Ever wonder what the board of directors wants from their legal team? Or how you can move from the legal department into a board position? In this episode, triple-threat Jeanine Wright–former GC turned tech-company founder, former COO of podcast giant Wondery, and current board member at several companies–is in The Legal Department to help lawyers how to be great in the board room. Find out the 4 things board members want in their lawyers. Jeanine also shares her journey from legal into business roles and the practical advice that helped her reach the board room and offers advice on how you can get there too.

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Listen to the podcast here

About Jeanine Wright 

Jeanine is a seasoned board member, Global COO, and CFO. She’s led organizations from start-up to $475M+ revenue subsidiary of a public company. She excels in growth strategy, adopting innovative technologies, scaling operations, and financial management. A media & entertainment attorney and trial litigator turned technologist and Qualified Financial Expert, she’s an expert in M&A, corporate governance, building sales organizations, and go-to-market strategy.

Jeanine recently served as COO at Wondery, Amazon’s podcast division. She oversaw sales, licensing, strategy, and global operations. Jeanine spearheaded initiatives that tripled ad revenue in one year and sourced some of Wondery’s largest deals (e.g., $80M deal w/Dax Shepard). She negotiated tens of millions in cost savings, led M&A strategy, and pioneered podcast video development. Regarded as an inspiring people leader, she consistently exceeded Amazon targets for employee retention and satisfaction. She also drove global expansion.

Before Wondery, Jeanine served as CFO/SVP Strategy & Operations at AdsWizz, the audio ad tech leader owned by SiriusXM, overseeing global operations, growing the revenue to $475M+, and leading efforts to integrate acquired companies. Her strategic initiatives were pivotal in both developing the SiriusXM-wide podcast strategy, and growing AdsWizz revenue 40%+/yr while improving product margins 45%+/yr.

As the Co-Founder and first investor in Simplecast, one of the earliest podcast infrastructure companies, Jeanine guided the company to prominence, joining full-time as CFO/COO/CLO at the Series A and carrying the company through to its acquisition by SiriusXM. She orchestrated financing rounds and drove revenue growth through a strategic pivot to servicing enterprise customers. As CLO and Executive-in-Charge of the Consumer Lending Platform at ZestAI, she managed a $100M+ P&L and significantly enhanced profitability.

Jeanine was the first General Counsel at Media Temple, where she successfully restructured debt to greatly improve the company’s financial profile, prepared the company for sale, and then co-led the process to sell the company to GoDaddy for almost $100M, setting an industry EBITDA multiple record. As a media & entertainment attorney, Jeanine specialized in Intellectual Property, litigation, and advising clients on dispute resolution, contract negotiations, and new business ventures.

A sought-after keynote speaker, Jeanine addresses topics such as Startup Investing, Law, Fintech, AdTech, Women in Business, and the Future of Podcasting at major conferences and intimate executive circles. Jeanine co-authored a chapter on “The Talent Agencies Act” in Entertainment Litigation, a seminal work in the field. An article she wrote on the 6th Amendment has been cited to the US Supreme Court. She has a JD from USC Law School, a BA from UCLA, and a Mini-MBA from Boston University School of Business. Jeanine also enjoys angel investing and adventure travel.

Transcript

My name is Jeanine Wright. I am a Board Director and I help companies grow. A fun fact about me is that I rescued bees from an orange tree in Compton. I keep them in my backyard and harvest honey from them every year. Sometimes I even make mead, which is honey wine. We have three kids, chickens, dogs, a snake, and a bearded dragon. It’s a crazy little farm over here in the heart of Los Angeles.

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In this episode, I’m excited to welcome Jeanine Wright. She is a lawyer by background and serves on a number of corporate boards and advises companies in a consulting capacity. She also co-founded a couple of tech companies. I wanted to bring her on to help us understand how to work well with board members, how to make great board presentations, and also pick her brain on how she landed these amazing board roles. Jeanine, we’re glad to have you.

Thank you so much. I’ve been meaning to come on the show for a long time. I’m a long-time listener. First-time caller, as they say.

That’s awesome. Thanks for the endorsement. I appreciate that. As I mentioned, you started your career as an entertainment lawyer. Looking at your very impressive career, I’m very curious how you ended up moving from a law firm into a GC role, then into co-founding companies, and now as a board member. Could you give us a little bit of your background?

They’re so complimentary. I appreciate it. I went to USC for law school. Thankfully, I did well. As people who do well at USC tend to do, I did a federal clerkship and then went into entertainment law. I did that for 5 or 6 years. I was lucky that I got to do a nice combination of both litigation and transactional work over a lot of different practice areas, because entertainment law can sometimes be the kind of client more than an area of law.

I got to practice as a generalist, which was cool. I even got some opportunities to help some celebrity clients start their businesses. It was back in the day when a lot of these folks were launching their fashion brand or their perfume line or whatever it was. Sometimes, we have to be involved in that side of the transaction work, too. It was a good diversity. I was there for a few years, and as life happens, I had my first baby while I was at the firm. Shortly thereafter, I took a case where I got the opportunity to first chair that case all the way to trial.

Transitioning From Law To Business Leadership

I represented a talent agency as a defendant. It was a two-week jury trial in Downtown LA. I got all of my big litigation heart moments. I did opening, closing, and cross-examination. I even had the opportunity when I caught a witness in a big lie on cross-examination. We won. It was a great experience, and everyone thought, “Jeanine is going to be a partner.” I remember thinking that’s an excellent way to close that chapter of my life. As I said, I had this baby. Maybe this is TMI for the audience, but my son was not quite one when we went to trial.

I felt like I needed to wean in order to get ready for the final stages of going to trial, and then go to trial. When I reflected on it, I felt like that was a personal decision that my job was making for me. I wasn’t feeling like I was able to find the work-life balance that I wanted in order to show up for my kids at home and have a very busy litigation practice, at least at that time. I know firms are different now.

When I started looking for what was going to be the next step and what I was going to do, a number of my friends were going in-house at a lot of different entertainment companies. That seemed less exciting to me. What seemed more exciting to me was some of the business work that I had the chance to do. Around the same time, Silicon Beach in Los Angeles was just starting to pop. There were a lot of startup companies happening, so we started joining these startup communities. We even started doing legal services in exchange for fractional equity ownership for some of these early-stage companies.

Very creative.

It was fun. It was a way for me to get a lot of different kinds of experiences. When I started looking for this next thing, what was I going to do next? I started looking at tech companies in LA and put the feelers out. Luckily, I was selected to be the general counsel of an internet infrastructure company called Media Temple, and that started my in-house counsel life.

Two funny things happened. One, the day I accepted the job, I found out I was pregnant with my second child. Shortly after that, the company started to receive inbound offers for acquisitions. We very quickly moved to getting the company ready to see if this was the appropriate time for it to exit. We ended up taking the company through an auction process, a full roadshow, and selling the company to GoDaddy. That was a fun rocketship ride and my first experience with M&A of that scale. While I was there at Media Temple, I met an incredible product leader.

There are these special people in the world who just have the ability to see the future. He’s like @Brad on Instagram and on Twitter. He’s always wearing the shoes that everybody is going to be wearing next year. He’s playing with the tech tools that are going to be the thing that’s going to change the world in the future. I quickly became friends with him and knew that he was going to do something that was going to be cool. I just didn’t know what it was yet. Luckily, I made a little bit of money in the sale of Media Temple to GoDaddy and decided that I was going to start placing some bets.

This friend of mine, Brad, came to me and he said, “Podcasting is going to be a thing. The infrastructure for it is broken, and I know how to fix it.” My husband and I looked each other in the eye, and we’re like, “Are we going to do this?” We decided yes, so we wrote a check to Brad. We were the first money in on his company called Simplecast. They moved to Upstate, New York, and started working in stealth on this future podcasting company.

Meanwhile, I went on to be the GC at another company. I was the general counsel of a fintech company called ZestFinance, now called Zest AI. Life was going on swimmingly. Luckily, podcasting was a thing, and that industry was growing. Simplecast was doing well, but I was more helpful from the sidelines, encouraging, weighing in, and doing what I could to help ensure their success, but I was still building my career as a general counsel.

One day, Brad came to me. Honestly, at first it was a joke. He was like, “If I raise a significant series A, will you come in and be my COO and co-founder?” At that time, nobody was raising any money in podcasting, so I was like, “Sure, Brad. If you pre-raise the series A, I’ll be there.” We started taking the show on the road, having a bunch of meetings. Lo and behold, we were able to raise a sizable series A, and I had to look my husband in the eye again and say, “Are we going to do this?” The next thing I know, I was leaving my stable, well-paying job to go be the co-founder and employee number 11 or 12 at Simplecast. Thankfully, podcasting was a thing that continued to grow.

It’s still going now.

We sold it to SiriusXM. Many of the largest podcasts out there continue to be happy Simplecast customers, which warms my heart. I love to see people like yourself having success in the podcasting industry, and to feel like I had some little part in building and shaping this industry.

I want to have another conversation with you about podcasting and all the things that I need to work on and do better. Did you feel confident that you could shift from being a GC to the COO of a growing early-stage tech company?

Yes and no. Sometimes I say the most important thing that anybody can do for their career is to be married to the right person.

If only we had a time machine to know what we would need.

I was lucky enough to marry Mr. Wright. He has been incredibly supportive of my career, and he’s had a stable, long-term career at a single company. That gives me some flexibility to take some more risks in my career. That is why we were able to decide that I could go from the firm to working in-house, and it’s why we were able to decide that I could leave a well-paying job to try my hand at an early-stage startup company.

On the business side, sometimes I even remind myself that even Michelle Obama and Tom Hanks have impostor syndrome. I’m able to silence those voices in the back of my mind that are like, are you going to be able to do this, and to just give myself that confidence that comes from deep down inside my gut, like I can do anything, and learn anything. I’m going to get in there and I’m going to figure it out. I’m willing to work harder, read more, and fail more times until I figure it out than other people are. That tenacity and grit are the key to being successful in a lot of different kinds of businesses, to being willing to stick it out, figure it out, and being intellectually curious.

That kind of tenacity and grit is key to success in many types of businesses—being willing to stick it out, figure things out, and stay intellectually curious. Share on X

I couldn’t agree more. However, lawyers produce a product. We produce legal advice, manage litigation, or turn out transactional work, and certainly, the general counsel role requires having business acumen and understanding the business. I wonder about how you were able to divorce, or maybe you didn’t have to, but divorce your traditional legal thinking, like, “My role is to advise and do this,” versus rolling up my sleeves and running the company?

When it happened for me, I was at ZestFinance, and they had a great leadership team there that believed in leader development. The company was going through a pivot, deciding to exit one business line and lean into a different business line. Every one of the companies was excited about working on this new business endeavor, and they needed somebody to run and continue to operate the existing business line so that it could keep paying the bills and keep the business stable while we made this transition.

I raised my hand for that opportunity. I said, “Would you consider me? Right now, you think of me as the GC, but if you give me this chance to own this P&L and run this business, I promise I won’t let you down.” At the time, I was also the chief compliance officer. To his credit, there were two leaders at the time, the CEO and the president of the company. They decided to place a bet on me, but they’re very smart in the way that they went about placing the bet.

Leveraging Executive Coaching For Career Acceleration

They said, “Even professional athletes have coaches. Let’s give you this opportunity, but what if we hire an executive coach to help you with this transition and support you through this transition?” That has been one of the biggest investments that has ever been made in my career. I was given this opportunity to run this business line through the $100 million P&L. I was responsible for product, marketing, and the engineering team, all these areas which I had never been over before. I was doing it in a very supportive environment and with the benefit of having a third-party executive coach who could be my workplace therapist but also give me a lot of constructive feedback on the way that I needed to show up, lead, and how I needed to grow.

It’s a clear acceleration point in my career. This woman, Melissa Karz from Next Step Partners, and all the people that I know who have worked with an executive coach in a career transition like this, I’m not sure that I can think of a single experience where somebody has told me that they did not find that incredibly valuable for them in their careers.

That speaks volumes about the leadership of that company that they made, I wouldn’t say a bet. They made an investment, and they knew it was going to hit, honestly. You were probably a superstar in your legal role.

Thank you.

I’m wondering, if you think back on your work with Melissa, is there anything like one big piece of advice or one big shift that made a difference?

Applying Strategic Thinking As A Leader

There were a number of epiphanies. One in particular, I remember before meeting with her. I was almost obsessed with figuring out what kind of leader I was going to be. Who am I going to show up as a leader? Especially when you’re moving quickly, and you’re starting to manage a team. How am I going to lead?

Especially being a lawyer. I don’t want to malign your law firm, but I would doubt there was a ton of emphasis on leadership development, and making a good team leader at the law firm.

By that point, I had the opportunity to see a lot of great leaders, and some leaders that I didn’t want to emulate. I kept trying to think about whether there must be a leadership profile or who I am going to be like. I remember having this conversation with Melissa where she said, “The best leaders know a bunch of different leadership styles and they hold them like arrows in a quiver. They’re able to pull out and use that leadership style. That’s the best style most appropriate for the action that needs to be taken or the person that you’re working with.”

Maybe they’re going to respond best to you being very direct. Maybe the situation calls for a more democratic kind of leadership, or maybe it calls for a more paced setting. Once she opened that aperture for me, I was like, “I don’t need to be one thing. I need to be the best leader in the moment, that’s most appropriate for that moment.”

That helped give me the freedom to start experimenting with a bunch of different ways that I could lead, and getting feedback from people on, “Did this leadership style work for you in this instance?” It’s almost like, all of a sudden, it let me be free to try a bunch of different kinds of things and recognize that there wasn’t going to be one-size-fits-all for all perfect things that I needed to make myself into it.

I wonder if other people think like that because that’s insightful feedback from her that you adopted. I’ve worked with a number of different leaders, and I don’t know that I’ve observed many people to be super adaptive in their style. That’s pretty cool.

Can I give you one other one?

Yes, I love it.

It’s such a fun, practical tip that is particularly beneficial for lawyers, so I tell it to a lot of my lawyer friends. The other thing she did was this whole 360 reviews. We got feedback from a bunch of different people, like, where did I need to improve? One of the areas that I got that early feedback on was that people saw me as very good at my job, but not very strategic. We developed this plan around how I was going to demonstrate that I was more strategic.

The first thing that she told me to do blew my mind at how effective it was. She said, “I want you to start using the word strategic more often.” She gave me this daily quota that I had to tick. Today, I use the word strategic five times, whatever it was, and check it off as I go. She’s like, “It’s going to do two things. One, it’s going to subconsciously start for people to change their minds that they’re going to start perceiving you as strategic just because you’re using the word more. More importantly, it’s going to remind you, like, ‘I need to think about this from a strategic perspective,’ before you’re going to make a comment.”

You’re just not going to throw it out willy-nilly. It’s not like an ad-lib game in the corporate environment. You’re thinking, “I now need to provide the advice that links to our corporate strategy. What am I going to say here?” It forces your mind to think like that, then you start providing more advice like that and more advice in that context.

It’s like brainwashing.

Exactly. It worked incredibly well to think about using the word strategic more often.

Are you familiar with Carla Harris? She has a TED Talk. She was an executive at either JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs, one of the big banks. One of the feedback she got at one point was that she wasn’t tough. She followed Melissa’s advice and was saying tough a lot and primed to pump herself mentally about being tough, walking tough, and chewing tough. I’ve done similar things in my life, too. You don’t realize you’re being perceived a certain way, and if you just start throwing the words out there, all of a sudden, people start associating them. It’s very interesting.

It changes who you are, too.

That’s an easy thing anybody can do. Again, I started off by saying that, now you’re doing a lot of board work, which for many of us feels like the gold ring. Those of us who work for boards, and many folks want to be on public company boards or other corporate boards where you get paid to do it, and it seems like a closed group, and not sure how to get those roles. You’re doing a lot of that now. I’d love to hear about how that experience is going for you, and in particular, you are a doer and have spent many years operating, co-founding a business, and selling a business. What’s it like? Tell me about making the switch into the board roles.

After SiriusXM, I made my way to Amazon, where I was the GM and COO of their podcasting division, Wondery, up until 2024, when I decided to leave Amazon and am now doing board work full-time. I’m working with five different companies. I’m formerly on the board of three of them and doing a board advisor role, which was more like consulting work for two of them. For some companies, when they’re smaller and don’t have a formal board structure. I do a board advisory role, which is like consulting because they don’t have a formal board that’s meeting. You’re more like advising the management team at a very strategic or high level, usually around a specific effort.

We want to get the company ready to sell, or we want to figure out how to adopt AI. The board member’s work is where they have a formal board. In my case, I’m serving as the independent director. Two of these companies are private companies. One is a late-stage private company in the Ad Tech space called GroundTruth, and I am the only independent director. All the other directors are early-stage investors in the company. My role is to bring industry expertise, but also to play almost like a liaison role between the management and the investor board members.

I bring a different perspective for those who have been investors in the company for a very long time. I also have strategic connections in the industry. For folks that they might want to meet, I can provide advice with respect to how products are evolving in the space. I can support the leadership in things like leadership development and hiring the most strategic hires. It’s fun and interesting work.

Sometimes, you feel like a diplomat in trying to get everybody on the same page in the room to figure out where exactly the line is between what a board should be doing and what the management should be doing. Those are all fun problems to solve. You lean into good communication skills and the business expertise that you’ve developed over a number of years. You can bring that advice and counsel to the room.

Navigating The Board Member Role: “Noses In, Fingers Out”

Talk about the phrase “Nose in, fingers out.” It’s one of the metaphors for boards, and I serve on a couple of non-profit boards and some big ones. I almost look for coaching here because one of them is an industry that I’m very familiar with. I find myself having to restrain myself. I want to give constructive advice. I also want to be supportive of the management, especially in meetings. You don’t want to undercut even if you have a differing view. Talk about walking that line between operating and governing.

Frankly, it can be difficult, and you are constantly trying to find out where exactly that line is. The “nose in, fingers out” principle is used to guide the board’s role is mostly to hire and fire the CEO. They should be leaning into making sure that the right things are happening with the business, and they are focused on the right initiatives. We have the right management in place and are incentivizing them the right way. We’re operating in compliance with the rules that govern our particular industry, or for a public company, that govern public companies.

The 'nose in, fingers out' principle is used to guide the idea that the board’s primary role is to hire and fire the CEO. They should be leaning in just enough to ensure the right things are happening within the business. Share on X

Fingers out means that although you’re supposed to be leaning in and seeing if you can sniff out any of the problems or anywhere that needs to be addressed, fingers out means that you are not supposed to be the one doing the work. Even if a problem is identified, you provide your advising counsel to the management team as to how they should go about solving it. Sometimes, they don’t listen to you, and the overwhelming majority of the time, you need to be okay with that.

Managing Board Interactions & Minimizing Burden On Management

One thing that I am cognizant of is that when I ask questions or ask for more information, I’m aware that whatever questions board members ask result in work for the management team. I always think, “Do I need to do this? Is this just curiosity?” I certainly have been on the other end of the question, and you spend all this time working up a deck, answering some long email, etc., and at the end of the day, the board member was just curious. It was not a big deal.

It’s very true. Sometimes board members don’t recognize the wake that they cause, and I’ve been on boards where we were meeting every month, and you can imagine the work that is going on in time for monthly board meetings. Board members will ask questions. As somebody who was an operator, who had a board and a very involved board, and who experienced a lot of late-night emergencies or having to give up time with my family or on vacations in order to respond to board questions or revise board decks. I am very sensitive and empathetic to overworking my management team.

I was on a call with the CTO for one of the organizations that I’m working with, and he said that they had a customer advisory board meeting, an all-hands meeting, and then they had the board meeting. He felt like it had been a number of weeks since he was able to get back into the product. We were both recognizing that’s not a good thing. You’re the product leader of what’s supposed to be a very quickly growing organization, and the amount of time that you’re able to dedicate is being limited by responses from the board.

I recognize that, and because I’m a peer to the other board members, I’m often the one who can speak up and who can say, “Do we need that report, or do we need that extra layer of data, or do we need an extra board call between now and then to find that balance?” It’s also figuring out how the management team can manage their own board and how they can get the trust of the board so that they can have more of that freedom. One of my early board experiences was helpful in giving me the right perspective on how to find the line between what the board should do.

I was on a private company board where the founders had decided to step back. They were joining board roles and had hired a professional CEO. At first, it was hard for the founders to find the scope of the roles. They were leaning in. They were still doing a lot of the things that they had done before and still showing up at a lot of conferences, events, employee meetings, and all-hands. The CEO was feeling he was being micromanaged and maybe not given the space to execute against his vision, but the founders felt like the CEO needed to be more proactive and manage the communications from the board and seek their advice and counsel.

They grew the company and knew it best. We went through a lot of work to define what one’s roles and responsibilities would be, where we were supposed to lean in and not. Because of that experience, I’ve developed a very good sense of what the line should be. It is an extreme case, but like you, I’m a doer, and when I see a problem, I want to jump in and help solve the problem.

If you go online, you’ll find board readiness programs that cost thousands of dollars. The truth is, most people I know at my career level are already ready for board service. The real question is: how do you package yourself effectively? Share on X

Back on the wake of the board and how questions and curiosity can lead to burning the midnight oil. As a board member, what do you want from the legal counsel? That’s the audience that we were talking to. I’ve made a lot of board presentations in my time, do it now, and I struggle with giving a complete picture, but not every tree in the forest, picking out those germane details of a case or a transaction. What do they need to know? I also want to be transparent. I want to make sure the board knows that we’ve thought about X, Y, and Z, but you don’t get all that much time. You don’t want to give them a 300-page legal report. What advice do you have for GCs?

Expectations Of Legal Counsel From A Board Perspective

I would say that it’s four things. One, I want to trust you. That comes from me believing in your confidence and your honesty, that you’re coming to me with the right kinds of problems at the right times. I would say there’s this first big bucket around trust. Two, just like what you spoke about, this clarity of advice. People make the mistake of thinking that if they make something sound complex, it makes them seem smarter or more important or more necessary, but often, the opposite is true. If you’re able to make it clear and digestible and you have well-grounded advice, that is incredibly valuable to me as a board member.

Three, I want confidence that you understand the company’s business strategy and financial goals, which is a big gap for a lot of people in legal. They pick this lane, and they’re like, “I understand our legal issues. I understand how to mitigate risk and the regulatory environment in which we operate.” When you ask them to tie all of those things to what the company is trying to do and what the shareholder interests are, and how legal is driving to realize better shareholder returns, you often see a gap there where the advice ends before it ties together, like what advice you were giving and how that links to the company’s success with respect to their business strategic and financial goals.

That is heavy. I talked with Eva Shang, who’s the CEO of Legalist, which is a big investment fund. She said pretty much the same thing. I want to talk to lawyers who understand the business goals. These things are not mutually exclusive. The legal work is not its own island without the rest of the business in mind. That’s important advice.

It’s funny, a lot of young lawyers asked me things like, “When starting a new job, what is the most important thing? What are some of the things that I can do to be successful in a new role?” One, I always tell them to read Michael Watkins’s The First 90 Days. I’m a huge fan of that book. I read it many times.

He was a guest.

I missed that one. I’m going to go back and listen to it. Two, find out how your company makes money. It seems so intuitive once you say it out loud, but a lot of times, especially people going into roles that are not directly in marketing, product, or growth. They miss the big picture of understanding, like, “Why are we here?” That relates to the fourth point, which is you have to have a belief that your lawyers are proactive problem solvers and that they’re not “no” people.

A lot of people who come straight from law firms, maybe they don’t have a depth of experience in in-house work, and even less advising boards. They are trained issues spotters, so they know how to say, “Here’s where all the problems are and here’s all the things that we shouldn’t be doing,” but they don’t know how to communicate what the things are that we should be doing or how we should go about solving those problems.

The next level down is advising on what the things are that, even if they pose a legal risk, we’re not going to worry about it for now. We’re going to be comfortable taking that risk because it’s more important that we grow. Sometimes, I say that the weight of the law could crush all innovation, so you have to go through some periods of deciding what things we’re going to care about and what things we’re just going to put on the shelf and worry about later. The board needs to understand that your lawyers are partners with you in making those risk-based decisions all the time.

Therein lies the rub, and you’re exactly right. A lot of lawyers are good issue spotters, and it’s easy to lay out the minefield of all the why-nots. You have to be discerning and have judgment to see which are the tripwires we need to worry about and which things we’re not going to worry about. We’re rounding the bend a little bit here. We talked about this in our prep, and it’s related to the four things you just shared, which is that for GCs, many of us want to be on boards.

I had another guest, Tricia Montalvo Timm, who’s on a few boards. She said the biggest identity she had to overcome was that of a lawyer in her board search. Recruiters and others were reluctant about her as a candidate because she was a lawyer, and you shared a similar sentiment. Can you share about that?

Overcoming The “Lawyer” Stereotype In Board Search

To put it bluntly, most boards don’t think that they need another lawyer in the room. They usually have a lawyer, who is either an outside counsel or an in-house counsel, who helps them with minutes. They feel like they have good access to legal advice as they need it. They feel like they’re already paying a lot for legal advice. There are these big stereotypes around lawyers, that lawyers are not proactive business problem solvers. They may be too conservative or too risk-averse, and they don’t have the depth of business operational experience in order to add value.

In some areas where you have highly regulated environments, you will have an easier time as a lawyer being key to your story for your board profile and getting on boards. For me and many others that I know, you are coached in preparing your board materials to minimize your legal background. You lead with other aspects of your story. Even if you looked at my LinkedIn page, which is essentially my board profile. It says things like, “A lawyer turned technologist.”

You also have quite a track record to back it up.

It’s not just branding, but it is highlighting a diversity of business experience versus just leaning into the legal piece. Maybe you’re in a different area of expertise. Especially if you’re in deal-making, how you’ve been able to get those deals, or if you’re in M&A, then it’s around leading with the transaction stories rather than it is around just the fact that you are a lawyer. It hurts my heart a little bit. I’m so proud to be a lawyer. I’ve taken such pleasure and being part of the lawyer moms’ community. I just love all the people that I went to law school with. To feel in this aspect of my career or in this part of my job search that I need to de-emphasize that part of my background, it hurts me a little bit to do it.

That’s great advice because many of us know, or most of us know, if you were in-house running an M&A, you weren’t just doing the documents. For the most part, the legal team drives the pace of the deal. I like how you said to tell the story of the transaction because there’s a reason why we’re doing the deal. There’s a goal that we have in executing, and then it’s all the hairy deal issues that we deal with as we’re trying to execute it. I love that advice. Let’s end with an easy question I ask all guests about music choices. I am always looking for new music. I use music all the time. As I was getting ready, I was listening to Sabrina Carpenter. What is your pump-up song?

I’m a huge Shakira fan. I like anything by Shakira, but maybe appropriate for this conversation is her song Try Everything, which is fun.

Great choice. I’ve not had anybody choose Shakira before, so I’ll look that one up.

I think she’s going on tour, too. That’s going to be fun.

Hips Don’t Lie. I look forward to that, and thank you so much for being here, Jeanine.

You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me.

Episode Resources

• Jeanine Wright on LinkedIn
• GroundTruth
• Simplecast
• Zest AI
• Next Step Partners
• The First 90 Days
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