Lisa Lanham
Partner; Head of Fintech LicensingOrrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP
Lisa Lanham is a partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP in Miami, where she serves as Head of Fintech Licensing. She advises banks, non-bank lenders and servicers, payments companies and fintech platforms on the licensing and regulatory questions that determine whether a consumer or commercial finance product can actually go to market, and on what has to change when the rules move.
Her practice covers multistate licensing strategy, bank partnership and product structuring, buy now pay later, earned wage access, mortgage and auto finance, and the regulatory workstreams inside secondary market and structured finance transactions, including loan and servicing rights sales, warehouse facilities and securitizations. She also represents clients in state examinations and enforcement matters, and she spends a good deal of her time helping companies build the compliance infrastructure that keeps those examinations uneventful. Her clients range from early-stage companies preparing for their first license to Fortune 100 institutions.
Lisa joined Orrick in 2026, bringing a team of five lawyers with her and anchoring the firm’s Miami office in financial services regulatory work. She was named a Law360 Rising Star in Compliance in 2026 and is nationally recognized by The Legal 500 for financial services regulatory and fintech work. She is a graduate of the University of Miami School of Law and began her career in New York before building her practice in Miami.
My Areas of Expertise:
Multistate licensing strategy for lenders, servicers, brokers, money transmitters and payments companies.
Bank partnership and product structuring, including true lender, preemption and program design questions.
Regulatory change management, so that compliance programs move when the law does rather than a year later.
Examination and enforcement readiness and defense before state regulators.
Regulatory diligence for M&A, change of control filings, and secondary market and structured finance transactions.
Building and leading a practice team, and translating dense regulation into plain guidance a business can act on.
Areas of expertise upon which I would like to continue learning:
Business development and origination, and the discipline of building a book rather than servicing one.
Practical use of artificial intelligence and legal technology to scale a regulatory practice without diluting quality.
Executive leadership, including how to develop lawyers who will eventually run their own practices.
What three keywords best describe you?
Practical. Relentless. Loyal.
Personal Motto:
Most issues are not black and white. Learn to do your best work in the gray.
What are you passionate about?
I am passionate about the point where product design meets regulation. The interesting problems in this industry are rarely about whether a rule exists. They are about how a company builds something useful inside a framework that was written for a different product, in fifty states, with regulators who do not all read it the same way.
The products I find most compelling are the ones the statutes never anticipated, whether that is earned wage access, buy now pay later, or a refinancing program built for borrowers who are already in default. Somebody has to work out how those fit, and I would rather be that person than the one who explains afterward why it could not be done. I try to give clients an answer they can build on rather than a memo that lists risks and stops there.
I am equally passionate about how the next group of lawyers comes up. Junior lawyers learn this practice by being trusted with real work early, with someone paying attention, and I try to run my team that way.
What is something interesting about you that members might not know?
I am writing a novel, which tends to surprise people who know me only from license applications and examination responses. Its protagonist is drawn from my own life more closely than I usually admit, and working on her has clarified a few things about how I actually think. Most of my weekends are spent on the water in the Florida Keys, snorkeling and boating, and I have been working toward a scuba certification. I also study Russian, which turns out to be reasonable preparation for regulatory work, because both reward patience with grammar that refuses to behave.
Who has been a role model for you?
An early mentor who never confused being demanding with being unkind. She gave me real responsibility well before I felt ready for it, corrected my work in private and credited it in public, and made clear that the point of the job was to be useful to the client rather than impressive to the room. I try to hold my own team to that same standard.
What are you most proud of?
The group we have built. A fintech compliance practice means representing first movers, and a good deal of our work has no precedent to fall back on. It also means representing companies at every size, from a five-person startup preparing its first license application to a multinational with a compliance department of its own. The legal question is only part of what changes across that range. There is also range in what the business can afford, how quickly it needs an answer, how much explanation it wants, and how much risk it is in a position to carry.
A team that can move across all of that is not something you assemble by accident. Giving clients what they need, when they need it, and at the price they asked for is a discipline in its own right, and on most days, it is harder than the analysis. I am proud of the group we developed, and I am proud to be bringing that group to a firm like Orrick, where it now sits on a platform that matches what it can do.
MENTORING
a. What would you say are the key success factors for a mentoring relationship?
The distinction that matters most is between mentoring and sponsorship. Advice is inexpensive to give. Sponsorship means someone spends their own credibility on you, in a room you are not in, and recommends you for something before you have obviously earned it. Advice shapes how you work. Sponsorship changes what you are allowed to work on. A relationship that never crosses from the first into the second has a ceiling on it, and both people should be honest about that.
Beyond that, the relationships that work tend to share four things.
A mentor who only offers encouragement is pleasant company and not much help. The relationship works when both people can say the uncomfortable thing and neither one flinches.
Proximity to real work. Advice given in the abstract rarely lands. Mentoring takes hold when the mentor is close enough to the mentee’s actual matters to be specific about what was good and what was not.
The mentee has to bring something, whether that is preparation, follow-through, or a perspective the mentor does not have. Sponsorship in particular has to be earned, because the sponsor is putting her own name at risk.
Short and regular beats long and occasional. A standing fifteen minutes every other week is worth more than an annual lunch.
b. What advice would you give yourself as a young executive?
Stop waiting to be handed the work. Early on I assumed that if I did excellent work, the right opportunities would find me. Excellent work is the price of entry, not the differentiator. I would tell my younger self to ask for the client relationship out loud, to name what she wanted rather than hoping it would be noticed, and to understand that being useful and being visible are two different projects that both require attention.
I would also tell her to ask for sponsorship directly rather than waiting to be chosen. Most senior people are willing to spend capital on someone who has made it a safe bet, but very few of them go looking for the opportunity.
c. What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started your career?
That law is not a discipline of right and wrong answers. I came into this work believing that if I read enough, a correct answer would be waiting at the bottom of it. Usually there is not one. The statute was drafted for a different product, two states read the same language differently, and the regulator has not spoken. You are not waiting for the water to clear. You are learning to see well enough in it to move, and then taking responsibility for the direction you chose.
Once I understood that, the work became harder and considerably more interesting. Operating in the gray means you cannot hide behind the text, and it means your judgment is the thing clients are actually paying for. It also means telling them plainly what is unsettled.
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