Path to Well-Being in Law – Episode 25: Helen Wan

Today, on the Path to Well-Being in Law podcast, co-hosts Bree and Chris hear from Helen Wan, a lawyer and the author of the 2013 novel, The Partner Track, which just launched as a new TV series on Netflix. On this episode, Helen discusses her journey towards writing her novel, how to get other stories told, and how getting senior leadership to show up for important discussions on inclusiveness and equity can shift a firm’s culture from one of competition to one of community.

Transcript: 

CHRIS NEWBOLD:

Hello, well-being friends. Welcome to the Path To Well-Being In Law Podcast, an initiative of the Institute for Well-Being in Law. I am joined again by my great co-host, Bree Buchanan. My name is Chris Newbold, Executive Vice President of ALPS. Bree, I’m pretty excited about our guest today. How about you?

BREE BUCHANAN:

I know. We’ve got somebody who’s really famous.

CHRIS:

That’s right. That’s right. It’s always great to bring… I think it’s fair to say that the legal profession in general, perceptions of it can be driven by media, television, movies, books. And I think that we are super excited to have a guest today that is really kind of sharing her novel was the basis for a Netflix series that is pretty popular right now. And so our guest today is Helen Wan. And Bree, if you could quickly talk a little bit about Helen and who she is.

BREE:

Absolutely. I would love to. And Chris, when you were talking about the history of portrayal of law in the media, I first thought of Legally Blonde.

CHRIS:

Yeah, Yeah. I always think of L.A. Law, right? Again, these are not oftentimes real perceptions of the legal profession, but the reality is people, particularly folks considering law school and other things, I think it does have, even going back to the old Perry Mason days. I think it does actually have folks look at the law through the lens, and I think the media creates some of that lens. So that’s why I think this will be a really fun conversation, particularly given Helen’s, the subject matter that she tackled based upon her own personal experience.

BREE:

I know, and I think of Helen creating this lens through which so many up-and-coming law students may see the profession. So enough about you, me, Chris. Let me talk about Helen. Helen Wan is an author and a lawyer and a graduate of Amherst College and the University of Virginia School of Law. She’s the author of the 2013 novel, the Partner Track, which just launched as a new TV series on Netflix. Incredibly exciting. It’s the story of an Asian American woman and her law colleagues as they compete in the culture of a prestigious global law firm. The book is taught in colleges and law schools and first-year seminars and ethics courses, and is used by law firms and companies in dialogues about DEI. And the book is being translated into several languages, including Turkish. I just think that’s so interesting that partner track began as subway scribblings on a legal pad when Helen was a first-year associate at a large New York law firm.

She writes primarily about how race, gender, socioeconomic, class, and culture impact am ambition in our pursuit of happiness, and I will add wellbeing. And Helen has written for the Washington Post. In fact, she has appeared on the cover of the Washington Post magazine, CNN.com, The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post among others. Before becoming a writer, Helen practiced media and intellectual property law in New York, both at law firms and as an in-house council. At the time, Inc. Division of Time Warner, Inc., A&E television networks and the Hachette Book Group USA. You could follow her on Twitter, @HelenWan1, the number one, and visit her website, at HelenWan.com.

Helen, we will now let you speak. How are you? Welcome to the podcast.

HELEN WAN:

Hello. Thank you both for having me. It’s really a pleasure to be here.

BREE:

Yeah, it’s so great. And so Helen, I’m going to jump in and ask you just the question that we really like to start off our podcast, to take us into a place that is personal and just in our background and where we come from and how we see the world. So tell us about what are the experiences in your life that made you care about and be, I would say, even passionate about the wellbeing of those and the legal profession, particularly those from a diverse background?

HELEN WAN:

Sure. Well, just by way of a little background about how I even came to law school, I was born in California, but raised on the East Coast. And I went, went to undergrad in Massachusetts and then I went directly to law school. And it wasn’t based on any sort of burning desire to be Perry Mason that I went directly to law school. It really was that when I was a senior trying to decide on a career path. I grew up the eldest child of first-generation Chinese American immigrants. And so there were certain kind of family-approved or culturally or society-approved careers such as law, medicine, engineering, finance, accounting. I was trying to decide on a career path and I thought, well, what is it that I’m passionate about? And it was words, working with words. And so truly, the calculus was not much more complicated than that. It was really kind of like, okay, well out of this group of careers, well, lawyers work with words.

BREE:

Yeah. Right.

HELEN WAN:

I guess, great. So I suppose, let me try the law school, the legal profession path. And I went and took the LSAT and I did well enough, I got into law schools and I picked the one where I knew I was going to get a good legal education, plus in-state tuition, because I had grown up in the northern Virginia suburbs. So there I was in law school. And then my first job out of law school was literally like Ingrid, the protagonist of the Partner Track, my first job was in the corporate mergers and acquisitions department at a large law firm in New York City.

CHRIS:

And Helen, obviously, I think a lot of law students, when you make that jump into that first career position, what’d you think? Did you like it? Did you detest it? Talk about your emotional mindset as you went and took that leap.

HELEN WAN:

Sure. So when I first landed at that firm, I truly didn’t know what to expect. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t have any specific expectations for that first job. But when I got there, I realized, “Oh wow.” I might as well have landed on the moon because it was such a, to me at least as a young freshly minted lawyer to have landed there, it just felt like such an alien culture to me.

And at that point in time, now, obviously, just to date myself, it’s been decades and decades obviously since I have been in law school. But I felt like law school did not really prepare people for the cultural entry into your first law job.

BREE:

Right, right.

HELEN WAN:

Everyone there obviously had the academic goods, otherwise you’re just not going to be at a place like that. But on top of that, there needed to be this extra kind of familiarity or knowledge of how the game was played, what rules really applied, and what rules nobody followed. And I just kind of felt like I didn’t have the decoder ring. I felt like everyone else did. Somehow I was absent the day they passed them out.

BREE:

Helen, can you give some examples of that? Anything?

HELEN WAN:

Just the very, very first weeks we were there, they had us attend a very thorough, well-executed and beautiful orientation for the new recruits, for the new associates. And it was in a hotel ballroom. And the person sitting next to me, also, obviously another entering junior lawyer, turned to me and said, he introduced himself with his law school name and that he was on law review and that he hoped to, in three years, have done X and, in six years time have done Y. And then had everything all mapped out, his whole career plan.

And I just thought to myself, oh wow, I just kind of want to get through this orientation week. He turned to me and he said, “Well, what about you? Where to you see yourself in five, 10 years from now?” And I said, “I just want to have found meaningful work and be pretty satisfied with where I am with my career and family, or what other things that I’ve chosen to do in life.” And he said, “Oh, okay. Well, I’m in it to win it.” He said to me, “Well, I’m in it to win it.”

BREE:

I know that guy. I think we all know that guy.

HELEN WAN:

Oh, Bree, you know him as well? Oh, okay. It’s a small world. And he said it totally unironically, totally unironically. I actually am still in touch with him, and he is a partner now. He’s a senior partner.

BREE:

Of course.

CHRIS:

There you go.

HELEN WAN:

So it worked.

BREE:

Oh my gosh. Well, tell us about your book, Partner Track.

HELEN WAN:

So my novel, the Partner Track, which I think as you mentioned, was originally published back in 2013. It’s been very interesting and I feel very fortunate that it’s kind of gotten, I guess, fresh life breathed into it now, almost a decade later. I think, because there’s more of a cultural lens focused on these topics, on these DEI topics now. It’s timely.

But I started writing the book because while I was working these 80-hour work weeks and I just needed sort of a creative outlet. And I literally started putting literal pen to paper, on paper, and I would journal about these observations and patterns that I was seeing, like who was sitting with whom in the corporate cafeteria, in the law firm lunchroom, who was being invited along on certain client pitch meetings and who was not, who was finding themselves spending good quality bonding time with certain mentors or sponsors, and who was not getting that kind of face time. So all of those kinds of things I began writing down as little sketches. And then when I found that I had a critical mass of sketches and pages, and I started showing them to a group of trusted friends, like confidants, who by the way, were not all lawyers, they were working all different kinds of industries and roles. But they had faced similar experiences in their jobs.

I shared some of those pages. And then people, my friends responded like, “Nobody’s telling these stories. No one’s talking about these issues. Why don’t you try to get some of them published?” And I had no idea how to go about getting something published. So I literally went to the bookstore and got one of those, how do you get a first book published for Dummies type books? And literally, I followed those rules and it kind of worked.

BREE:

That’s great. I love it.

CHRIS:

And Helen, can you, just for our listeners who have not read the book or seen the series yet, can you just set the storyline of at what point is the book focused on? And just kind of set the table a little bit for the setup of the book.

HELEN WAN:

Sure. Yeah, happy to. In a nutshell, the novel follows a young Chinese American junior associate who is trying to make partner at a very, very large and prestigious and rather traditional global law firm in the New York office. And it follows not only her, although it focuses primarily on her POV, but it also focuses on the experiences of her cohort, that she’s up against, competing against for partner. And what I was trying to accomplish with my novel was… Well, just personally as a reader, I love really tight ensemble cast-type novels and movies myself that talk about group dynamics in a tense kind of pressure cooker-type environment. And so that was what I was trying to bring across with my book. And I just wanted to show an underrepresented perspective on navigating that kind of corporate culture.

BREE:

Yeah. So this podcast, we really have spent our, I guess, 25 episodes plus, Chris, and counting on amplifying the voices of those in the wellbeing and law space. And your book, which is now a TV show, really has added to that conversation. So I’m wondering if Helen, you could have 30 minutes in a room with law firm leadership, maybe you could throw in some of the leadership from the firm you worked for, I don’t know, and could talk to them about what you think they should do differently, what would you say?

HELEN WAN:

Well, I actually have been pretty encouraged by the evolution in the, I guess decade, since initial publication of the book until now, with the launch of the TV series, because in that intervening time, I’ve been lucky enough to have spoken with and seen the behind the scenes DEI strategies at a lot of different legal employers, primarily law firms. But a lot of other places too, like in-house legal departments or even the academic world. And there definitely is a lot of progress left to be made, but at least progress is being made, I think. Because when the book was first published in 2013, and I was speaking to audiences of lawyers and law students, a lot of times at a firm, it would be a beautiful, gorgeous, gorgeous cocktail party and no senior management in attendance.

And hey, we’re talking about diversity in the legal profession here. It would be a whole bunch of summer associates, which is great, but not a lot of visibility with the firm senior leadership. Nowadays, I think that I truly have seen a change in that way. So I see more firms really kind of putting their money where their mouth is. I have seen firms do things such as, well make it basically mandatory for all senior managers, all partners, to show up for one of these dialogues and discussions about increasing inclusiveness at the firm, the feeling of inclusiveness and equity at the firm. They do use often my book as a teaching text. And I’ve seen some particularly just, well, really carefully planned events where the firm even has prepared a list of discussion questions and breakout sessions and breakout groups, et cetera, that are pretty thoughtful. And the discussion turns into a really fairly meaningful one. I am encouraged by the changes that I have seen.

BREE:

And it seems like that kind of tracks I’m thinking in just to the general wellbeing space in that what we’re seeing now is that it’s become a part of the conversation.

HELEN WAN:

Yes.

BREE:

It’s a start. You got to start there. You got to get people talking about it and thinking about it. But there’s still a long way to go to bring about real change. Absolutely.

HELEN WAN:

Right. Yes, I totally agree.

CHRIS:

And Helen, one of the things that I think is really powerful about what you’ve written about, and now what the big screen is, is the perspective of associates. Because we all can envision a scenario in which, let’s just call it the power structure is not tilting in your favor, which necessarily has folks competing against others in ways that sometimes are, let’s just be honest, unhealthy, and then a lack of a willingness or a wherewithal to speak loudly when there are things that are unhealthy going on within the firm for stigma reasons and otherwise. And so I just think one of the things that’s really interesting, and I think one of the areas of wellbeing that I think there’s an associate community out there that probably really empathizes with the plight that both, you write about you went through, and just that it certainly feels like there’s more on-ramps to be able to vocalize challenges that you’re facing. But let’s face it, 20 years ago that might not have actually been the case and actually might have been more summarily frowned upon.

HELEN WAN:

Yeah, absolutely. That is, I think, one of the reasons why I started my little journal scribblings to and from work, is that I was observing the same patterns happen in terms of really talented people, really talented lawyers taking themselves off the vine very early on. And then I’d ask them or have some private candid conversations with them, everyone essentially said more or less the same thing, which was, “Oh, well I could look around.” And I could see that my career was not going to go smoothly here in the same way that X, Y, Z perhaps.

CHRIS:

And then obviously, you add gender issues and diversity issues into the mix. And boy, I just think that the story and the nature of it with kind of historical cultures in the legal profession… What you’re bringing and what you’re raising in terms of the consciousness and the awareness of some of these real issues that continue today, I think is a really powerful element of what will come out of your work. Hey, let’s take a quick break here, hear from one of our sponsors and come back and talk a little bit more about the show and the book.

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BREE:

Welcome back everybody to the Well-Being In Law Podcast. And today we have author Helen Wan, who wrote the book Partner Track in 2013, and has now been turned into a television show that was just recently released, because I started to watch it and I love it, Helen, it was the beginning I think, of August 2022. But what was it like to work on turning that book and to a TV show?

HELEN WAN:

Truly, it’s been a very thrilling ride. Because I just never, never, never, over two decades ago when I began writing the book, I never would’ve expected that the stars would align in this way and that one day I would be walking, literally would be able to be walking through Times Square in Manhattan and look up and see the Partner Track featured on the big old gigantic Netflix digital billboard.

BREE:

Helen, that gave me chills.

HELEN WAN:

Yeah, it really did. It really did, Bree. I stood there and I just stood there for a couple minutes. It just was amazing because I just stood there and watched the loop several times. So there’s Ozark, Stranger Things, Squid Game and Partner Track. I was like, “Wow. Okay.”

BREE:

Oh my gosh, I wish I could have seen a film of that, of you seeing that.

CHRIS:

What’s been the biggest surprise to you since the launch? And obviously, Netflix has a worldwide audience. And so I got to imagine that quite a few folks have come out of your history and your background to reach back out to you. And I’m just kind of curious on what the biggest surprise was?

HELEN WAN:

Yeah, you kind of hit the nail on the head. I have been lucky enough to be hearing from so many old dear friends and colleagues and I heard from my high school prom date. I heard from my prom date, I heard from my a middle school English teacher. And it’s just been pretty amazing. Who knew so many people read Variety or Hollywood Reporter.

BREE:

Yeah.

HELEN WAN:

It’s been amazing. And the other, probably the best and happiest surprise for me has been just the tremendously positive and enthusiastic support that the show has gotten. But not just from lawyers or groups of law students or even groups of women lawyers or Asian American lawyers or what have you, no particular this community or that community or that community. Just people in general just from all quarters. And that has been just really positive and encouraging for me to see.

BREE:

No kidding. So Helen, looking back, now that you have the benefit of being able to deploy hindsight, a 20/20 vision, what would you have done differently? What do you wish that you had known when you started? What was the decoder? [inaudible 00:26:54].

HELEN WAN:

Now that I’m a lot older and a little bit wiser, I would like to think… I think I just would’ve walked in there with more self-confidence, to be honest. I think that I would’ve walked into not just that particular law firm role, but every job that I have helped since with, just with more confidence that I could try to bring my, I know this is kind of a cliche way to say it, but bring my authentic self to work. And if it didn’t work, then I would know that, hey, perhaps it’s time to seek out someplace that perhaps is more where I would feel more included or would feel more valued, or perhaps the values of that particular workplace would be more aligned with my own.

So I think that I would’ve just walked in with more confidence and not hold the belief that, hey, okay, what a legal employer wants is someone who just lives, breathes the law 24/7. Because that’s not true. What they want is, I think, happy people who are pleasant to be around. I wish I had come to that conclusion sooner because I think that I would’ve wasted less time kind of spinning my wheels.

BREE:

Yeah. And being able to have the belief that when you walk into that space, you deserve to be there. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

CHRIS:

I’m curious, as you reflect on the book, the storyline, and so forth, do you see it as a cautionary tale, an expose, a tutorial? I think you shared in the storylines just a number of, I think, very interesting elements to a journey. Again, with gender, with race, with first-generation elements and even remarking upon the person who’s like, “I’m in it to win it.” But I’m just curious on how you look at the storyline today versus obviously when you wrote the book almost a decade ago.

HELEN WAN:

It’s funny, I did not think of it as an expose when I was writing. Truly, what I was trying to do when I first began this project, it was just kind of like my creative outlet, my written therapy from a stressful week at work. But then it eventually evolved into a proper story arc and it populated with different, more perspectives and more characters. Truly, I wrote it just as of my creative outlet. It was sort of my way to have well-being in the law. I needed to have a creative outlet, and so that was mine.

BREE:

Absolutely. And do you have advice for law students or those contemplating a legal career? What could you say to them?

HELEN WAN:

I think the best advice someone could have given me back when I was trying to embark on my first steps in my legal career would be just to take more time to really ask the savvy questions about the workplace’s environment and culture before making any decisions. Because I realized fairly early on when I got to my first law job that, oh, okay, I don’t think that this culturally is the right fit for me. Now, that’s not to say anything about anybody else’s decision because personally, I have very good friends who are senior law partners now and are really good at their jobs and just amazing lawyers. So it’s each person. It’s person by person, obviously. For me, that was not the right fit culturally. And I think that I would’ve taken the time to do a little more research, to ask smarter questions, to understand before making any decisions. And also to realize that hey, just because just you can continue grabbing more gold stars, you don’t have to.

CHRIS:

Yeah, I think it’s very interesting that one of the things that I makes me optimistic that well-being will continue to become a more prominent conversation topic, particularly in the big law community, is the fact that I think the most talented law students coming out are asking more of the tougher questions on the front end.

There used to be, I think again, oh, I really want to get in at that particular firm because that will cement a pathway for me to success. Where generationally now, there’s a little bit more of a, I know that I have a lot to offer, but I also am coming at this with more appropriate expectations as to what my work-life balance might look like and are asking those questions as part of the interview process. So it’s a two-way hiring street versus kind of a one-way. And if we’ve gotten there, that I think can be a catalyst to the culture shift that firms, what they value in terms of talent acquisition and talent retention, changes the game quite a bit. And I think that your story and the Partner Track sheds some interesting new light on some of those kind of realistic elements of culture in firms that I think will play out, I think, in very interesting ways in the years to come.

HELEN WAN:

Yeah, Well thank you for that compliment because yeah, I’ve been fortunate enough to be speaking with lots of groups of law students and their law profs. And these students are really just asking very wise questions, questions about their future employers. And not just about future employers, but just about the state of the profession generally, or really asking things like, okay, well at this place, what is the partner group makeup? How long did that person take to make a partner? How many partners? And what is the path to partner? Is it clearly laid out? What happens… These are all very savvy questions that I, to be honest, I personally did not even know to ask when I was a 2L or 3L.

BREE:

Yeah. I think Chris and I both are first generation to go into law. And absolutely, you don’t have somebody laying that down for you. You don’t know what you’re supposed to ask and those questions and things.

CHRIS:

Yeah. And the waters can obviously be pretty choppy when you don’t have perspective and then you come into environments in which, let’s just say that the environment can be some welcoming, some not so welcoming and then with undertones that you would’ve never known before.

HELEN WAN:

Right, yes. And I will add too though, that sometimes some of these instances where I did not necessarily feel very included in conversations or whatever the circumstance was, I don’t feel that it was intentional or necessarily intentional or blatantly racist or sexist or anything. It’s what you know, who you know, what is comfortable and familiar to you. And one thing that happened to me, which really made me want to start writing this, was that I was invited, see, I was invited along to a lunch along with some other, my cohort, who had also just entered the firm recently. And it was at a fancy steakhouse-type restaurant. And the conversation turned to sailing and sailing camp. Now, I had never been to sailing camp in my entire life, but apparently everybody else had, or I don’t know, but apparently, to me, they all had.

So he was talking about, “Oh my gosh. Well okay, I went to this sailing camp. Oh my goodness, do you know,” blah, blah, blah. “Yes, we went to summer camp all of the time together and then we went to this academy together before college and law school.” So I was like politely trying to listen and trying to get a word in edgewise. And sometimes I would succeed, but then no one was intentionally trying to exclude me from being a part of the conversation, obviously, it’s just that I had no way to join that conversation and no one was allowing that foothold into the conversation. And so when I would try to get a word in edgewise, inevitably, the conversation would soon quickly turn back to sailing. And that’s when I was like, hey, I’m going to take the legal pad and start writing this stuff down. And decades later, now it’s on Netflix though.

BREE:

There you go.

CHRIS:

Yeah. Well, so much of what… I know that we did a kind of mini-series on the podcast on the nexus between and the inherent nexus between diversity, equity, inclusion, and this sense of what I think you’re getting at, which is also the sense of belonging, right? And sometimes not having the context to feel like you can be part of conversations because you don’t have the shared experience. And I just think that’s a real element that sometimes has people feeling like they’re just, maybe this isn’t my place. And that maybe not be intentional, but the reality is that there are elements to that and they’re real.

HELEN WAN:

Right. Yes, absolutely.

CHRIS:

Well, Helen, this was a great podcast and I appreciate, we had a chance to meet back in August in Chicago. Helen was the keynote speaker in front of the National Conference of Women’s Bar Associations, where I had a chance to meet her before the series dropped. And I could immediately tell that Helen has a passion for seeing people want to ultimately find professional satisfaction in the practice of law. And again, her willingness to be able to, I think, identify some of the real issues that associates face in their journey in the legal profession, I think will kind of continue to serve as an important part of the well-being conversation moving forward. So Helen, thank you so much for joining us and we continue to want to incorporate you into well-being activities with the Institute for Well-Being in Law, and thanks for sharing your experience.

BREE:

Absolutely. Thank you.

HELEN WAN:

Thank you both so much for inviting me today. It was a pleasure.

CHRIS:

All right, we will be back in a couple weeks with the next podcast. And until then, be well out there friends.