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

Career Footprints

Alum Wendy Jephson 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.

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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 [e-mail].

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.

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