Molly Wilkens on Managing Antitrust Risk at Wells Fargo

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Most of the career decisions Molly Wilkens made on her journey to becoming Wells Fargo’s assistant general counsel for antitrust were nonlinear.

Wilkens, who describes herself as “intellectually eclectic,” was a first-generation college student who double-majored in brain and cognitive science and writing at MIT. Most of her cohort were planning for careers in medicine, but that career path held no appeal for Wilkens given her distaste for lab work. “I did not enjoy dissecting mouse brains,” says Wilkens.

Then, she met an alum from her major with a career path she had not explored. The woman had double majored in computer science, worked on Wall Street, and was about to go to law school. “Law school, I forgot about that. That’s a choice,” Wilkens, who had participated in mock trial in high school, remembers thinking at the time.

“Being in-house gives us the opportunity to become true partners to our stakeholders—we’re able to build stronger working relationships and understand the ins and outs better than outside counsel would be able to.”

Molly Wilkens

Wilkens tracked down the one law professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and became his undergraduate research assistant. She helped him with his research work and he provided a preview of life as a junior associate at a law firm. “He told me that if I enjoyed that, I should go to law school, work in a large firm for several years, and then I could take a variety of paths after that,” she recalls. “I loved reading, writing, analyzing, and synthesizing large volumes of information, so I knew that law school would be a good fit.”

After earning her JD from UC Hastings, Wilkens joined Jones Day in 2010, where she started out on a large copyright infringement case. Then, an antitrust partner was looking for a first-year lawyer to assist on a merger review. “I said, ‘I’ll try it. I’ll try anything.’ I loved it and just kept asking for more and more of that work,” says Wilkens. She spent a decade at Jones Day working on a wide range of antitrust litigation and high-stakes transactions. Antitrust allowed her to guide clients through a legal maze while satisfying her intellectual curiosity. “It’s a very fact-specific analysis based on markets and the spaces your client operates in,” she says.

Following an industry trend toward moving antitrust capabilities in-house, Wells Fargo hired Wilkens in 2021. “Being in-house gives us the opportunity to become true partners to our stakeholders—we’re able to build stronger working relationships and understand the ins and outs better than outside counsel would be able to,” says Wilkens. Providing strategic guidance and advice to the company means Wilkens is well-versed in current enforcement trends from both the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice—and how quickly things change. “There’s a lot to keep up with, but that’s the challenge that keeps the role interesting and fulfilling,” Wilkens remarks.

Reflecting on her path to her current position, Wilkens rejects the typical framing of career advice to think about where you might want to be in five or ten years. “That assumes you can pick a point several years from now and then reverse engineer it. If I want to be there in ten years, these are all the steps I need to take to get to that place,” Wilkens says.  

“I didn’t take antitrust in law school. I didn’t know what antitrust was until somebody had an assignment and I said, ‘I’ll help.’ I learned about this entirely different area of law that I found super fascinating, and I made a whole career out of it.”

Molly Wilkens

But career trajectories are rarely linear. As people grow bored, become burnt out, or adjust their daily structure to accommodate a family, they veer off on unplanned detours. “My advice to junior attorneys would be to know that it doesn’t have to be linear, and you don’t have to have it all mapped out,” she adds. “It takes a lot of pressure off. Take the opportunities as they come, even if they feel like they came out of left field. Find the sweet spot of work you like to do, with people you like to work with, at a place where you feel appreciated. I didn’t take antitrust in law school. I didn’t know what antitrust was until somebody had an assignment and I said, ‘I’ll help.’ I learned about this entirely different area of law that I found super fascinating, and I made a whole career out of it,” says Wilkens.

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