In 2021, Liisa Thomas, ’96, earned a master’s degree in learning and organizational change from Northwestern University. By then she had already guided corporate clients through transformative legal change during an era of rapid technological and regulatory developments, while forging a successful career defined by innovation and leadership. The degree manifests her commitment to continually raising the bar, personally and professionally, and to dealing as effectively as possible with the challenges of her chosen fields.

She coheads the global privacy and cybersecurity practice at Sheppard Mullin and serves as office managing partner for its Chicago office. “The legislative and regulatory environments in my fields are fragmentary and fluid, so there’s a lot of learning to be done and a lot of change to be managed,” she said. “Our team needs to be adaptive, working with our clients to proactively develop systems and practices that will help them adjust to change.”

Among her thought-leadership qualifications for these efforts are two magisterial treatises, Thomas on Big Data: A Practical Guide to Global Privacy Laws and Data Breach: A Practical Guide to Handling Worldwide Data Breach Notification. She has been recognized more than 70 times as a top lawyer and thought leader by publications that include Crain’s, Chambers, and Legal500.

Thomas didn’t expect things to turn out this way. She came to the Law School from Haverford College with a goal of using a law degree for a career in international relations. “I thought most of my classmates would end up at firms but I’d be doing something very different,” she said. “It turned out to be the other way around, with me loving my firm work and many of my classmates doing other things.”

She took a firm job right after graduating. “I was living in my mother’s attic to save enough to pay off my loans,” she recalled. But the firm’s IP work interested Thomas enough to keep her nonfirm aspirations at bay, although she didn’t enjoy the firm’s heavy litigation focus.

She moved to Gardner, Carton & Douglas in 1998, where one of her assignments involved online trademark law for Ty Inc., the Beanie Babies company. Ty’s website had an early iteration of an internet chat room, where kids and adults ended up together, and the company wanted to be sure that the space was safe for children. That work led her to privacy law, as one of the first practitioners in that nascent field.

As her passion for the practice grew, she began sharing her knowledge with more than just her clients, teaching privacy and data security classes at John Marshall Law School (now the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law), and subsequently at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

In 2005, Thomas moved her practice to Winston & Strawn, founding and chairing the firm’s privacy and data security practice. “A lot of our work there focused on advertising, where you find many cutting-edge privacy issues,” she said.

She moved to Sheppard Mullin’s Chicago office in 2017, becoming the office’s managing partner in 2022. At Sheppard Mullin she created a privacy and cybersecurity fellowship program, one of only a few structured law firm programs aimed at developing a pipeline of privacy professionals.

Thomas is often in Europe, coordinating global privacy matters with multinational clients. “We are working with stakeholders in the United States and worldwide to jointly create a principles-based approach to privacy law that can be adapted to virtually any existing or emergent circumstances,” Thomas said. “I sometimes describe our mission as ‘compliance without tears.’”

In addition to her roles as a firm and industry leader, law school teacher, and mother of two sons, Thomas is an avid sailor, plays violin in the Chicago Bar Association Symphony Orchestra, and serves as a trustee of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association.

“In my graduate work, I really liked the concept of ‘zestiness’ as a characteristic of people who thrive, professionally and personally,” Thomas said. “I think it’s a great description of the best of my experiences at the Law School—the faculty, the students—and of what I aspire to help accomplish as a lawyer: helping other lawyers and clients find zest in their work. Zest indicates that you’re not just working but that you have a calling. I feel so very blessed to have found mine, and I am doing my best to help others find and develop theirs.”

You can watch a new series of career path conversations that Liisa Thomas hosts with compliance leaders here.