Reed Smith alum Molly Campbell shares how her passion for learning novel and complex subjects and her powerful interactions with mentors enabled her to excel as a litigation associate and then partner at Reed Smith. She details how careful reflection and strong professional and personal relationships paved her path from trial lawyer to in-house counsel at Astellas Pharma advising on cutting-edge regulatory issues. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Welcome to the Reed Smith podcast, Career Footprints. In each episode of Career Footprints, we'll ask our guests, 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.  Lauren: Welcome to another episode of Reed Smith's Alumni Career Footprints podcast. This is Lauren Hakala, Reed Smith's Global Director of Learning and Development. Today, I'm really excited to be speaking with Reed Smith alum Molly Campbell. Molly is currently the Legal Regulatory Lead for Gene Therapy at Astellas Pharma. She joined Astellas from Reed Smith’s Washington, D.C. office, where she most recently was a partner in the Global Commercial Disputes Group. Molly, welcome. How are you today?  Molly: Hi, thank you so much. So nice to be here. I'm doing quite well.  Lauren: Awesome. So let's dive right in. We've got a lot to cover. So I'd love to start by asking you about your current role. What are your main areas of responsibility at Astellas?  Molly: Well, you touched on one. So I am the legal lead for the Astellas Gene Therapy Division, but I actually have quite a diverse role here at Astellas. I also support our government pricing and state transparency teams, and I'm the global social media subject matter expert and serve as the legal representative for the U.S. Specific committee dealing with sort of any novel social media initiative. And finally, I've most recently taken on the role of providing any legal guidance and support necessary for any independent medical education grants.  Lauren: That sounds like a very wide area of responsibility. I'm curious, what do you like best about the role?  Molly: Well, like you mentioned, I love the variability. I'm never, ever bored. Sometimes I do feel a little bit like whack-a-mole. I'll be thinking in one area of the law and then have to pivot to something completely different. But I think my favorite part is really the relationships I've been able to build since coming to Astellas. It's interesting, of course, I had good relationships with clients when I was at the firm. But as a litigator, you also have some fairly adversarial relationships. And as professional as those may be, you certainly don't want the same thing as your opposing counsel. But in-house, the business partners that I work with every day know that I want the things that they want. And it's really our process together, finding the best solution to balance risks and getting to the great answer and the good outcome that they want. That's been my favorite part of being in-house. I set sort of a goal for myself originally that I would be an attorney that people want to include on the calls and I think based on some of the feedback that I've received to date I've made some very good inroads into developing that reputation because I know it can be so difficult everybody knows right the lawyers are the people that they love to hate and that was something that I just didn't want to have happen in-house. And it's been wonderful to try to make sure that people value what it is I can contribute to the conversation and know that it's my goal to do everything I can to support their, you know, all of the opportunities and all of the desires that they have as a business.  Lauren: That's so cool how intentional you were about, I want to be a lawyer that people want to hav