Felicia Ellsworth: Welcome to In the Public Interest, a podcast from WilmerHale. My name is Felicia Ellsworth, and I’m a partner at WilmerHale, an international law firm that works at the intersection of government, innovation, and business. I’m thrilled to introduce today someone who is not just joining us for this episode, but also is officially stepping in as our new co-host on the podcast. Please give a warm welcome to Jekkie Kim. Jekkie is a corporate partner in our Palo Alto office who focuses in the life sciences sector with extensive experience in complex commercial transactions involving breakthrough technologies. Jekkie is also trained as a doctor and has an MBA in addition to her MD and JD. Today, we’ll be discussing Jekkie’s wide-ranging career and journey to becoming a top dealmaker and strategic counselor to our clients in the life sciences industry, as well as her perspective on developments and challenges in the life sciences industry, and of course, her thoughts on her new role as podcast co-host. This promises to be a fascinating discussion, and we hope you enjoy. Welcome to In the Public Interest, Jekkie. Thank you so much for joining us.
Jekkie Kim: Thank you. Very excited to be here and looking forward to joining the team.
Felicia Ellsworth: We’re thrilled to have you. Let’s begin with your career and your practice. As noted in the intro, you’ve been involved in numerous transactions over the course of your career, working with all sorts of different clients from startups to large corporations. How would you describe your practice for our listeners?
Jekkie Kim: I would say that foremost, I am a corporate lawyer who sits within the life sciences vertical, but blends into technology, including AI, because of my digital health practice. My core practice is complex technology transactions, but I am a life cycle attorney, which means that I represent clients from incorporation, or sometimes pre-incorporation, all the way to M&A or IPO and everything in between. I also represent investors, lenders, underwriters within the life sciences industry for their investment-related transactions.
Felicia Ellsworth: So as mentioned, you trained as a medical doctor prior to pursuing a law degree and an MBA, so lots of initials after your name. But what made you want to become a lawyer and in particular, a transactional lawyer?
Jekkie Kim: Most of my friends are practicing physicians, and my husband is a physician at Stanford Medicine. So, I have a lot of respect for our clients who are MDs, PhDs—who have their day jobs and are able to start companies and continue to operate them. As for me, I realized very early on during med school that, while I enjoyed the subject matter of medicine, I really couldn’t see myself practicing medicine as a career. One day, there was this semester where the school that I attended taught medical ethics and healthcare policy, and I realized that healthcare and medicine wasn’t just all about the subject of medicine, the treatment or the diagnosis or prevention of illnesses, but there was a much larger subject involved. So then I started doing my rotations, and I saw my professors prescribing medicine to their patients. And I saw the surgeons using these fancy devices in the surgical rooms, and a realization came to me that there are these companies out there doing R&D and commercializing drugs and devices. These professors weren’t cooking up drugs and making up devices in their garages. Right now, it’s an obvious thing, but at the time it was this “a-ha” moment that I had. And then I realized there were government agencies that were regulating all these activities as well. I wanted to be part of that. At the time, I didn’t know what that was, so there’s a lot of hand waving going on. But I drew this roadmap. I made decision trees. Sometimes I made U-turns, sometimes made the wrong turns. But there was a lot of luck involved, a lot of guidance from many mentors that I met, and here I am.
Felicia Ellsworth: Lots of interesting twists and turns, I’m sure, to bring you to where you are today. But tell us a little bit about how you leveraged that medical background when working with life sciences clients.
Jekkie Kim: Sure. I do think that folks without medical or scientific background can absolutely be successful and accomplished life sciences technology transactions attorneys, and serve life sciences clients. Sometimes, I review and help clients with technologies that I’m not at all familiar with, and it takes me time to ramp up on those technologies, and I ask myself if I am asking the right questions. So, I do think that—being an MD—I am able to serve the clients and work on their transactions in a practical and efficient manner. And, I do see that clients in the life sciences industry sector and companies connect with me a little bit more than I think they normally would because I speak the medical jargon (which is a language in and of itself). I think they feel comfort in knowing that there is a lawyer out there who can speak medicine.
Felicia Ellsworth: You went to law school and started your career in Boston, but now you’re over on the West Coast in Silicon Valley, where you’ve been for some time. Talk a little bit about how that location, the epicenter of the tech world, how that shaped your practice and your approach to your work.
Jekkie Kim: As you know, the Bay Area has a very large and active life sciences industry. So, my practice continued from Boston to the Bay Area. But having Silicon Valley in our backyard does add a twist to the scene here. I have a very large digital health practice, which really means, in my definition, technology playing a material role in healthcare and life sciences. So, that part of my practice took off since I’ve relocated to the West Coast almost 10 years ago. Now, with everyone talking about AI, I am really working with more and more life sciences as well as tech companies coming into healthcare and life sciences space. I get to work with startups, establish life sciences and tech companies, and obviously there are investors and lenders and everyone in between really trying to solve a similar problem, which is the human health.
Felicia Ellsworth: This is obviously a really interesting time for the life sciences industry amid an evolving regulatory and legal landscape. And you mentioned AI, which of course is at the forefront of everyone’s minds. As you think about your practice, what has scientific innovation been looking like from your perspective as you’ve been seeing it through your current practice?
Jekkie Kim: For quite some time, those in the life sciences industry, including our clients, have been fierce advocates of leveraging big data—then AI. We’re finally seeing futuristic concepts becoming core operational tools for our life sciences clients. So, AI in drug discovery would be one of the best examples. The traditional drug discovery process usually takes over 10 years and costs a few billion dollars; AI is now able to slash the early discovery phase from years to weeks. This is weeks, not months. In radiology and diagnostics, AI is acting not only as a second set of eyes for physicians, but as a triage engine that actively prioritizes the most critical patients. For example, if a patient comes into the ER with a potential brain hemorrhage or a stroke, instead of waiting for a radiologist on call, the hospital can have an AI engine quickly, efficiently, and accurately read potential brain CTs and triage emergency patients. Now in 2026, the expectation is that the field would move towards multimodal diagnostics. That means that AI would not only look at the X-rays or the CT scans in isolation, but that it would combine these with the blood work and the medical records of the patients and then provide outputs for the practitioners to further assess the patients.
Felicia Ellsworth: I hear you speaking medicine there. What are some conversations that you’ve been having with your clients lately as you’ve counseled them on their business or on deal-making through these, I think we can all agree, unique times?
Jekkie Kim: Because I’m a life cycle lawyer, I get to meet clients in all commercial stages, from pre-incorporation to full-on mature public companies. So, one morning I might be talking about, should I incorporate in Delaware and California? And the same day I might be talking about a distribution agreement for a fully commercial drug. But regardless of the commercial stage of a client, the general consensus right now is that the market is pretty choppy, especially for those companies that don’t have AI in their company names. At the same time, there are a lot of creative conversations that are going on around structuring deals and identifying creative assets. I think the discussions are less cookie cutter and more thinking outside of the box on all fronts.
Felicia Ellsworth: Let’s shift gears for a minute. A lot of our listeners are law students or early career attorneys. What kind of advice do you have for those folks about choosing an area of expertise as they embark on their legal career?
Jekkie Kim: In case this is helpful, this is how I generally approach a decision from a selection of choices. It’s kind of choosing what to order from a very, very large menu of a restaurant that I’ve never been to. I was an MD going into big law. I knew I wanted my subject matter vertical to be healthcare life sciences, and I knew I didn’t want to do litigation. That already helped me rule out 70% of the law firm practice group menu. So those going into legal practice, perhaps instead of choosing from the large menu, start with ruling out, then choose from whatever’s left. Also, if a law firm like WilmerHale allows you to explore different practice groups as a junior member of the firm, try them all, and then rule out the ones that you don’t like, and then try more of the ones you like, and you’ll end up with a subject matter expertise that you end up being an expert in.
Felicia Ellsworth: You mentioned earlier having some really valuable mentorship along the way in your career, and another important way of developing expertise is mentorship. Can you talk a little more about the role mentorship has played in your career and what you would say to our listeners who might be seeking out mentors?
Jekkie Kim: I’ve been tremendously lucky with all of the mentors that I’ve met along the way. My mentors have been extremely generous with their time and patience. If anybody is looking for a mentor, if I were to reverse engineer my prior relationships, I think I would say, one, be genuine with the relationship that you’re creating. All of my relationships were built organically. Two, the relationship goes both ways. And three, it takes a lot of time and effort to really foster that relationship and to grow that mentor-mentee relationship.
Felicia Ellsworth: Well, Jekkie, we’re thrilled that you have agreed to join us as a co-host of In the Public Interest. And so, to wrap up our conversation today, we’re wondering if you could share some of the key themes or topics that our listeners can look forward to on the podcast now that you’re joining us.
Jekkie Kim: Sure. So again, thanks for having me as a co-host. Very excited to be joining the team. We have some great AI-related episodes in the works, along with trends and new developments in transactional law. And we would love to spotlight some of our exciting work in our West Coast offices and our Life Sciences Group.
Felicia Ellsworth: Well, thank you so much, Jekkie, for taking time to join me on the podcast today to talk about your career and on the podcast going forward. For those listeners who are interested in learning more about WilmerHale’s capabilities in the life sciences industry, complex commercial transactions, and our transactional practice more broadly, please visit wilmerhale.com to learn more. Jekkie, thank you again for this conversation, and we look forward to hearing more from you on the podcast.
Jekkie Kim: Thanks for having me.
Felicia Ellsworth: And thank you to our listeners for tuning in to this episode of In the Public Interest. We hope you’ll join us for our next episode. If you enjoy this podcast, please take a minute to share with a friend and subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any questions regarding this episode, please email them to us at [email protected]. For all of our WilmerHale alumni in the audience, thank you for listening. We are really proud of our extended community, including alumni in the government, the nonprofit space, academia, other firms, and in leadership positions and corporations around the world. If you haven’t already, please join our alumni center at alumni.wilmerhale.com so we can stay better connected. Special thank you to the producers of this episode, Arpi Youssoufian and Ben Gardiner. Sound engineering and editing by Bryan Benenati. Marketing by Andy Basford and Alexandra Thimble, all under the leadership of executive producers Kaylene Khosla and Jake Brownell. See you next time on In the Public Interest.
