How to be an Effective Leader in a Virtual World

Sara got her start as a commercial litigation lawyer at Simons & Simmons in the UK, before joining Axiom’s London office, where she managed clients across commerce, industrial, and financial services industries. In 2018, she moved stateside to lead Axiom’s North American Financial Services sector, with a specialized focus on large regulatory and investigatory work. Sara now sits on the Executive Leadership Team, overseeing a global network of over 5,800 lawyers, serving clients across all major industries and legal practices.

As Deputy General Counsel at Compass, Timothea Letson oversees Litigation, Employment, Risk Management and Corporate Insurance.

Prior to Compass, Timothea worked at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP in their Employment Group and spent time on secondment at Facebook. She was also a Litigation Associate at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP where Timothea was seconded to Barclays following the Lehman Brothers asset acquisition.

Timothea earned a JD from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and a BA in Political Science from The Ohio State University. Prior to attending Northwestern, Timothea was a Congressional Finance Director, working on campaigns in Oregon, Washington DC and South Dakota. She and her husband currently reside in Brooklyn where they are raising their two sons

Nia M. Jenkins is currently the Head of Commercial, Legal at Surescripts, LLC which is the nation’s most trusted and capable health information network. In this role, Nia reports directly to the Chief Legal Officer and sits on the legal department’s senior leadership team. She oversees, trains, hires, develops, and coaches a team of managing and senior attorneys, junior attorneys and contracts administrators which make up the Commercial Legal Team. This team develops, drafts, and negotiates customer and procurement contracts and advises the Product Innovation team on legal matters across product lifecycles from ideation to commercialization/scale. In addition to leading the Commercial Legal Team, Nia serves as legal lead on the Company's Business Development Committee to evaluate strategic company relationships and transactions and supports the Chief Legal Officer in numerous strategic projects for the company’s Board of Directors.

Prior to Nia’s current role at Surescripts, she was Senior Associate General Counsel – Data, Technology, Digital Health & Cybersecurity at UnitedHealth Group (Optum). She directly reported to Optum’s Chief Data Governance Officer. In this role, she served as business counsel to the Optum Technology team, which supports the entire UHG organization (over $242 Billion in revenue for 2019). This included primary responsibility for supporting data governance activities, data driven initiatives, digital health initiatives and products, and technology operations and transactions.

Before Nia’s role at Optum in the Data Governance Office, she served as the lead attorney for several OptumInsight subsidiaries, which included Optum Connect, Optum Puerto Rico, and The Advisory Board Company (Advisory Board). These subsidiaries are in the main areas of healthcare research, services and technology. In this lead role, she directly advised the C-suite executives, senior vice presidents, and vice presidents of her businesses. She identified and mitigated risk across all business functions including sales, product development, corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, intellectual property, litigation, employment, compliance and regulatory. Nia joined Optum through the acquisition of Advisory Board in the fourth quarter of 2017.

Prior to Advisory Board, Nia worked as a technology and transactions attorney at The American Red Cross where she led deals for the acquisition of major technologies and equipment used during times of disaster. Nia started her career as a corporate associate at the law firm of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP where she worked on many biotechnology transactions for several Fortune 100 global corporations.

Nia graduated with her Juris Doctorate cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center, and her Bachelors of Science in Accounting summa cum laude from Towson University. She is the mother of Azad (5) and Zara (3).