There are bosses, and then there are leaders. Wanji Walcott, who quickly rose up the ranks at PayPal Inc., is a natural leader, according to some of those who work closest to her.

In early 2017, Walcott stepped into the general counsel role at the San Jose, California-based payments company. It was a very busy time: Last year the company inked partnership deals with Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. and Google Inc. and fintech startups such as Acorns, an investment app.

PayPal was meanwhile tangled in an investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission into its subsidiary Venmo Inc.'s disclosure and transfer policies. (The suit was settled in February.)

Walcott has helped the legal department navigate through these high-profile matters. But it's clear that Corporate Counsel's 2018 General Counsel of the Year is much more than just a top-notch legal and business problem solver. She's also a staunch advocate for doing good.

Walcott first joined PayPal in November 2015 as the vice president of legal product, supporting PayPal and subsidiaries Venmo, Braintree, Xoom and Paydiant. She came to the company by recommendation of PayPal CEO Dan Schulman, whom she'd met years earlier in her previous job as managing counsel at American Express Co.

She wasn't initially interested in joining PayPal because for a number of years, she had aspired to be a GC. “The company had a new general counsel in Louise [Pentland], so I wasn't sure how I would fit into that,” Walcott says.

But when Walcott first met her future legal boss in 2015, she says Pentland assured her she could groom her to become a general counsel somewhere in the next two years. “I didn't know at the time it would be with PayPal,” she says. “And I had never been at a company with the GC and CLO structure, so I really didn't envision that.”

Doniel Sutton, the company's head of people, remembers when Walcott first joined PayPal. They met on the products and engineering team and worked on deals with companies such as Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. “I've had the opportunity to see her career skyrocket,” Sutton says.

“This is not the easiest company to integrate into, especially when you're coming from a big corporate institution to a high-tech company,” she explains. “It's all about how you interact with others, and it did not take me long to discover because of how she led through change and moments of crisis that she would quickly rise.”

When Pentland was promoted to chief legal officer at PayPal, the company had plenty of options for a successor, but Walcott had clearly made an impression.

As CLO, when Pentland's role expanded to executive vice president of business affairs, her responsibilities shifted to more of a strategic business role. This gave Walcott a wide opportunity as the new GC to oversee the legal department of about 170 people that reaches more than 200 markets.

Because half of those legal professionals are outside of the U.S., Walcott made it a priority to further integrate the global team. She named Lisa Mather to the new post of international counsel. Mather, who is based in Singapore, says Walcott has had a “focus on increasing connectivity of PayPal's lawyers all around the globe.”

Recently, Walcott organized a global legal summit for PayPal's lawyers. “I heard very consistent feedback from the attendees at the summit that they felt more connected across the legal function than ever before,” Mather says.

Aside from breaking down geographical barriers, Walcott also took charge by implementing the pro bono program at PayPal. She and her lawyers have all committed to 12 hours of pro bono work each this year.

Kenton King, a Palo Alto-based partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, works with the PayPal general counsel as outside counsel and also as a partner on pro bono projects. Skadden and PayPal are working together on a pro bono program that helps individuals with criminal records get back on their feet.

“It's one thing to say, everybody has to do pro bono and here are some ways to do it. It's quite another for the leader of the team to demonstrate how important it is,” King says of Walcott. “I've seen her literally get on the bus to join her team on a Justice Bus pro bono trip to the Central Valley area of California, where she has helped people navigate through the legal system to clear their names to enable them to get productive jobs.”

Walcott also finds the time to personally act as a mentor—inside PayPal and externally. She meets with mentees to help them in such areas as public speaking, networking and choosing the best career opportunities.

Another one of Walcott's missions at PayPal is diversity and inclusion, which she has made a priority since day one. Ask those closest to Walcott what it's like to work with her, and it doesn't take long for them to mention her strong advocacy in this area.

In 2017, after already getting involved in the companywide initiative called Unity, which fosters an environment for women to thrive in the workplace, Walcott helped PayPal launch Amplify, a community group that supports the advancement of black employees.

According to Walcott, her desire to promote diversity predates her tenure at PayPal.
She says that as an African-American female, she has experienced situations throughout her career where people may assume she is the secretary or court reporter. She says those were more instances of micro-inequities, as opposed to overt biases.

Instead, her passion stems from the experiences earlier in her career when she would look at senior-level employees “and no one looked like me,” she says.

Now that she is one of those senior managers, Walcott calls it a “business imperative” to include a set of diverse voices on important corporate decisions.

That strategy isn't as straightforward as it sounds, though. Walcott explains that PayPal's team is even involved in making sure its technology adopts those same ideals. She refers to it as “next level D&I,” which she says will be a big focus for her this year.

“What I've seen there just in terms of my own observation is that when you don't have diversity in terms of your data scientists who are creating your artificial intelligence or training systems to do machine learning you get biased outcomes,” Walcott says. “And I don't think anybody is intending to get biased outcomes, but they can happen unintentionally without an eye and focus on D&I.”

She says that it's bigger than the business observing that, “to bring diverse customers, we need diverse people.” If the algorithms in the company's technologies, like fintech lending tools, inadvertently treat customers in a biased manner, she says “it can result in more than micro-inequities but can result in violations of laws and regs.”

While Walcott's first year and a half in the GC seat has been “a journey,” as she describes it, it has been well worth the effort.

Says Walcott: “I've always lived by the saying, 'To whom much is given, much is required.'”