you for joining us, Jamie. It's a real, real pleasure to meet you once again. We are talking about Reed Smith and the sort of the footprints of those incredible people who have, I guess sort of stepped in the firm along their journey in their careers. And because of that, I am so curious to, to bring to life more about your own career journey. Can you stroll us through? I will stop with the analogies. Can you stroll us through your journey? Uh Some of the milestones or key moments and choices along the way and where Reed Smith played a part of that. Jaimee: Yeah. So I started my career at another large law firm. Um and I worked there for about five years and I pretty much did exclusively products liability work. I was in their products group and I loved that work. And then, um I ended up laterally to Reed Smith when I was, like I said, about probably a fifth-year attorney. Two of my colleagues had gone to Reed Smith and had great things to say about it. And so I ultimately decided to make the leap along with them a few months after they had joined the firm. And one of those, actually, both of those colleagues are still at Reed Smith. Um They are now Stephen McConnell and Mike Salimbene, who is now a partner at the time. We were both fairly young associates. So I was doing again, largely products work at Reed Smith. I was at Reed Smith for about 4.5, 5 years, worked primarily on the mesh litigation, which was very, very big at the time and was taking up the majority of my time. And then I had, at the time that I, while I was at Reed Smith, I had a child and then had a second child. And at the time that I had my second child was just feeling that I needed a change. Um and had always thought that I would want to go in-house um for a Pharma company as I had been sort of working with Pharma clients my entire career and an opportunity came about at GSK at the time, not in the role that I currently am. So it was a role called, it was managing attorney in the GELRT Group and that stood for a Global External Legal Relations Team, um which at the time was actually part of litigation group. It has since moved into a legal operations function, but at the time, it was part of litigation and the role was to basically partner with our external council and put in place alternative fee agreements and work with the in-house attorneys to scope out the work and just sort of help make sure those relationships remain strong, um and dealt with any fee disputes, et cetera so very different than what I had been doing. I mean, it was a legal role but not practicing law in the traditional sense. And it was honestly a really nice change of pace at the time, sort of from the, you know, trials and tribulations of, of being in big law and working at a law firm. And it was kind of a nice breather and a nice change of pace to sort of see the business side. And I thought that I could, you know, bring a lot of value given that I had worked on many of the types of cases that we, I was helping put the agreements into. But I never, actually, when I took that position, I never actually thought that that was going to be a sort of my landing place at GSK. I was hoping that that position would then be a launching off point to a role that I really wanted, which is my current role. However, I didn't quite even get into my current role right away. So another opportunity opened up, um, about 18 months into my tenure at GSK and it was also within the litigation group, but it was as Investigations Council. So managing the company's attorney client privileged, um, internal and government investigations. Very, very much outside of my comfort zone, not something I had ever previously done in private practice. So it was definitely a stretch role and it was at times a little bit scary when I started, it probably took me a good six months to actually feel comfortable in the role and like I sort of knew what I was doing, but, you know, all of my skills of taking depositions doing fact discovery really came to bear and I had the right skill set. I just, you know, it was not something I had done previously, but I really enjoyed that role. And I did that for another 18 months until my current role became available, which is a just straight litigation role kind of helping to manage the company's litigation docket. And so that is what I am doing now. And my primary responsibility right now is to manage the Zantac litigation for GSK. So that is what I do mostly day to day right now. Alicia: What an incredible practice you have and a journey even through GSK, let alone where sort of Reed Smith plays a part in, in, in your career to date so far. I have a couple of questions based on what you were saying. And I'm really curious about the sort of the main difference between, I guess the working life that you have in private practice versus in-house. And I know that that could be around structure of the organization and all the way down to, you know, literally your working day to day. What's from your perspective, those, those big difference between private practice and in-house? Jaimee: So I think the biggest difference is your day to day, the types of people that you're interacting with and what the type of work that you're doing. So when I was in private practice, I spent a lot of time, you know, reviewing documents, reading deposition transcripts, writing briefs, reading case law. And I, I think I spent a lot of time sort of in my office, you know, by myself, like reading and thinking and drafting things and that is very, very different than in-house where I spend most of my day on um phone calls or in meetings, sort of updating people on the matters that I work on talking mo like a lot of my day is spent talking with our external counsel to get updates on cases, to talk about strategy, you know, to ask questions so that I can then brief our senior management and provide sort of clear advice. So I think the hardest part honestly about being in-house is that and I think many of my colleagues would probably echo this, is that often you feel like because you're running from meeting to meeting, which I like because it's a lot of just sort of talking and interacting. You don't have the same space and time necessarily to think and you have to be really, really intentional about carving that time out of your day. So if you really need time to sort of, you know, draft a memo or you need time to sort of really think through an issue, you know, or put a presentation together, it's, that's time that you really have to be very intentional about blocking off in your calendar because those opportunities of just sort of time to think and pontificate on things don't come about a lot just because your day is so jam packed. Alicia: And from that, it makes me think, you know, time has a very, very different meaning. Jaimee: Time has a very different meaning. Yeah, I mean, at least like the great thing is that I no longer have to bill hours. Um So that it was very hard to get used to not having to bill hours. But, you know, I no longer have to worry about. Am I billing enough or am I billing too much? But it's also having to really, I think time management is in a lot of ways more important than it was when I worked at a law firm just because I have a lot of internal, more deadlines. I think that I used to have in a law firm. I mean, you law firm, you have deadlines that are based on, you know, court filings, et cetera. This is more kind of responsive to the businesses needs in terms of what my deadlines could be. And I don't always know what those needs are. I mean, you could find out someone needs something kind of on the drop of a hat. So it's a little bit different. Um, and I also, I think the maybe misconception is that, you know, the hours are so much better in-house than in, in, you know, in a law firm and especially in big law. And while I think that's true to some extent, I think, I, you know, I don't know that necessarily like you're working so much less. I mean, if you have a big case, if you have a case going to trial, you're working the same amount, I think as you worked when you were in a law firm, I think it's just a little bit it's a little bit different in terms of kind of when and how you spend those hours. Alicia: So the, the actual management of your time rather rather than, you know, sort of necessary the allocation of your time that will then be billed and go into something that will come back from a client one day. I also heard that, you know, sort of what, what I'm getting from it is there's a movement from overwhelming heavy on task when you're in private practice to actually being much more focused on people when you're in-house. Is that, is that fair? Is that, did I hear that right? Jaimee: Yeah, much more focused on people and much more focused on overall business strategy. And however, what you're doing is actually impacting and has a direct effect on the business, which is not something, at least as an associate that I truly appreciated when I worked at Reed Smith or, you know, at any law firm. Um, because as you said, you're very, very focused on the task, you know, on the, on the individual case that you are assigned to work up. And so you're really in the weeds and when you're in house, you actually can't generally afford to be in the weeds. Alicia: Got it, got it. I'm gonna, I'm, I'm really curious now about the, the skills that you've taken from your time in private practice certainly at Reed Smith and at other law firms. Is, is there an obvious sort of transfer I heard you say about, you know, the, the taking depositions, the ability to actually get stuff done, the tasks that you had really have carried along with you? What other skills would you say have you sort of taken along on this journey into, into GSK and actually through, in the different roles that you've had, Jaimee: I would say clear writing skills and the ability to clearly and succinctly communicate. Obviously, generally, when you're working for a law firm, you know, you're primarily when you're writing, you're either writing briefs, motions, you know, or maybe a memo to a client or a more senior partner. Obviously, when you're in-house, you're not the person writing the briefs, you may write a memo, but it's really about communicating succinctly to senior management. And so really kind of honing in on what are the key issues, what would the business care about being able to strip away the facts and really kind of working on being able to deliver a very tight, you know, executive summary because senior people do not have time um necessarily, or the desire to read very lengthy, you know, documents. So while you may have, you know, an appendix with much more explanation, you have to figure out like what are the key things that they care about and how do I convey those quickly, like in one page so that I can grab their attention and they're gonna actually read and retain that. And I think, you know, all of the writing experience that I got at Reed Smith really helped me to be able to do that. I mean, I used to hate, hate writing sort of intros and conclusions because I actually think those are the hardest to write because you're trying to distill, you know, everything in your 20 page break down into, you know, a page. But that's basically what I now have to do all the time. And so, you know, the better you can get at that early on, I think it's helpful later in your career. Alicia: Got it. Absolutely. Got it. Now, I obviously my world is around learning and development, training, professional growth, that sort of thing. So I am really curious how have you continued to learn and grow professionally now that you're outside of a law firm environment? Jaimee: So for me, it's been about taking on assignments or taking on roles that are, as I said before, very outside of my comfort zone and really trying to stretch and grow and not always just taking the safe choice. So I think even coming into GSK and taking that GELRT role was definitely, you know, off the beaten path of sort of what I always, I envisioned my career path to be, I always kind of assumed I would just be a litigator and that was obviously very much not being a litigator and not litigation. And so I think it's being able to sort of take risks. And then if, when an opportunity presents itself kind of jumping with, you know, head first, both feet in and really grasping that opportunity and trying to get whatever you can out of it, even if you're scared. Because I think those opportunities, then first of all, they help you to be able to expand your skill set and just be a more versatile attorney. And then ultimately, I think, you know, showing that you're willing to do different types of things you're willing to learn then helps open the door to the next bigger and better opportunity. Alicia: And do you see yourself, you know, sort of in a version of uh the, the perhaps Reed Smith world? Ie. you have mentors around you, you've got sort of people who are supervising and line managing and that sort of thing. Does that, does that still exist? Do you have the opportunity to be mentored by other people? Uh And, and in turn mentor down, is there a structure like that? Because I, I sort of look at that as learning in the moment, learning from other people as well as, you know, the choices that you make and the opportunities that come in the, in the day to day work. Do you have those sort of people around you as well? Jaimee: You definitely do have those people around you. But I think it's less formal of a structure than it is for example at Reed Smith, you know, where you, you know, have a partner that you're always working with and you're sort of in that type of an organization where there are always people above and below you to both, you know, learn from and, and sort of to help shepherd along. You know, at least at GSK, certainly I have been fortunate to have been mentored by my managers over the years and those are probably I think the most obvious mentors, but also I think my colleagues, so both in and out of my group, I mean, I interact with a lot of people both within and outside of legal. And I have, I actually have an informal mentoring relationship with someone else who's on the legal leadership team at GSK outside of my group. So she's been really great. It's kind of a good person to be able to bounce ideas off of who isn't so enmeshed in my day to day and can give me a much more objective sort of view of things. And it is also a safe space and then also in terms of my colleagues. So we don't have a structure where in my group, anyone other than my manager has direct reports. So we're all sort of about on the same level, doing similar things. But a lot of my colleagues have been at GSK for many, many years, like 20 plus years, which is just a testament to the great company that it is. And so they, I think have been around the block in the sense that, you know, they understand how GSK works. They understand like our often complicated processes, they sort of know who, you know, who to talk to, who to go to. They've sort of lived it all. So it, it's very helpful, I think to have those people around who can kind of help, help you when you're, when you get stuck or you can go to them to bounce ideas off of. So I think it's just a maybe in some ways, a more collaborative type of working environment as opposed to a formal mentor, mentee relationship type environment. Alicia: Got it. And um I must ask this, of course, because I'm intrigued, is it easier to have working relationships with people outside of legal? Ie. because you talked about, you know, business strategy, you talked about, you know, sort of the way in which you understand and my interpretation of that is the real commercial side of your business. Do you have the chance to interact and, and work alongside people who are not in legal who are across the organization? Jaimee: Yes, very often. And it, and, and that's also been in some way, it's dependent on my role. So for example, in my previous role, when I was in Investigations Council, I worked hand in hand every day with our compliance colleagues. So I knew a lot of people and worked with them in the compliance group and sort of got a better understanding of what our compliance colleagues do, so outside of legal. Now, I feel like as in my litigation role, I have an opportunity to meet with so many different people throughout the company because I need subject matter experts. So, you know, when we have company witnesses that need to testify, I have to figure out who, who can I talk to that was working on, you know, R & D or that was working in supply chain, for example. And so I end up meeting lots of people and learning about their roles and also sort of learning about the company as a, as it relates, you know, to a specific litigation, which is very nice and very interesting. So it's kind of both in an, you know, informational way, but also sometimes you need to interview those people or help prepare them for deposition. So I actually think that I've been lucky in that, I think I've been able to interact with a wide swath of the company both inside and outside of legal. Alicia: Amazing. Thank you. Of course, it would be remiss if I didn't ask you about, you know, how you engage with and work with your outside council. And I think for me and given, given our audience is our sort of younger lawyers at Reed Smith they may be sort of a one or two years into practicing, what is it that you would invite them to consider when working with in house counsel, when, when working with a version of you? Jaimee: So I really view my external counsel as my partners in the trenches. I mean, honestly, I spend more of my time working and talking with my outside counsel than I do with my GSK colleagues when I'm involved in a litigation. So it's almost as if they are like, I'm part of the firm or they are an extension of GSK. And so it's, you know, I think it's hard, especially in large law firms when you're very junior to get direct client exposure and have direct interactions with the client, especially on really, really large litigations. But what I would say is that the client is always watching. So if we get a memo, for example, on a specific issue, I'll know who wrote the memo. Like, I'll see like, you know, who did the memo come from, who wrote it? Because we all know that it's the associates that are the ones that are really taking the pen there. And if the memo is really good, I mean, I'll, I'll note that in the future, I will also note when we are doing witness preps, for example, and there's always, you know, a partner with an associate helping, usually the associate might be there, you know, to sort of take notes or, you know, help ask questions. But I, I'll note, you know who that person is, especially if I'm seeing them a lot and, you know, some people are really good and you can tell that by the questions that they ask or if they're given an opportunity to cross examine, for example, not cross a witness, if they can really step up and do that and you can really see very quickly who is indispensable. Um And I would also say, you know, to the extent that you get opportunities to, you know, meet the client or be face to face or in front of them. I mean, take those opportunities if you are able, if you're allowed, you know, to be the person that's emailing the client, you know, just make sure that your emails are, you know, professional that you're responsive or for me, responsiveness is probably one of the most important qualities. It is completely fine if you cannot get me an answer right now because you have to research it or you have to, you know, talk to others, try to get a collective and consensus response. But just let me know like, hey, thanks got your email. We're working on it. That means so much, even if you haven't gotten back to me with an actual substantive answer. So I think all of those things are supremely important. Alicia: And I think that certainly goes  back to your point around you having to really manage your time and make the most of the time that you have. So having that responsiveness, having that clear communication and keeping you informed. I think I can, I can definitely sense that that's going to help you in your day to day when you're back in the office. Jaimee: Yeah. And one other thing too, I would just say to try to make yourself into the go to person on a particular issue. So if you have the facts at your disposal, if you are really facile with those facts, if you're the kind of the person that knows everything about a particular case, like I notice those kinds of things too and like I will, I will end up emailing that person. I won't email the partner, I will email that associate because I know that they're going to know the answer. Alicia: Got it. Absolutely. Got it. Thank you. I guess in the sort of our final bit of time together, I'm, I'm always fascinated to hear, you know, what, what would be your, I don't know the, what do we call it these days? The message to your younger self or certainly, what would you say to our young attorneys about career longevity, the wise words, I guess to remember about, you know, sort of either your time in Reed Smith or just your time as a, as a fantastic practicing lawyer? What would you say to them? Jaimee: So I would say that I think most younger attorneys, myself included, the common perception is, you know, to be a good lawyer to be thought of as a great associate, you know, you really just need to keep your head down and work really hard, you know, do good work and people will recognize you. While I think that's true. I think it's what really matters even more than that is the relationships that you create, you know, with your colleagues and making sure that you never burn bridges and that you really take the time to form deep and meaningful and lasting relationships because you don't know how your career is going to unfold and how things may come full circle later and where people will end up, you know, who may end up being sort of helpful to you, whether you work with people again. And I can just give a very brief example about my own career and how sort of everything in the last two years has come full circle for me. So at my first firm that I worked at prior to Reed Smith that I worked at for five years, like I loved my experience there, I made a lot of good friends that were both my own peers, but also I was very, very friendly with much more senior people to me, both senior associates and junior partners. At that time, I ultimately left that firm, went to Reed Smith and I went to Reed Smith because I had a great relationship with a partner that had left my previous firm and gone to Reed Smith. And we'd had a great working relationship for years and it's Steve McConnell and he, you know, he's still at Reed Smith. He's a fantastic lawyer and an even more fantastic person. And because we had had that great relationship, you know, he was like, you should come over to Reed Smith and you should work with me again. And so I took that leap and it was, you know, great. It really helped, I think, further launch my career. And so, you know, because he knew that I, I was looking and I might want to leave. And because of that and my relationship with him when that GSK job, uh that initial job came about, my boss Brennan Torregrossa, who was very good friends with Steve McConnell because they had also previously worked together, you know, he said to Steve, like I have this job that's available. Do you know anyone? And Steve came to me and said, you know, there's this job available. Like he knew that I was potentially wanting to go in-house. And it turned out that I had known Brennan from my very first job when I was a baby associate, Brennan was the partner that I had done a lot of work for. And it had been eight years prior and we had kept in touch. Were we super good friends or close? No, but I would see him at various events around town and we had kept in touch and so when that job came up, I was like, oh, wow, this is a great opportunity and it might be my chance to get in. It's so hard to get in-house jobs. You often have to know someone at least to get your foot in the door. So that was my chance. And I think that really helped me be able to differentiate myself and get that job. Fast forward, like five years in my current role that I'm managing Zantac. The firm that is our National Coordinating Council is the firm that I had worked at as a younger associate for the first five years of my career that I had made all of those great relationships with. And those are the very same people that I am now managing on a day to day basis in the Zantac litigation. And so it's great because I know them so well, I used to work with them, we have a great relationship. It was a very, very easy transition when I took over that role. But I only, I, I've thought and reflected a lot over the last two years of like, what if we had had a terrible relationship? Um when I left that firm, like what if I hadn't been so close with all of these people? And then I was put in a situation where then I even had to manage them. Like that would have been very, very awkward. And so I think it's just you never, like I said, you never know where your career is going to take you. You never know where other people are going to end up. And it's just very, very helpful from a networking perspective, from a working perspective to maintain your relationships. Alicia: And people in relationships, so very much at the core of our careers and, and the longevity within it, no matter where we twist and turn and no matter where our journey takes us, those people that cross our paths in a, in a very good way, we do carry that. And that's I think an absolutely wonderful message to close out this podcast on. I want to say, Jamie, it has been a great pleasure. Uh listening to your career journey and wherever it may go next, I can certainly feel that there is, there's some insight there. There's certainly inspiration for our young lawyers here at Reed Smith and I want to thank you so much for your time. Jaimee: Thank you so much Alicia for having me. I really appreciate it. Alicia: Great pleasure. Thank you. Outro: Career Footprints is a Reed Smith production. Our producer is Ali McCardell. This podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, PodBean and reedsmith.com to learn more about Reed Smith's Alumni Network, or if you're an alum of the firm who wants to share your career story, contact me, Reed Smith's Global Senior Director of Alumni Relations, Laura Karmatz at alumni@reedsmith.com. (mailto:alumni@reedsmith.com.) Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for educational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice and is not intended to establish an attorney-client relationship, nor is it intended to suggest or establish standards of care applicable to particular lawyers in any given situation. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Any views, opinions, or comments made by any external guest speaker are not to be attributed to Reed Smith LLP or its individual lawyers. All rights reserved.

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