Reed Smith alumna Jaimee Farrer discusses her path from lateral litigation associate at the firm to assistant general counsel at GSK. Jaimee talks about how she landed her first in-house role, key differences between her law firm and in-house practice, and how the skills she developed as a Reed Smith litigator prepared her for the fast-paced, strategic work of managing major litigation at a global pharmaceutical company. ----more---- 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. Alicia: Welcome, I am Alicia Millar and I have the great pleasure of welcoming our first guest. Jaimee: Hi, Alicia. Thank you for having me. My name is Jaimee Farrer. I am assistant general counsel in the litigation group at GSK and I am based in Philadelphia. Alicia: Wonderful. Thank you for joining us, Jamie. It's a real, real pleasure to meet you once again. We are talking about Reed Smith and the sort of the footprints of those incredible people who have, I guess sort of stepped in the firm along their journey in their careers. And because of that, I am so curious to, to bring to life more about your own career journey. Can you stroll us through? I will stop with the analogies. Can you stroll us through your journey? Uh Some of the milestones or key moments and choices along the way and where Reed Smith played a part of that. Jaimee: Yeah. So I started my career at another large law firm. Um and I worked there for about five years and I pretty much did exclusively products liability work. I was in their products group and I loved that work. And then, um I ended up laterally to Reed Smith when I was, like I said, about probably a fifth-year attorney. Two of my colleagues had gone to Reed Smith and had great things to say about it. And so I ultimately decided to make the leap along with them a few months after they had joined the firm. And one of those, actually, both of those colleagues are still at Reed Smith. Um They are now Stephen McConnell and Mike Salimbene, who is now a partner at the time. We were both fairly young associates. So I was doing again, largely products work at Reed Smith. I was at Reed Smith for about 4.5, 5 years, worked primarily on the mesh litigation, which was very, very big at the time and was taking up the majority of my time. And then I had, at the time that I, while I was at Reed Smith, I had a child and then had a second child. And at the time that I had my second child was just feeling that I needed a change. Um and had always thought that I would want to go in-house um for a Pharma company as I had been sort of working with Pharma clients my entire career and an opportunity came about at GSK at the time, not in the role that I currently am. So it was a role called, it was managing attorney in the GELRT Group and that stood for a Global External Legal Relations Team, um which at the time was actually part of litigation group. It has since moved into a legal operations function, but at the time, it was part of litigation and the role was to basically partner with our external council and put in place alternative fee agreements and work with the in-house attorneys to scope out the work and just sort of help make sure those relationships remain strong, um and dealt with any fee disputes, et cetera so very different than what I had been doing. I mean, it was a legal role but not practicing law in the traditional sense. And it was honestly a really nice change of pace at the time, sort of from the, you know, trials and tribulations of, of being in big law and working at a law firm. And it was kind of a nice breather and a nice change of