Interview with Stephanie Liston

Stephanie Liston was born in Galesburg, Illinois in 1958. Stephanie’s mother was a primary school teacher and her father worked in the retail sector. The family moved across the US as his career progressed, Stephanie explains: “We were in Galesburg, Illinois, then Detroit, Chicago, and so we increasingly moved to larger cities, New York and then California, and I went to college in Colorado.  So I didn’t live anywhere longer than a couple of years until I moved to England.”

Stephanie attended Colorado College in Colorado Springs where she studied history and politics, in particular political philosophy. She followed this by studying law for two years at the University of San Diego and then spent a year studying in London.

She explains why she chose her subjects: “I was always interested in history and political philosophy and I had wanted to be a lawyer from an early age, I don’t know why.  I was primarily interested in international law. History tends to repeat itself, as we’re finding now particularly, and I thought that would be a good background for law, and for international law in particular.”

Asked about Donald Trump, Stephanie says: “That’s part of the history that’s repeating itself, look at Germany and the rise of Hitler in a very sophisticated society, and you look at Trump and it feels like history’s repeating itself in a not very attractive way.”

In 1984 Stephanie started her career as a lawyer at Fulbright and Jaworski, based in London after completing her Masters in English law at Cambridge, she later returned to work in the Houston office. She says: “Leon Jaworski was the investigative prosecutor from the Watergate trials.”

Asked how she found English law in comparison to US law, Stephanie says: “The tricky thing about being qualified in both jurisdictions is remembering how they differ, in what ways, and making sure you’re applying the right law in the right place to the right thing, because they are so similar.  I did not find English law quaint, it was very interesting.  A lot of English laws, particularly in the trust area, were adopted in United States at different times in different states in the United States. I don’t practise that sort of law, but it’s interesting to see what the similarities and differences are.”

Stephanie transferred to Washington DC from Houston and worked in the international commercial transactions practice. She explains: “Steve Pfeiffer, the partner that was then running the Washington DC office, asked me to come, he would also have been running the London office, and was responsible for the merger between Fulbright and Norton Rose. He asked me to come to Washington because we had to sell a lot of assets of a South African company, it was during the anti-Apartheid legislation.  So that was a very busy time. I loved Washington, it was a huge breath of fresh air compared to Houston.”

Stephanie next moved to MCI as a senior attorney. She explains: “MCI is the company that dethroned AT&T, and Bill McGowan, when I joined MCI, was still alive.  So I had the very good fortune to meet him and he really was a visionary. They used to refer to MCI as a law firm with an antenna, because so much of what we did was litigation.  I wasn’t doing litigation, I was just on the cusp of international, when I joined X.25 was new technology.  I had to explain to the independent contractors that MCI had around the world what mail was, because they were still using telexes at that stage.  So, I felt like I got in on a very early stage.”

Looking at the question of why AT&T have been allowed to put itself back together, Stephanie explains: “I think it was a period in history that kept things going. It’s a matter of scale and I think that’s an issue across all of Europe that telcos don’t have the scale that they need, and so over a period, when I was at Freshfields I did a lot of work with the US R Box who were acquiring all the cable franchises around the UK, because they weren’t allowed to invest in the United States, so that was an interesting amalgamation and now you have Virgin Media out of that.  AT&T putting themselves together are not the only ones who have done that, and that being allowed means there are now some major competitors, including Telefonica in the US, AT&T and Sprint, Verizon, so you still have some competition, it’s just not as vast as it was.”

In 1992 Stephanie returned to the UK and joined Freshfields as a lawyer. She says: “I’d always wanted to come back to the UK, and I had this opportunity.” She worked on the merger of BT and MCI. She adds: “MCI called me and asked me to work on the joint venture, which was Concert, the very first joint venture.  I was a senior associate at Freshfields, and my colleagues from MCI were living in London to do this project and so I was also essentially still working for them, so it was like doing two very large jobs at once. This is a period when I did not go home at night, pretty much, but it was interesting and great fun. The merger with BT and MCI didn’t happen, and I think our world would be very different if it had.  I was really disappointed that it didn’t happen, because the joint venture was actually going very well.  It’s my understanding that it was the bankers that prevented the merger, because MCI was investing in local access, and we know how important local access networks are, and so the bankers recommended that BT lower the price, which is when WorldCom came in.”

At both MCI and Freshfields, Stephanie worked across a wide range of jurisdictions including: Australia, Taiwan, Japan, Guam, United Kingdom, Greece, Spain, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, The Netherlands, The Antilles, Puerto Rico, Peru, Venezuela and Bolivia.

She says of it: “I thoroughly enjoyed it, it was exactly the sort of thing that I had hoped that I would be able to do. The jurisdictions that I was working with at MCI were often working out commercial arrangements with independent contractors who were reselling MCI. I really enjoyed the different legal systems and the people I met.”

Stephanie also negotiated the inter-connection arrangement with what was then Mercury.

Referencing the Bernie Ebbers case, Stephanie is asked whether there is still financial corruption or villainy in the IT and telecommunications sector. She replies: “There was so much money sloshing around in the industry in the eighties and nineties, and I think that caused part of the dotcom exaggeration. I don’t think the companies, whether they be PTTs, or in the US, ever thought the pipe was going to be turned off.  As a result of that, they weren’t as forward looking as a whole.  I don’t know if that’s villainy or not, it’s a type of villainy in this industry not to be future looking.

“I think that the telcos were burned at that stage in the late nineties and never quite recovered their vision, so location services, for example, which could have been capitalised on by all the telcos, weren’t. I do tend to see the best in people and in companies.  However, I have seen some quite poor examples, like WorldCom. I would say that villainy exists on an extreme corporate governance, but I’m not sure it’s special to telecoms. I think that it’s an individual and a lack of corporate safeguards, and problems with the board not paying attention.”

After three years with Freshfields, Stephanie was headhunted to join Baker & McKenzie as a partner based in London. The move gave her the opportunity to work internationally again. While at Baker and McKenzie, Stephanie worked on commercial transactions for Nortel.

In 1999, Stephanie was headhunted to join McDermott, Will & Emery. She says: “At that time, everybody wanted an expert in telecoms, and there were two of us in the market; Colin Long and myself. McDermotts was an American firm based in Chicago that was expanding quickly and they wanted me to start a practice.  I’d just been promoted to being an international partner at Baker & McKenzie, Christine Lagarde, who I have enormous respect for, was my managing partner at the time.

“I loved my practice at Baker’s, and if I were going to change anything in my career, I would have stayed there.  But McDermotts pestered me and the senior partner from Chicago came over several times over a period of about eight, ten months.  I was a single parent at the time and they eventually offered me three times what I was making at Bakers, so, I couldn’t actually make the personal business case to stay but I don’t think I did my due diligence quite well enough.

“The idea of building a business from scratch was very appealing to me. I built a two-and-a-half million-pound practice. … It was a very successful few years, it was nice being able to build a business, but I didn’t have the people in the background in any jurisdiction that really had strong telecoms or communications and technology expertise.”

After her success at McDermott, Will & Emery, Stephanie was approached by Wilmer Hale. She says: “They have quite a strong communications practice in Washington DC, that was a good move.”

One of Stephanie’s clients was Cable and Wireless. She explains: “It was Cable & Wireless post John Pluthero. I sold some of their subsidiaries.  Mike Matthai was on the board of one of them. They were selling things, just as the telcos have started selling things, and that’s what I was participating in. I was also involved in trying to fire people in Europe and they couldn’t quite work out that the employment laws were different in Europe than they were in the UK.

“So it was that downsizing that started and that’s when Richard Hooper talked me into applying to go on to the Ofcom board, because unless you were an employment lawyer, communications companies weren’t doing any joint ventures or M&A, they were all about downsizing.  I think my experience with Cable & Wireless was one of the first examples of that. I also had an interesting experience with Global Crossing when they had their issues.

Asked about the success or lack of success of partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, including the example of AOL Time Warner, Stephanie says: “That’s something that I worked on.  I think it depends how you define success. A joint venture that doesn’t last forever is not necessarily a failure. AOL Time Warner is a good example of something that went well for a period of time, but it wasn’t necessarily going to be a match made in heaven for ever.

“Another example is Energis which I acted for when they did a joint venture with France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom, called Metro Holdings. Essentially Energis was getting the French and the Germans to pay to do their local access. It was quite a successful joint venture from Energis’s perspective.  I’m not sure it was quite so successful from France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom’s perspective and

“Concert was a very successful joint venture for the time, and if the merger had gone ahead and BT hadn’t been short-sighted at the time, which is what I believe, I think we would live in a very different world if BT had that joint US footprint, it would be a very different company than it is now and it wouldn’t be selling everything.  It would be building on what it had already built in the late nineties.  If I look at the industry, I think it was the most massive missed opportunity.”

Asked for her opinion on BT selling its mobile arm, Stephanie adds: “I don’t think it was very wise, to say the least. I know Mike Short well, and I think he was a bit surprised, and also a bit surprised it didn’t come back together later. BT obviously had a huge debt problem and it had its pension issues, but also had a huge debt problem following the 3G auctions, which I was involved in for a different company.  It had to plug a hole and I think they plugged it with the wrong thing, I don’t think they were very far sighted.”

Between 2005 and 2008 Stephanie was on the board of Ofcom. Asked about the difference between Ofcom today and then, she says: “I don’t think Ofcom today is the same regulator that it was when I was on the board.   The composition of the board, for example, with Michael Grade at the helm, is very much content driven, and they’ve slightly lost their focus on telecommunications.

“I’m very concerned about digital switch-off, digital switchover, and the lack of either the regulator or the government taking responsibility for letting the public know, particularly the vulnerable public, what the risks are in terms of switching off the PSTN.  We would have paid a lot more attention to that when I was on the board, and either insisted the operators do something about it urgently, or we would have done the information flow ourselves. I’m troubled by the lack of focus on telecommunications.

“Having been on the Equality of Access Board, the undertakings were a very good regulatory remedy.  When I first joined the Equality of Access Board, which is basically making sure that BT was adhering to the undertakings, and so having seen both sides of that, BT was in a very good place. There was a real mutual respect, which is how the undertakings in fact were agreed.  I’m not sure that there’s that focus now, and I don’t know whether it’s because Ofcom has become responsible for online harms and they’ve hired lots and lots of people to cover that.

“I’ve told Michael Grade that they really do need some heavyweight telecoms experts on their board. He nodded and his private secretary said, ‘Thank you for saying that’.  So I suspect I’m not the only person that has suggested that to him.”

Stephanie moved to become senior counsel at Charles Russell Speechly’s LLP, a role for which she was also headhunted following her role on the Ofcom Board.

She says: “It was three days a week, but it was nice to be back in private practice. My focus has always been telecoms and after being on the Ofcom board I was much more involved in regulatory advice versus transactional work, not least because there wasn’t any. It was just about at the time when data protection legislation was coming in as well.  I gave a speech at the ITU talking about data protection privacy and cloud, and whose data is it anyway.  I think that the European Union and data protection doesn’t focus on the right thing, they should focus on who owns the data, not where it is. Most telcos have no idea where it is anyway, because it’s running around the world in packets, so it’s not very practical legislation, which was most of my point.

 “The individual should own data, and decide how they want to use it, or whether they want to use it or give it away. It should be structured in a different way.  I think part of the way things are moving with the data sovereignty issues around, it means that more people are creating data centres to have data storage locally.  So, the whole data centre industry’s very interesting and different, particularly at the edge.  I think that’s where we’re going in that part of the infrastructure.”

In May 2019 Stephanie joined Mishcon de Reya, LLP, where she stayed for two years. She was asked by the managing partner to put together the firm’s inter-disciplinary regulatory practice.  She explains: “We were talking about the financial services area, they didn’t have much of a communications practice, the commercial area, data protection, just any kind of regulated business, I did a business plan to help them bring all the lawyers in those areas together. They accepted the premise, but they didn’t implement it.

“I started the project in 2019 and I did a business plan for them. I am an optimistic person and when you approach regulation I think it’s quite important that you take a holistic approach of getting to know the regulator, getting to find out what was keeping them up at night. Mishcon is a very litigious law firm and so my approach was not necessarily the one that they thought was going to ultimately be. Then they changed managing partners, Kevin Gold, who’d brought me in, stepped down which was the reason that I departed.”

Since 2021, Stephanie has adopted a portfolio career style, she explains: “I have a portfolio of different things that I do, which I love, and will probably be looking for one more thing for that portfolio.”

She highlights one of her activities in particular; acting as chair of the Jersey Competition Regulatory Authority. She explains: “It was a really interesting time because the Jersey regulator had just split from the Guernsey regulator as a result of a reaction from one of the ministers. I had been shortlisted for the chairman of CICRA and then I was shortlisted for both Jersey and Guernsey.  I was appointed by the Jersey government and it’s been a fantastic opportunity where we’ve really built a different kind of regulator, it’s not like Ofcom because it’s a small country but a much larger portfolio.  So we regulate competition, telecoms, ports and posts. It’s quite a broad brief for a small regulator. I was given the opportunity to appoint the board, because it was a brand new regulator, and there were only two people in the team, an acting CEO and one other, and the acting chair became my senior independent director.  It’s really interesting appointing people to the board, boards have a really important role in terms of their independence, in terms of making sure you get the right skillset together. We appointed Ian Walden, he’s been a fantastic board member and will step up to be my senior independent director when Paul leaves, and Lara Stoimenova, who had never had a board role before, but she’s a very eminent economist. Richard Hooper coached her, because I think if you’re doing something for the first time it’s nice to have an expert work with you that’s not immediately in front of you.  She’s been a wonderful addition and is an expert in competition, she was at the CMA and at Ofcom when I was there too.  So that’s been a great part of my portfolio.”

Asked about the kind of role she’s looking to add to her portfolio in the future, she says: “I think I’d be interested in being on a commercial board. I am on the Jersey Competition Regulatory Authority and I also chair the Digital Connectivity Forum which used to be called the BSG, but which is private, essentially, we’re not a lobbying organisation but we do a lot of research and things, so I’d like to be on a commercial board that is looking at P&L and has some horizon gazing involved. I do think the whole datacentre infrastructure part of our industry is growing and needs to grow actively and responsibly with a bit of vision.  So that’s an area I’d be most interested in.”

Asked about her management style, Stephanie says: “Encouragement. Whenever I’ve been managing people I’ve been trying to get them to work together, to think about following the money. It’s the areas that are important if you’re doing transactional work or any kind of work, you need to look at what’s the motivation of the parties and where is it, how are they going to be successful doing whatever project that they might be doing. You learn that over time from other partners who help you understand what the vision is.”

In 2000, Stephanie co-founded Women in Telecoms and Technology.  She explains: “I was really lonely, I was regularly in meetings where I was the only woman.  I thought we needed more women in the industry.  I got together with a number of other women, many of them were American, including Michelle Senecal de Fonseca, who was one of my first board members and Mary Brazeau.

“I did wonder whether we should have American Women in Telecoms, rather than Women in Telecoms, but it grew by word of mouth. We had meetings about every two weeks with a very senor woman talking about their career and how they got from here to there. They’d never been asked to talk about their career, interestingly, and they were as inspired by the young people that were so inspired by them. There wasn’t any male bashing, it was all about encouraging each other.  We had a number of male speakers including Ian Taylor who’s a great supporter of women, and Richard Hooper. There were lots of men and we were asking them, so what do we need to do to be more visible.

“We still have the same problem, it’s still important.  I gave up the chair of that ten years on because I thought it was bad corporate governance, and so it has carried on.  I’m a bit disappointed that it hasn’t taken on a new vision, so I did resign from the board a couple of years ago because I tried to make it move into a different space where it was more relevant to younger women who are in a slightly different place in their career now, say.   But I still am a massive supporter of helping women to be successful.”

Asked about the situation today, Stephanie adds: “I don’t think the pandemic did women any favours.  It’s challenging enough juggling children and careers, but during the pandemic it was quite spectacularly difficult and people being let go were those people that were probably most vulnerable, not necessarily the people who were least talented.  So, I think women are in a worse position today.  I found my fifties very tricky, because after I left the Ofcom board I wanted to get back into private practice and nobody thought I knew anything.  Though, once I turned sixty, that all changed.  Isn’t that weird?  Now people seem to think I know something, and I haven’t changed very much.  So I think there’s an age in people’s careers that can be challenging.”

Stephanie says: “England and some of its larger communications companies have done a huge amount in research and development, but they don’t take the next steps to commercialise it. I think that’s partially why the United States and companies have stolen a march, for example, the FANGs. I’m also English, so we should learn the lesson and as we do this research we should look at the longer perspective.”

Asked about the risk of using Chinese technology, Stephanie says: “It’s not the kit that’s the problem, it’s what’s on the other end of the kit.  There is some risk, as with all infrastructure like that, and particularly now with all the cyber threats, their kit is probably not without listening abilities.

On the subject of Y2K, Stephanie says: “It was a flash in the pan, or it was a muddle, frankly.  Our IP and IT lawyers at Baker & McKenzie were running around like crazy trying to get companies to sort everything out, and at the end it was a bit of a damp squib, wasn’t it, and not worth all those legal fees, probably.”

Faced with the question of whether 5G is in search of an application, Stephanie responds: “In many ways, yes it is.  The use cases need to be published, they need to be more carefully considered.  I think there are some good use cases for 5G, I can’t quite see 6G on the horizon just yet, but I think it’s the Internet of Things, it’s things people don’t necessarily see that 5G delivers, and there’s not a lot that’s very different from 4G.”

Asked who is responsible if AI hallucinates, Stephanie says: “It’s a very difficult question. Stephen Hawking was very worried about how AI would be used, how AI might be regulated. If it hallucinates should the maker of the AI be responsible?  I think that probably is where I’d land responsibility, the creator. Although AI is a black box, they do know how the AI was set up.  Things like gender biases go into AI because it depends who programs it, which is why I would take it back to the creator.  How did you create this piece of AI?  What did you put in it?”

Asked if she is worried that AI will take over the world, Stephanie adds: “No, I’m not.  but I do think it needs to be managed.”

“Leaving Baker & McKenzie was probably my biggest mistake. I went somewhere where I hadn’t done my due diligence on the new place that I went.  So the two major things are, look carefully at what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, why you joined them to begin with, and do your due diligence, even if they have offered you the earth, the sun and the moon, sometimes that’s not what is the right approach.”

Stephanie is also a mentor to women and men. She says of one experience: “One project I had mentoring a woman whose promotion had been delayed significantly for an organisation that I work with, I mentored her and then it ended up I needed to mentor the men, because the problems and issues around it, were not hers in many ways.”

Offering advice to young women thinking about joining the sector, Stephanie says: “Don’t give up.  Keep going. Find people that will mentor you and help you along the way, and identify those people and also look out for, some women aren’t always very helpful to other women, so be alert to that.”

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley