Mentorship – and being a good mentee – has been important to alum Cara DeCataldo since the beginning of her career. Cara shares insights into how mentors and others in her professional network helped her to prepare for and thrive in her first role at a small regional firm, then as a product liability litigator in Reed Smith’s Life Sciences Health Industry Group and more recently in her current position as assistant general counsel at global pharmaceuticals company Eisai Inc. She reflects on some of the important lessons that each of these moves taught her and explores the exciting and liberating idea that your next role might not be the one you first expected. ----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 the careers of these inspiring professionals that will help you find 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 Head of Learning and Development. Today, I'm excited to be speaking with Reed Smith alum Cara DeCataldo. Based in New Jersey, Cara currently serves as Assistant General Counsel at Eisai, a global pharmaceutical company headquartered in Japan. Cara joined Eisai eight years ago after practicing as a product liability litigator in Reed Smith's life sciences and health industry group, what we sometimes call LSHI. So I want to start by asking you about just your professional life currently. Can you tell us a little bit about your role at Eisai and what you do and how you spend most of your time there? Cara: Yes, definitely. We are a midsize pharmaceutical company, and we have a pretty lean legal department of about 20 attorneys across the entire company. So I support our commercial side of the business, including our medical affairs colleagues. So mostly marketing, sales, and I have an assigned product, which right now is an Alzheimer's drug, which was approved roughly two years ago. And so I am, you know, I sit on our promotional review committee. We review all the materials that are used for sales and marketing. As you know, the life science industry is so heavily regulated. So, you know, we take special care in how we promote the product. And so I sit on those committees and then just generally advise clients on interactions with HCPs and our customers, market access issues. So anything sort of commercially related to the product that I support is the legal work that I do. Lauren: Wow. So it sounds like you're just really embedded in the day-to-day operations of a large pharma company. Cara: Yeah, absolutely. Lauren: Could you tell us a little bit about what you like the most about that kind of pace and that sort of focus of your work? Cara: Yeah, I really like being part of the team who can sort of think strategically about things to come rather than sometimes when we're in a law firm, we're reacting to things that have already happened. And you're, you know, a ton of strategy involved in preparing for litigation, of course, but it's just sort of different. You're more partnered with your business colleagues and can think about ways to mitigate risk, but doing so in a way that really helps to achieve the business's objectives. I like in the work that I do, I use this term a lot. I'm a bit of a connector because I do see such a variety of questions that are posed to me or materials that are sent to me for my review. And I can really, a lot of times, sometimes our business colleagues are in a silo and they're working. And I kind of see the bigger picture sometimes. I'll say, hey, did you know so-and-so was working on a project that sounds somewhat similar? You know, you might share learnings. And so I really like that part of my job, this connector role that I get to play just by nature of the legal questions and issues that come to me. So I think that's fascinating. And then I really like being part of the pharmaceutical industry. Like I do have deep belief in the science that is achieving remarkable goals to help patients in the field that I mentioned in Alzheimer's disease. It's obviously an incredible unmet need, just a dearth of treatments and just a lack of hope for these patients. And so that's been incredibly exciting to me in my way, in my legal way, my non-scientist contributing way. But contributing to that is really something that I enjoy. Lauren: That's amazing. It sounds like you have that sort of double crown of loving both what you do and then also feeling good about the mission. Cara: Exactly. Lauren: Well, thank you so much for sharing that. So I want to kind of figure out how you ended up in such a great and fulfilling position. And when we spoke the other day, you mentioned to me that you graduated law school back in 2009, which was right in the middle of the global financial crisis. I was a few years ahead of you. I was law school class of 2004. So I remember what a really tough year 2009 was for law school grads. So I'm wondering, can you tell us a little bit about how you landed your first role at a law school in that environment? Cara: Yeah, it was interesting times. Hopefully not like anything the 2025 graduates will be facing. But as we're talking, it's April. So who knows? Hopefully not. But I did have a summer internship at a regionally based New Jersey law firm, and I was lucky enough to secure an offer. And I thought I would be doing, you know, more business litigation. That's sort of what my offer was extended to in that particular group. But, you know, life unfolded and unfortunately a lot of offers were rescinded at that time to my colleagues. But there was one particular partner who was in the product liability litigation practice in a different office of this regional New Jersey firm that I worked for. And he still had, you know, had a need for an associate. And You know, they said, listen, are you willing to go to this other office, which wasn't terribly far away? New Jersey's not a terribly big state as it is. So I said, yes, of course. And so I did get some great experience. I was doing more like automotive, some asbestos litigation. And it was wonderful because when you got, I didn't know much. I knew not much of anything. I had some great, more senior associates that were really friendly, open door. Like I could ask them those really dumb questions of this partner said to do, you know, get the interrogatories. And I just, what does that even mean? Where do I look? You know, those are just very basic questions. So I was just fortunate I was surrounded by good people, willing people, people generous with their time. And so I learned a lot. But even at that time, I just felt that I wasn't busy enough. And I know that sounds silly, but I think even then I recognized it wasn't the type of experience that I wanted to have when I had the time to get more experience to get me where I sort of wanted to go long term. And so I started looking for other jobs, and a friend of mine from law school had ended up at Reed Smith, And at one point, I think we had just talked over the years, I was kind of like, I'm looking, I'm not terribly, I could use more work. I wanted different experiences, more experiences. And she reached out to me and said, oh, the Princeton office is hiring, you know, a litigator in their product liability, their life science group. So it wasn't, you know, exactly, I wasn't as familiar yet with the pharma industry, but I had those general early associate litigation product liability thought processes, certainly understood that. And so we connected and I interviewed with Melissa Geist and I was just fortunate enough to get hired into that group. And that was just such a great experience overall. Lauren: Oh, gosh, that must have been like a big change. I want to kind of ask you about that. So you were at a regional firm, New Jersey-based firm, I understand. And then you made this move to Reed Smith and suddenly you were at a global firm with colleagues all over the world. How was that for you? Cara: Yeah, it was super exciting. And I do always say that I have the best of both worlds work standing in the Princeton office because, you know, it's sort of a smaller office with the resources of a national farm, which was super exciting. So it definitely had the clients and the sophisticated type of work that I knew that I would have ample opportunity to grow my skill set. It also just had, you know, the ability to network with other attorneys of these like great minds and different groups. And they had, you know, different networking events and just seeing the leadership structure, like. You know, the firm chair. And that's really like running more of a business, you know, certainly all law firms are running a business, but at a large scale. And so all of those opportunities to meet people doing such a wide variety of legal work and networking with those people, trying to understand the work that they did, that was really exciting and important because you can never grow your network, you know, big enough to know, because none of us are going to be experts in every area of the law. It's really not possible. It's about, you know, having a network to rely upon. And so that was super exciting to me. And then really just, again, I started with this point, but the focusing on the nature of the work. So at that time, there were some large, you know, multi-district litigations going on at which we were, you know, chief defense counsel. And so the exposure to, you know, drawing up expert reports and helping to develop them in the context with expert witnesses. The ability, at one point, some judge went nuts and ordered
