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In this special episode, Stephanie Spangler sits down with the acclaimed lawyer and writer, Helen Wan, best known for her novel The Partner Track, to discuss the unique convergence of creativity, authenticity, and the practice of law. Tune in for a deep dive on leveraging the creative spirit to inspire one’s legal practice with one of the most insightful voices in the field.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Zoë Badger: Hello, and welcome to the McKinsey Legal Podcast. I’m your host, Zoe Badger, Associate General Counsel at McKinsey. This podcast is for legal and business professionals, where we’ll explore legal issues on innovation and creativity that matter to you and the world. We will feature interviews with global legal and business leaders to learn more about the ways to unlock their innovative and creative capabilities. We’ll highlight stories on innovators in the legal and business world through a lawyer’s perspective, learn from them, and explore how to amplify our own professional trajectory with insights from our guests.
In this episode, my colleague Stephanie Spangler sits down with lawyer and writer Helen Wan, the author of The Partner Track, to explore creativity, authenticity, and vulnerability and the practice of law.
They discuss the synergy between legal skills and creative writing skills, approaches to creative and collaboration processes, finding moments of inspiration, and the interplay between authenticity and vulnerability. I hope you enjoy this episode.
Stephanie Spangler: Hello and welcome to the McKinsey Legal Podcast. I'm Stephanie Spangler, an Associate General Counsel at McKinsey. In today's episode, we are going to cover creativity, authenticity, and vulnerability and the practice of law. We are fortunate today to be joined by our guest Helen Wan, a lawyer and writer known for her novel, The Partner Track. This book has recently been turned into a show now streaming on Netflix.
Welcome, Helen.
Helen Wan: Hi, thanks so much for having me.
Stephanie Spangler: Thank you so much for being here. I'm excited to get the conversation going today because I think you have such a uniquely positioned perspective, given your background. You started your professional career as a corporate M&A attorney in big law, then pivoted to focus on intellectual property and media law at an entertainment boutique law firm, and then you went in house to work in several media companies.
You then transitioned from being a lawyer to a writer, and during this transition period, you published The Partner Track, a novel about the trials and tribulations of a first-generation Chinese American woman seeking to make a partner at a fictional big law law firm. And now you have just recently completed the manuscript for a new book, so we're very excited about that.
Creativity and lawyering
I wanted to kick off our discussion to talk about creativity and lawyering. One idea I've been thinking about a lot lately is how constraints can drive creativity. For lawyers, this is relevant where we are advising on complex, issues that are layered with legal ambiguities, or there's legal and regulatory constraints we have to contend with, and all of this often times requires really creative problem solving.
In your own work, both as a practicing lawyer and now as a writer, how do you approach constraints?
Helen Wan: Yes, well, first of all, thank you for that really kind introduction, and it's just a real pleasure to be here with you this morning. I've had a lot of chances over these different career transitions to think a lot about the challenges that specifically lawyers face when trying to transition over to something more like a creative pursuit.
The skills of writing and research and close reading and analysis and good judgment and being careful observers of human nature, et cetera, are skills that every good lawyer needs to learn and master.
And then when you try to shift these same skills over to a more creative pursuit, a creative context, it's not automatic. You're right, it's not automatic. And they're not exactly at odds, but I did find it a challenge sometimes to switch over from a lawyer mindset over to a novelist.
I'm fortunate to have a great community of writer friends, and specifically a lot of fellow novelists, and some of them are so just amazingly adept at switching over from a day job mindset over to the creative. And, to be perfectly honest, I still find that challenging. I'm not just talking about lawyers either. No matter what your role is, where you work, I have found that a lot of writers still struggle with that, even very, very seasoned writers.
Stephanie Spangler: The way that you describe it, it almost sounds like an on and off switch in terms of how you have to shift your mindset. Are there still things that can translate or transfer between the two worlds, and if so, what would those things be? You mentioned things like understanding human nature, in engaging with the writing community and hearing their stories and experiences, there's this, maybe a mentoring aspect there, which lawyers can completely relate to. What are the commonalities that you see that we can as lawyers learn from in terms the strengths and skills that you've developed as a creative writer?
I'm just wondering if there's things that you can transfer over that would be helpful. Recognizing that it is challenging to turn off or to change that mindset because in some ways you do look at things slightly differently, but it does seem like there might be some commonalities there.
Helen Wan: Sure, of course, there definitely are commonalities. And it's on such a subjective, individual by individual, person by person basis. In my case, I have always been a transactional lawyer. As you said, I had started off in a big law environment. I have never been a litigator. And so those of my lawyer friends who have always been litigators in the courtroom. I think they may have a very different perspective on your question. Every lawyer, of course, uses judgment and analytical skills, but if you're a litigator, it is more explicitly about storytelling. And when you're in the courtroom you're trying to make your persuasive argument, make your conclusion, your closing statements, etc. I have never had that professional experience, not since law school and mock trial days, so I think that really does make a difference on what kind of lawyering we happen to be talking about.
But yes, in general, I do think that that lawyering is about storytelling, being persuasive and telling a credible narrative. In that way, there certainly are commonalities. The credible narrative relies on who that narrative is coming from. Do I trust the person that's relaying that message? Or if it's the written word and I'm reading it, do I trust them? Do I believe them? Is there a level of authenticity there that I can trust?
Authenticity and credibility
Stephanie Spangler: In your own experience and in your work, how do you think about authenticity to create that compelling story or compelling narrative to really make your reader and the audience or whoever you're relaying that message to believe you and trust you?
Helen Wan: The key tenet of good successful storytelling is to be a credible narrator, right? Or at least a compelling narrator. And, so, that's why it was very important over two decades ago, when I started writing The Partner Track, which, by the way, started off as subway scribbling, as nonfiction, just journaling about my day back and forth on the subway as I commuted to my first job after law school. And then those ideas, those subway scribblings began to morph into what I thought might possibly even be a book one day.
It was very important to me to just tell an authentic story. Keep it authentic, even when you fictionalize something. Keeping the voice, the characters, the conflicts and the challenges faced by those people both authentic and credible.
And again, those things aren't unique to any particular career or certainly not unique to law firms or to lawyers. When I started trying to find that narrative voice, I talked to a lot of trusted friends, classmates from college, classmates from law school, and others who were not in the corporate world at all, and I started asking them about their workplace stories.
I love a good workplace story. I just think that work is phenomenal, it's gold for good source material. And, oh, so are airports as well. Airports, especially at holiday travel time. So, I started speaking with trusted, friends, colleagues, confidants, asking people to share their stories and specifically work stories. And from there, I started to shape, the cast of characters and the voices that I wanted to give them for the book.
When I first started marketing and trying to get this book published, I was lucky enough to find an agent and together we were trying to find the right fit for the book. And people talked a lot about vulnerability and about how protagonists must be totally vulnerable in order to be likable. And so it's interesting that you asked that question because the question of vulnerability and likability came up a lot when I was trying to shape this novel.
Stephanie Spangler: That's so interesting because what I'm hearing is there may be times when, to tell that compelling story, vulnerability is very useful as a tool, but not always.
Collaboration and creativity
Stephanie Spangler: I was wondering if there was an aspect to your creative process that requires collaboration with others, whether it's other feedback from writers, your editors, things like that. I was wondering if you could talk about your approach to collaboration, how you think about feedback, how you process the feedback, and how you use that to incorporate back into or inform your writing.
Helen Wan: Obviously writing can be such a solitary activity in itself anyway, and then factor in working from home or COVID times, et cetera. I have recently had to remind myself more and more frequently that it's very important for productivity to make the effort to set up time to just interact.
Stephanie Spangler: Having these in person interactions with real human beings and not just your Zoom screen is inspiring. You take away things that are said or just an in-person interaction that can be inspiring in some way, that I think is great. Or if you have to work together moving forward, it just makes things -- there's an energy between that is now more developed or the relationship's more developed in a way that just makes working together and collaborating a lot easier.
Take more risks
Stephanie Spangler: One question I have is, looking at where you are today and back at where you have been over your career, what is one thing your writer self or advice that your writer self would give to your full-time practicing lawyer self?
Helen Wan: Oh, that's easy: Take more risks. Earlier and more often.
Stephanie Spangler: I love that.
Helen Wan: I mean, hindsight’s 2020, right? But if you're asking what my current older, hopefully a little bit wiser, writer self would have told my younger self. It would be “Don't be afraid to fail.” It's all about trial and error. The worst thing that can happen, if there's an opportunity that you want, that you see, and you want to try and seize, you have to raise your hand and open your mouth and ask that question, because bosses and colleagues and people are not mind readers.
So you've got to let them know that you're interested in opportunity X. And I wish I had known to raise my hand, to not be afraid to raise my hand, and just ask for opportunities earlier and more often, instead of overthinking things. And to understand that, even if the answer comes back as a “no”, that costs nothing. The worst that can happen is that it's a “no.”
Lightning round
Stephanie Spangler: Well, Helen, I think that's a great note to leave it on. But before we close out, I did want to ask you a few lightning round questions. These are three questions that focus on this season's theme of innovation and creativity. And these are questions we're asking all of our guests this season. So are you ready?
Helen Wan: Ready. Yes.
Stephanie Spangler: Great. So first, what have you seen, listened to, or read recently on the topic of innovation or creativity that particularly inspired you and why?
Helen Wan: Okay, I love that question. I recently was lucky enough to be invited to speak with a group of Brazilian law students and lawyers in São Paulo. And on the flight back, this is one of the rare times that I get to watch a whole movie in its entirety in relative peace and quiet. I was going through the inflight entertainment options, and I happened upon a just beautiful, beautiful movie that I had heard several friends talk about, but I didn't really know much about. It's a Korean-made, Korean language movie called Past Lives. And it was just stunning. It was so, so, so inspiring. It's just this really beautiful meditation on personal and career choices; personal choices that we make in life and career sacrifices and choices that people make.
And talking about credibility and authenticity. I think every single person I know can relate to some or all aspects of that particular story. It was just so moving and so beautifully written, beautifully directed, beautifully shot, beautifully acted. So that one was inspiring to me about creativity and the choices that creative folks make.
Stephanie Spangler: Number two, what is a quick fix strategy that you use when you are in a creative slump?
Helen Wan: One that I started adopting after I heard the wonderful Joyce Carol Oates suggest it to a room full of writers at a recent literary festival. Someone asked her that question where they said, Oh, when you are in a creative slump or you are dealing with some form of writer's block, et cetera, what do you do? What's a quick solution? And she said, Oh, that's easy. I leave my desk. I don't sit there and waste time being anxious and overthinking it. I just get up, leave my desk, and if possible, just go for a walk. I look at nature. I see some trees. I try to think about anything other than the writer's block moment, and she said, after I take a few minutes doing that and I'm outside walking, I go back inside and get a glass of water, sit back down at my desk and keep going.
Stephanie Spangler: Number three. What is the first word you think of when you hear the word innovation?
Helen Wan: Courage. I think courage. It takes a lot of [courage]. It's all about trial and error and not having that fear of failure. I think it does take pretty brave pioneers to truly be the innovators. Or the kind of creative leaders that we've been talking about.
Stephanie Spangler: That's great. Well, Helen, this has been a truly enlightening conversation. I thank you so much for your time, for your insights, for sharing your perspectives, for sharing with us creative tricks and things that maybe we can even apply in our own day to day to inspire our own work. Pleasure to have you. Thank you.
Helen Wan: I really enjoyed being here. Thank you.
Zoë Badger: Thank you for listening to this episode of the McKinsey Legal Podcast on creativity, authenticity, and vulnerability in the practice of law. Join us for the next episode where we explore legal issues on innovation and creativity that matter to you and the world. This episode is a production of the McKinsey Legal Department, was produced, co-hosted, written and edited by Stephanie Spangler with original music by David Shaporov.