#085: Helen Wan - Media Lawyer Turned Novelist, Author of The Partner Track (Now a Netflix Series)

How I Lawyer Podcast with Jonah Perlin

In this episode I speak with Helen Wan. Helen is an author, speaker, and diversity and inclusion consultant who previously worked as a corporate, media, and intellectual property lawyer at law firms and in-house. She is best known as the author of The Partner Track which was recently turned into an original TV series on Netflix.

Helen was born in California and raised in Northern Virginia. She is a graduate of Amherst College, UVA Law, and my alma mater Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology.

In our conversation we discuss her path from being in the law to writing about it, the real life foundations of the fictional world she created in The Partner Track, the similarities and differences between the life of a novelist and the life of a lawyer, the ways in which her fictional work seeks to shed light on the shortcomings of our profession, the path from novel to Netflix Original Series, and her views on how to have meaningful and productive conversations about difficult subjects like race in professional spaces.

This episode is sponsored, edited, and engineered by LawPods, a professional podcast production company for busy attorneys.

***

Want to Support the Podcast in 2 minutes or less?

• Leave a Review (this helps the algorithm connect me to new listeners)
• Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify
• Purchase How I Lawyer Merchandise
• Share on LinkedIn or Twitter.