Category: Interviews

In February 2019, I stepped down from my position as general counsel of Ingredion after 22 years. I had a wonderful career – it’s a great company, I can’t say enough positive things about it – but 22 years is a long time. The previous year, I had taken a continuing legal education program on mental health, largely because it’s now a requirement in Illinois to maintain your bar license. The program I chose was on burnout and, as I was listening, I started to recognize a lot of these symptoms in myself: feeling continually overwhelmed, having a lack of patience and energy to connect with others, and physical symptoms including headaches and not sleeping well. I realized that I desperately needed a change. I knew I was under stress. I knew I had anxiety – I guess I just didn’t realize it was a problem. I hadn’t stepped back and taken a look at all of these disparate symptoms and said: hey, there’s something more here.

For a long time, those of us in the law thought of mental health issues as being limited to drug addiction or alcohol abuse. We didn’t realize there was so much more to mental health. And people didn’t speak about these issues – except maybe with their very close friends – for fear of being judged, losing their jobs or not being seen as good enough to continue practising law. I realized that, right now, we need to be able to speak openly about mental health. Storytelling is very important – people using their own voices and talking about their own experiences.

There’s a landmark study called the ABA Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation Study. It was completed in 2016, and it surveyed 15,000 attorneys in 19 states, all currently employed in the legal profession. 21% self-identified as having difficulties with alcohol, 28% self-identified as struggling with depression and 19% indicated that they demonstrated symptoms of anxiety. What’s scary is 11.5% had considered suicide. Younger attorneys in the first ten years of practice reported a higher incidence of these problems, and that’s a change, because earlier studies showed this as more of a ‘later-in-career’ problem. The study showed that attorneys in the United States had higher rates of drinking and mental health issues than in other high-stress professions. Lawyers working in law firms have the highest rates of alcohol abuse, and law students drink more alcohol and have higher rates of anxiety than their non-law peers.

There are a lot of factors at play. Law is a hard profession; it’s stressful, you work long hours, and you give a lot of yourself personally. Many lawyers are ‘type A’ personalities and we are driven to win, both personally and on behalf of our clients. We are taught to look for risk in every situation, and even in our personal lives we spend time looking for what can go wrong. Many of us have very high personal standards of performance and, for many of us, particularly in law firms, long hours can be seen as a proxy for both devotion and success. There is a fear that admitting to vulnerability of any kind can be career limiting. There’s also a perception that there is some ideal model of what a lawyer should look like, and I think that’s even more true in the big law firms. That model is not a true reflection of who a lot of people are – in addition to creating mental health stressors, perhaps this hits our diverse lawyers even harder.

I think one thing that needs to improve is our storytelling – the ability for people to speak out and say: ‘This is my experience and I’m still a good lawyer’. Flextime, alternative career paths, use of technology in the work environment – these are all partial answers. But the biggest piece is really to remove the stigma around the topic of mental health and bring it into the light of day. The next generation of lawyers needs to know they are not alone, and that it’s acceptable to make their own wellness a priority. It could be through individual actions like meditation, yoga, fitness and personal care. But I think, particularly with younger employees coming into the workforce, people are realizing that a stressed out, burnt-out workforce is not going to be competitive in the future. People should be incentivized – or at least disincentivized – for behaviors that are not sustainable in the long term. You need to remember that a legal career is a long-term play – it’s not about how many hours you can bill this year.

I think younger workers are using their feet to demand better working environments. Younger employees don’t expect to work for an employer for 20 years – they expect to work at multiple different companies and in different industries throughout their career, and perhaps even change their professional focus. If they are in a work environment they don’t like, they’re going to leave. They feel perfectly free to try something new. Work environments that acknowledge and cater to the whole person will win the war for talent.

I also think we need to make sure that our professional interactions, our networking events and our social interactions, are comfortable for everyone. There are a whole host of diversity topics here, but alcohol plays a key part in the mental health arena. Alcohol does not need to be served in order to have a social or networking event. I think the younger generation would appreciate that from us. I sit on the board of trustees of a law school and I’ve heard law students in the student lounge complaining about this – they want to go and meet lawyers and learn about the profession. They don’t want to drink. They don’t want to see alcohol at every event.

As a workforce, we are seeing people in their 40s and 50s who are really struggling with mental health issues and who are realizing, perhaps based on the good example that our younger employees provide, that it’s alright to talk about things.

The legal profession agrees. The ABA model rule recommends that lawyers earn one continuing legal education credit hour in mental health or substance abuse disorders every three years, as well as one hour of diversity and inclusion programming. States are not required to do this, but Illinois adopted this recommendation, and it’s definitely a growing trend. In part, Illinois did so because people didn’t take these courses despite them always being available. There was a perception that taking a mental health program could reflect negatively on the attorney, or that they were only for people with a drug or alcohol problem. In Illinois, we also have the Lawyers’ Assistance Program (many states have something similar), which is a free scheme providing help for lawyers experiencing mental health issues. The continuing legal education requirement helps publicize the available resources, so that more attorneys know they can get support.

More experienced lawyers also need to help law students, younger lawyers, and the non-lawyer professionals around us feel comfortable talking about these issues and finding help. Even if it’s something that seems trivial, like burnout: to speak about it, to realize it’s important, to get help, to make change – these can all serve to remove the stigma and create the sense that seeking help doesn’t mean someone has a problem, it just means they are taking care of themselves.

I think that when we talk about the war for talent, companies and law firms need to take care of their existing talent. I think the greatest compliment that can be paid to a general counsel, or any leader, is when a member of their team becomes a general counsel somewhere else, or takes a promotion somewhere else, because that general counsel or leader helped create a safe place for them to grow, professionally and personally.

I recently completed the National Diversity Council’s DiversityFirst certification program. I saw diversity and inclusion gaining stature as a profession, not just a function of human resources, similar to the relationship of the legal department and compliance a decade ago. I felt like training in this area has been way too slow in coming – and it’s been limited to human resources professionals. The continuing legal education courses I attended on this topic didn’t go deep enough. I wanted to go beyond ‘diversity is good’ and really talk about practical ways to create an inclusive environment and to be an inclusive leader.

I feel we are at an interesting intersection of the law and D&I. In the past, lawyers counseled our clients to be color blind. Knowing too much about employees’ personal lives can lead to employment discrimination claims, particularly in the event of an unrelated performance action or a cost-based restructuring. We struggled as lawyers when clients wanted to have metrics or quantitative data about diversity, for fear this information could be used in litigation. But D&I really requires us to embrace differences and be able to talk about them openly – and I think we all agree that if you don’t measure in some way, diversity doesn’t happen. The old way of counseling our clients just doesn’t fit the workplace of today or of tomorrow. We need to be thinking about what workplace interactions will look like in this very inclusive employment environment. How do we get there today, without increasing our risk of employment litigation? For a lot of companies, that is a big concern, but one that can be overcome as we embrace and create inclusive workplaces, with a focus on the employee as a unique individual, while we all learn how to speak openly about mental health and diversity issues.

For the first 12 or 13 years of my career, I was blissfully, painfully unaware of genuine issues on inclusion and diversity. I knew how to say the right things because I’d gone through all the training programs, but I didn’t really feel it in my heart of hearts. I’m a white male from the New York City area, so I was always part of the majority culture in whatever major law firm or major US corporation that I worked for.

Then I came to work for DSM, which is a Dutch-headquartered company, and I found myself travelling at least once a month to the Netherlands for internal meetings. It was all Dutch people, and they would speak in a language that I didn’t understand, they’d talk about sports teams that I didn’t follow, they’d eat food that I found very strange, they wouldn’t invite me to dinners or lunches or even just for coffee because I was the outsider in many respects. I would find myself flying home on the plane feeling depressed, angry and frustrated.

It finally dawned on me that, for the first time in my career, I wasn’t part of the majority culture in these environments, and it altered my behavior. It made me hesitant, it made me less likely to speak up, it made me much more aware and in tune with all the little gestures and words that were made in the room – and that was exhausting.

I was actually thinking of leaving and, after a few of those trips, I said to myself, if I feel like this when I go there, how do my female employees, my racial minority employees, how do they feel working in an environment that’s predominantly American white male? So I asked them, and they told me. That was my epiphany: how can we get the most out of any organization when such a significant portion of it is not bringing their whole selves to work every day (like I wasn’t when I went to the Netherlands)? And that was how we began to change the programs.

Now that I found myself to be awake and aware of these issues and the impact of not being part of the majority culture, I started to work hard to change things. I had a more junior female lawyer that I worked very closely with for a few years on mergers and acquisitions and, as a consequence, she would sometimes have to travel for two, three weeks at a time when we were doing due diligence at a location or in the midst of a transactional negotiation. She did a great job.

Over a period of two years, she had two small children, and so I said to myself, why don’t I take some of the pressure off of her and not give her these assignments anymore because they require her to be away from her family and two small children for such an extended period of time? What a great person I am!

And then I talked to my sister, who’s about the same age and a lawyer at a corporation in the US. With such pride I explained it all to her, and she looked at me and said, ‘You are a number one fool!’

And I said, ‘What are you talking about? Look how smart and progressive I am!’

She said, ‘No, you are a complete idiot. Who are you to decide for this person what they can and cannot do? Do you decide that for your male lawyers?’

So the next Monday, I went into the office, set up a meeting with this lawyer and said, ‘Look, I think I have really done you a disservice. I thought I was being a good guy by not assigning you these M&A projects that would have been high-profile, but would have required you to be away from your family, and it has been brought to my attention that maybe that wasn’t the smart thing to do.’

She actually started crying, and said, ‘I’ve been thinking of leaving the company, because I thought that since I’d had children you had lost faith in me.’

Going forward, I’ve been very keen on talking to all of our employees around, ‘Hey look, if you have an issue with the demands of different assignments because you can’t balance it with what you have going on at home or with elderly parents, tell me, and accommodations will be made and there will be no adverse consequences for you.’ But I don’t want to be in the position ever again where I’m making decisions for people without having that conversation with them.

Certainly we look to recruit and hire diverse talent, so we take a lot of different things into consideration when we’re looking to hire lawyers for the law department that go beyond just experience. We try to bring in diversity in terms of age, gender, national origin and race. They certainly can’t be determinative factors in hiring because that would be discriminatory, but they are definitely taken into consideration and we certainly put in place – not just for the law department but for all of DSM – different tools and processes to try to weed out unconscious bias in the hiring process.

We use a basic questionnaire that’s the same for everyone, so we can generate similar responses and ensure that there’s no bias in the questioning or interviewing process. We have a diverse team that looks at responses again to ensure we’re weeding out a little bit of the unconscious bias that creates an environment where folks tend to hire people that look like them, act like them and think like them. Then, our diverse team will have an opportunity to not only conduct interviews but be part of the decision-making process. As such, it’s not just me making a decision as to who we hire and who we don’t hire, but the team itself – I give a great deal of autonomy to make a decision as to whether or not a candidate will fit with the team from an inclusion perspective or not.

Once we bring lawyers on board, the inclusion part is where it gets difficult. You really have to spend a lot of time and energy and effort to ensure that when you bring folks together from different backgrounds and different experiences, that it is a very close team, communicative and collaborative – and that can only happen when you spend time ensuring that there’s complete transparency and authenticity, and giving everybody an opportunity to reach their full potential within the group.

DSM is not unique – many companies have a lot of internal diversity and inclusion and unconscious bias training programs and things like that, which I find to be very nice but not impactful. So I try to create experiential learning opportunities for members of the team, because that’s how I came to my epiphany on these issues myself. I’m on the board of directors of the Tri-State Diversity Council and what I’ll try to do, for example, is find some white male attorneys and send them to events that are overwhelmingly attended by African American females. Putting people in an environment where, for the first time in many respects, they are part of the minority culture is an eye-opening experience for them, and those experiential learning opportunities create a need for reflection. That reflection allows for adaptation, not just in behaviors but point of view. The most important thing for me, is that those members of the legal team who are part of the majority culture have an opportunity to be confronted with the privilege that comes with that majority, and that changes their point of view. When I create these experiential learning opportunities at provocative inclusion and diversity conferences and experiences, the lawyers come back with their own evangelical bent on the issue and then become my ambassadors within the organization for change.

I’m working on a project for the whole company to completely rewrite our policies, procedures and norms to be a better fit for the future of work. I’m a strong believer that, in corporate America today, the current policies, procedures, benefits and practices were written 60 years ago by people who looked like me – and they are still working really well for people who look like me. If we want to drive change, we don’t make incremental changes to these policies, practices and procedures to adjust to changes in the law, we bring a diverse team together to rewrite them so that they work for everyone.

To me, it’s about adapting to the future of work. We’ll see much more flexible work time, much more use of technology for collaboration, more concierge services offered to employees so that they’re not wasting their time grocery shopping and picking up dry cleaning and things like that, much more of the forced sponsorship programs where diverse talent gets a traditional sponsor so that the next generation of leaders doesn’t look exactly like the previous generation of leaders. I’m completely convinced that, because of demographic changes, diversity is a given. If a company is not diverse going forward, it just means it’s forgotten a half-to-two-thirds of the population when looking for talent, and no company can survive that way. It’s those companies that create a culture, environment and infrastructure to foster inclusiveness that will be really successful going forward.

My journey to the law, on paper, was pretty straightforward. School, high school, undergraduate degree, and then straight into law school. But my hand was forced, slightly, towards the legal profession.

My real interest in school, even through undergraduate study, was in science. But I have muscular dystrophy – I was diagnosed when I was around three or four, and it’s a progressive disability, so I knew from an early age that it would worsen as I got older. Law was a very good choice for me, because the only thing required to practice law was a mind and a mouth. Muscular dystrophy does not attack those, so it was something that I felt I could actually have a long career in – and it was a laudable profession to enter.

In some ways, I think that having muscular dystrophy taught me to be an advocate from a young age – to stand up for myself and try to speak and educate people. I also think that growing up with a disability made me a little bit more patient, and it definitely made me a better listener. Maybe the quick answer isn’t always the right answer. It never hurts to listen, hear something out, and do a little bit more research, to try and think, engage or get creative on a solution.

With disability, there are challenges in all aspects of your life. My wheelchair comes with me, so architectural barriers are just everywhere. There are issues in housing, transportation, education, and places of public accommodation, like stores and restaurants. I have witnessed great strides and many improvements in accessibility, but there’s still a long way to go.

However, more problematic than architectural issues are the attitudinal barriers that still haven’t fully been breached. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that, historically, people with disabilities have had the lowest representation in all aspects of life. Just me being in a room at a closing or in court, sitting across a table from an adversary or discussing things with clients – the importance of that is immeasurable. The best way to learn is by observing, and the best way for that is to have people with disabilities more visible in every facet of life.

Traditionally, a lot of people with disabilities have been employed in disability-related fields. That’s great, and it’s important, but that’s not the be-all and end-all of life experience for people. I think that the more you see individuals with disabilities in regular roles, like in the law department doing real estate work, the better. Frequently I’m the first person that non-disabled people have a professional experience with, and that takeaway is enormous, because these people go back to their firms, go back to their lives in business, and maybe there’s a conversation at the dinner table, or maybe their kids hear something about it. It’s not a formal type of experience where somebody takes a class, or a piece of legislation is enacted – it’s more real.

Disability runs the spectrum; there are lots of people with either invisible or less visible, not-so-obvious disabilities. But I haven’t had somebody else with a visible disability sitting on the opposite side of a conference room table from me, or appearing in court on the other side of a case. I’ve encountered many other diverse attorneys professionally, but I haven’t had the experience of having an attorney with a visible disability as an adversary. It would be odd for almost any other diverse attorney to have an experience where they have never encountered a similarly diverse attorney (as an adversary) in their professional lives.

In terms of the New York City Law Department, there are several other attorneys with disabilities, and frequently what happens is an introduction is made with newer attorneys with disabilities, even if it’s just a summer intern. I might be able to provide some advice to newer attorneys starting out, or somebody who might be thinking of the Law Department, and it’s always beneficial to have someone else who’s been through something similar to talk to. There are some unique challenges and issues that we face where the only other person who might be able to fully understand, or think of solutions, or just be a friendly ear, would be someone else who’s been through it too.

Several months ago, I was one of the presenters and planners for the first continuing legal education course given by the Law Department for City attorneys on disability rights. That was really a great thing to be involved with and it was also a real honor to be asked.

I serve on the Law Department’s Committee on Diversity Recruitment and Retention. I was the first attorney with a disability to serve on that committee. Through that committee, we became a signatory to the American Bar Association’s Disability Diversity in the Legal Profession Pledge for Change. The pledge recognizes that disability diversity is in the best interests of the legal profession, our clients, and our firms. Attorneys with disabilities are important constituents of legal practice, and you should take steps to be more inclusive, while also giving more recognition to these types of issues.

I was the chair of the disability mentoring day program that we run, where high school and college-age students with disabilities come here to the Law Department. They sit in lectures from attorneys who explain what we do, give them tours and that sort of thing. It’s to keep the interest of those students who may not necessarily think that law is a possibility for them, and explain to them it is not worth closing themselves off from work. It was really a wonderful program to be involved in.

Our people are really dedicated to making the Law Department and the practice of law in general more inclusive through training, hosting lectures where people from different diverse backgrounds come here, and hosting receptions welcoming new summer interns or new attorneys into the Law Department, where we can highlight that diversity is important. We represent the people of the city of New York in a way; New York City is one of the most diverse cities anywhere, the Law Department is one of the most diverse law offices anywhere, and it’s both an important and necessary thing for every law office and every employer to represent the communities that they work in.

Personally, I’ve been involved with several disability rights organizations, and one of them is Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled (BCID). It’s in the living sector and its goals are to provide information, assistance and counseling for people with disabilities to navigate the bureaucracy of programs that might enable them to live and work, through advocacy; whether it’s going to local businesses and educating them in making their organization more wheelchair-friendly – for example, by installing ramps or training staff – or providing guidance to students who might be transitioning from high school or college and preparing them for career decisions. I’m vice president to the board of directors.

I’m also involved with an organization called NMD United, and that organization is founded by professional people with various forms of muscular dystrophy to assist fellow people with the condition, who can offer advice on aspects of living with a neuromuscular disability. That could be by finding personal attendants, discussing issues with housing, access or benefits, and we’re also involved in providing microgrants to help with certain disability-related expenses that might not necessarily be covered by insurance or other programs. Even for something simple like wheelchair repair, there might be bureaucratic hoops to jump through with insurers to get coverage. But if your wheelchair breaks, lots of people end up trapped at home, or even trapped in bed, just because of a relatively small repair.

If you have an attorney with a disability, or even a member of support staff with a disability, engage with them; ask what works for them, and for their advice on issues. There’s a wealth of knowledge on problems that could be tapped into. And, engage the community: invite schools over and have open house – like our disability mentoring day, or ‘bring your children to work day’. Little things like that are really important, because you want to teach people from a young age that there are options and choices – that inclusion works.

Legislation is wonderful, and regulation is wonderful, but you also need the community to really embrace issues and to be accommodating. Changing an attitudinal barrier costs nothing. If you’re going to put together training programs, have one (or many) that can cover multiple facets of inclusion. Be inclusive in training: recognize there are issues that need to be addressed and the best way of doing it is by encouraging further dialogue, and engaging with those who know best in order to try and address those issues.

We’ve always had a lot of diversity in the workplace. We worked to bring people into our headquarters from Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Brazil to ensure that we were getting great insight into what was happening in our marketplaces, but also to ensure that our management and operating team in the US was diverse and appropriately represented our company.

Marketing, in particular, was very clear that when it comes to selling products in another country, it’s really important that you have people on board and working on the marketing campaigns that understand how things are going to be perceived. So the business teams would come to legal and HR and say, ‘We are expanding into this area and we think it would be important to make sure that we have representation of these groups – can you help us to make that happen?’

A few years ago, it was pretty easy to bring people from our markets to the US for a period of time on specific types of visas, and they would bring their families. The company would sponsor them; these are people that were going to be contributing to our company and to our society, and the US was very open to doing this. Now there have been some changes that are making these visas more difficult.

There have been some recent discussions where some of these doors will be opened again, but it hasn’t happened yet, so we have run into some barriers. Now what we’re doing is working with people in the market in Brazil, without them coming and living in the US. It has become too expensive and difficult right now for us to continue to do this the same way that we used to. Companies are challenging the visa issue, particularly tech companies, because they rely on people from all over the world – it’s going to be a major issue.

We have a joint venture with a group that has operations in a number of countries, and English is our business language. You may be speaking English to each other, but there may not be a meeting of the minds just because of cultural differences. Those differences can be based in how people view the world, and that can happen on the legal side very easily, because law is something where we are so grounded in how our country views and uses a legal system and looks at regulations and the courts. All that comes together as we draft contracts and agreements, and when you don’t view things the same way it can be difficult to ensure parties are having a meeting of the minds – so everyone is shaking their heads in the affirmative, as though there is a common understanding, yet there isn’t. We’ve figured out that we need to have full discussions and then follow up in writing so that people can have an opportunity to think about it, and then raise their hand if they think there may be an issue.

The other issue, of course, is when you have people working in their second or third language. Technical terms, and in particular foreign legal terms, are not what you learn in school – they can be very difficult, and we have done a better job over the years of ensuring that we provide clear definitions and resources. You have to have people who are willing to put in a little more work on these things, and it’s worth it, it definitely pays off, but it does take a little more work.

Some of these things we have gotten from meetings and consulting with some of the Big Four, outside legal teams, large business consulting firms and investment bankers. We watch how these multinational advisory firms bring together people from all over the world and put them in a room and how they work together on things, and we have learned some lessons. For example, if there’s going to be a meeting where you have people from a number of different countries coming to the table, it’s very helpful for people to receive materials ahead of time so that they have an opportunity to review them. You just can’t throw up the slide presentation at the meeting and expect that everyone is going to clearly understand what you’re talking through.

Inclusion makes everybody comfortable, which can lead to a much more effective business environment. People are able to raise their hands when there’s an issue and speak up, because they feel like they are part of a group that accepts them and is willing and able to work with them on concerns. And that’s not just for looking at cultural and ethnic diversity, but also gender diversity and all forms of diversity. Religious diversity, for example, doesn’t come up as often at work, but there are situations that arise where people need time off for religious reasons and it’s certainly easier to raise those issues when you feel that you are part of a group that is properly and fairly represented.

As the head of legal, and as a woman, I do what I can to ensure that any time we have a large project with a big law firm there are women on the account, and that I would really like a female partner to be a part of the group that’s providing service to us. In the US, a lot of women go to law school, but law firms are not doing a great job of retaining women through partnership, and there’s a variety of reasons for that. I believe the law firms are working on this, but I feel that, as a company, I can help to ensure that law firms do what they can to support their female associates by requiring, in order to get our business, a female partner for this job. It’s actually been interesting and fulfilling to watch law firms work to meet these requests, and they have – and that’s wonderful.

The legal team is also in charge of drafting and updating our ethics and compliance guidelines and training and, through those, we set an example and provide principles on how the company should be thinking about diversity. And then when it comes to actually trying to think about diversity in hiring, it is really important that legal be involved in that as well – because while diversity is a factor that can and should be considered, it can’t be a reason that we select one person who is not as qualified over someone who is qualified. It’s a balancing act, and I think it’s important that the legal team remains involved, and it has to be something that the legal team cares about for it to really work effectively at a company.

One area that’s a little bit concerning to me right now, not just in the US but also in Europe, is this idea of requiring a certain number of women on boards. It’s a great idea, but I am a little concerned about how boards meet those requirements and ensure that the right people are given the seat. Boards often want to appoint new members that have board experience, and when there’s a small group of people that have that experience, what you’re doing is just appointing the same group to all of the boards. So I think it is about people working to expand their skillsets, and boards also being advised by the legal team – both outside counsel and inside counsel – that they need to consider diversity and the importance of having fresh perspectives. That means providing opportunities to people who don’t have board seats already on their résumé.

I think it’s making sure that people are being given the opportunity to stretch their wings, and allowing people potentially to stumble a little bit, because you learn a lot when things don’t work out exactly the way you want them to. It’s about saying to senior leaders, boards and executives, ‘Make sure that you give people opportunities, and that you are there for them and available as they try to work through these projects.’

In October 1987, about 750,000 people gathered in Washington, DC for what was called the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Our community had lost about 50,000 of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters to AIDS; the vast majority were young gay men in their 20s and 30s. A group of lawyers was at that march in Washington, helping these young men create wills and plan for their deaths as pro bono volunteers in their practices. They decided to form a national organization for LGBTQ attorneys, and so the National LGBT Bar Association was born in that moment of crisis.

Although we have seen gains over the last 60 years in terms of LGBTQ rights, we’re really at an inflexion point. There is so much left to do to achieve full equality for LGBTQ citizens and individuals, but there are also additional hurdles being erected – sometimes it feels like daily.

At the federal level, we continue to face an environment where there are no federal legal protections regarding discrimination against LGBTQ individuals – in the workplace, in financial decisions, in public accommodation and even on jury service. Worse yet, at both the federal and state level, policies are being put into place not just to disadvantage, but specifically targeting members of the LGBTQ community – primarily transgender men and women.

A Credit Suisse report a few years ago revealed that 41% of LGBTQ workers in the US said they had not come out openly at work. Even more shockingly, for senior LGBTQ executives in a corporate environment, that number was 72%. With the amount of progress that we as a movement have made over the last 30 years, it can be pretty easy to forget the complicated layers that many people, including attorneys, face when making a decision about when and how to come out. And it’s even more complicated for those in our community who are navigating multiple minority identities.

D&I leadership really needs to be a daily agenda item. I have a sign that hangs above my computer that asks, ‘What good shall I do this day?’. That’s really how I look at it: what can I do to advance the issue in both big and small ways on a daily basis. It can be as simple as ensuring that the language we use in our policies, in our forms, in everything that we do, is fully inclusive. It can include asking more challenging questions, like who is at the table when decisions are being made and why are certain types of people being excluded from that decision-making team?

The National LGBT Bar Association is the largest provider of LGBTQ legal education programs through both our annual Lavender Law Conference, which is now in its 31st year, as well as a year-round, web-based lecture series that we provide to our members. We offer networking opportunities and career development for individuals, and we also have the largest careers fair for LGBTQ law students in the country.

We also engage in advocacy. The Equality Act, passed by the House of Representatives in May 2019, included a provision that the National LGBT Bar Association had been a long-time leader on, which would prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ jurors – individuals who are stricken from the jury because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. For over ten years we have also been the leading organization advocating the ban of what is known as the gay and trans ‘panic’ defense, which is used to excuse violent assaults – and even murder – because the perpetrator alleged that they couldn’t prevent themselves from committing the crime when they found out that the victim was LGBTQ. Sadly, this often comes into play when trans men and women are assaulted or murdered. This year alone, we’ve had five states (CT, NY, HI, ME, NV) enact that ban, adding to the three states (RI, IL, CA) that had previously banned this heinous defense. We also have a bicameral, bipartisan bill that was introduced in June here in Washington DC.

The problem in law firms and corporate legal departments is that the actions to advance diversity are often far too little, and the progress we’re making is far too slow. I think we’ve realized now that there’s no single policy, program, or practice that is going to solve the lack of diversity within the legal community, or the lack of LGBTQ representation within the legal community.

Diversity is not a destination that we reach one day, it’s a journey with multiple milestones. What we need to do is create an ecosystem where diverse individuals can grow and thrive and achieve success and, to do that, there are some foundational requirements. You need inclusive policies that clearly protect all diverse individuals – so you need clear anti-discrimination policies that protect on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, and you need parity in benefits, which should include both married same-sex couples and couples who are in a domestic partnership.

In order to create diversity within corporate legal departments and law firms, we need to expand the talent pool and look at law schools that large law may have historically overlooked, because clearly going to the same pool of law students is not having a dramatic impact on the number of attorneys who are female, of color, or LGBTQ at the partnership ranks of the AM Law 100. This is a complex issue and we need to address it like a complex issue, in a multi-dimensional way, throughout the career trajectory of an attorney from the law school and recruiting stage to the executive committee decisions that are made regarding partnership in a law firm, and regarding the allocation of credit for clients.

My former general counsel, Denise Keane, was one of the few female general counsel in the Fortune 150, and always had a passion for diversity and inclusion. She formed a law department diversity committee many years before the company itself formed employee resource groups, so I have seen the value of being a part of an organization that has placed a huge emphasis on diversity and inclusion when the rest of the organization wasn’t as passionate about it.

Our law department diversity committee is made up of individuals throughout the department at varying levels. It includes educational programming that allows myself and my colleagues to hear from speakers who might not look like us or have the same background as us, and helps expand the base of understanding of our entire law department. A little over a year ago, we implemented a reverse mentoring program, which made sure that our leadership team in the law department receives differing perspectives in a way that will helpfully impact its overall outlook and activity.

Altria’s law department is also one of the founding members of the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity (LCLD), which provides a year-long leadership program for diverse attorneys. It is not only a great professional development program, but exposes those of us who have been fellows – as I was, in 2014 – to a vast network of other diverse lawyers that we can reach out to when we have concerns, need help, or even when we have a legal issue that we’re looking to hire for. Another professional development scheme that I and a few others in the law department have participated in is the Stanford Graduate School of Business week-long LGBTQ executive leadership program, which is geared to helping LGBTQ individuals expand the leadership ranks of their organizations.

A number of my colleagues and, of course, myself are involved in external organizations that place a focus on diversity and inclusion issues. My general counsel, Murray Garnick, does a great job of ensuring that when members of the law department are participating in those activities, it’s seen as part of our responsibility on D&I issues – and we’re not just permitted, but encouraged and supported, in our work in that space.

Last year, Altria signed on to the Business Statement for Transgender Equality. Before that point, we had not taken a public stand on any legislative LGBTQ issue and, since then, we were one of 200 companies that signed on to the Business Coalition for the Equality Act. In July, Altria submitted its own amicus brief to the US Supreme Court on three cases involving LGBT workplace discrimination. Those cases will be heard this coming October.

None of those huge shifts in very prominent public pronouncements about equality would have happened but for the foundations laid previously, which permitted my current general counsel and others to have the power, freedom and strength to say: ‘This is the time to do this and we can do this.’ So that’s exciting, and energizing. You can’t overstate the impact, not just from an external perspective but from an internal perspective, when a corporation takes a bold stand for diversity, inclusion and equality.

I’m a firm believer that there are ways to reach almost everyone. At a basic level, every single person knows what it feels like to be excluded. Some of us have been excluded more than others based on the color of our skin, who we are or who we love. But I think we can build on those individual experiences to show people who may not be as far along as we would like, exactly why D&I matters.

Starbucks has a fundamental business tenet that we are creating a welcoming place for all people, and that means inclusion and diversity is critical to our success. We provide inclusion training and tools to people managers to ensure that we are preparing all leaders to foster a diverse and inclusive culture based on merit, and we provide diversity education for retail partners.

In 2015, we set a goal to increase the female and minority representation of our senior leadership (approximately 50-60 senior vice presidents and upwards) by 50%. We achieved that goal for women in 2018 and, by the end of 2020, we aspire to have 50% women at the senior leadership level and to achieve our goal of increasing minority representation by 50% over our 2015 number.

For two years in a row, we have achieved pay equity for men and women and all races performing similar work in the United States. We also have verified gender equity in pay in China and in Canada.

We have focused very much on youth as well – we partner with community-based youth organizations and educational institutions to try to advance the cause of 16-to-24-year-olds who are not in school or who are not working. We are engaged in our communities in a number of ways. For example, in March, Starbucks hosted a town hall during the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives’ “NOBLE” CEO Symposium held in Houston. The town hall was designed to explore bias in public accommodation with law enforcement organizations, and to discuss the proper use of emergency services in order to mitigate discrimination.

We have a law and corporate affairs diversity and inclusion committee, which has the goal of fostering inclusion and diversity in the global legal profession, and we seek to influence our partners, other businesses with whom we interact – for example, external counsel – and other professionals to inspire, attract and retain diverse talent within the legal community.

We are focused on a few different sets of activities. We support organizations that promote inclusion and diversity in the legal profession. We conduct an annual survey of our top 25 external law firms with whom we have the greatest legal spend, and based on the survey results, we do an annual recognition and award for the external law firm that has demonstrated the most commitment to inclusion and diversity within the legal community, and also the community in which they operate.

We undertake a series of pipeline programs developing diverse professionals. One of these is the Gregoire Fellowship, which guarantees students summer fellowships at local law firms and in-house legal departments, a mentoring relationship with former Governor Christine Gregoire [and also the former Attorney General of Washington], and help studying for the bar exam. Fellows also receive University of Washington scholarships to help defray tuition cost. Starbucks is a founding partner of this program, which began in 2015 and, additionally, each summer supports an incoming 1L at UW Law for a five-week paid internship at Starbucks. We also have a mentorship program matching a Starbucks attorney with a diverse attorney in their first five years of practice. We recruit for open attorney positions through affinity bar associations, diversity fellowship programs such Leadership Council on Legal Diversity (LCLD), and our own diverse networks.

We support the involvement of our legal and corporate affairs partners in affinity bar organizations, and we participate in both in-house and outside counsel fellowship programs, such as the LCLD Fellows Program, which offers development opportunities that include networking, mentoring and leadership training.

We very much feel like our legal department is part of the social and business fabric of Starbucks, and I think legal departments have an excellent opportunity to lead in this space. First of all, the legal profession deserves – and, I think, requires – some additional thought and investment, not only by internal law departments, but also by external law firms, by the government, and by many other sources. We have an opportunity to be at the table when issues arise, or when we are deeply involved in the expression of our brand.

One of the interesting things about our department is that we have expanded our efforts beyond just the legal profession. Our department also consists of corporate affairs, which includes legal operations, global security, ethics and compliance and global privacy, and so when we talk about our inclusion and diversity initiatives, we look at the legal profession and beyond, to try to create best-in-class programs and initiatives that couple with the enterprise-wide goal of creating a welcoming environment.

Starbucks is very transparent about its efforts in the inclusion and diversity space and about our statistics. If you look at our website, you will see a wealth of statistics on the diversity of our partners, and we also seek that information within the legal team, so that we can be as engaged as we would want our law firms to be relative to quantitative and also qualitative programming to advance the cause.

We recently published a civil rights assessment report that was conducted by Covington & Burling under the leadership of former Attorney General Eric Holder, who helped us to better learn about our own practices and policies and how we could further advance our commitment to creating a culture of belonging and welcoming for our customers, partners and also for the communities in which we serve. In looking at that report and applying some of those learnings, we are going through a process of ‘learn and adapt’.

So, within the legal profession, we are embracing, for example, the notion that when we select outside counsel, we look at inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility. We look at them both in quantitative and qualitative measures. We will look at numbers – attorneys, paralegals, who’s an equity partner, who’s an income partner, and so on – and that’s quite important to us. We will look at data that pertains not only to women and racial minorities, but veteran status, people who are openly LGBTQ and people with disabilities.

But the qualitative aspects are also important to us, even if it doesn’t turn up within the law firm’s own internal statistics. So, for example, what are the programs, development initiatives, training, the resources that are made available to attract and to retain and promote diverse talent within that law firm? Is that law firm doing something above and beyond to build the pipeline of diverse talent within law schools? What kind of community outreach efforts might they have? What kind of mentorship efforts might they have, even if they go beyond the four walls of that law firm? We will ask very broad questions about how our firms are strengthening their bench and their talent pool within the legal community more generally, to get under the surface and analyze beyond just what the numbers might say.

What matters to us is whether the firm can demonstrate actual results, for example, improved recruitment and retention of women and minorities, promotions to partnership and expansion of D&I programs. We request that firms staff our matters with a diverse panel of lawyers, that a lawyer from a diverse background serves as the lead or relationship lawyer assigned to the matter, and that diverse lawyers receive origination or other credit.

There’s always going to be more to be done in the future. We’re re-evaluating and stepping back to look at some of our current formulas. For a number of years, we had been utilizing a unique law firm survey, but we’re pivoting back to the ABA model diversity survey because of the importance, we think, of continuity of data and information across the legal profession. I will sign off on new legal service providers to whom we are giving new business, and one of the criteria is inclusion and diversity.

We’ve signed a GC pledge committing to ABA Resolution 113, about promoting diversity in the legal profession. We also try to get into this issue through our legal operations team, and we have partners who are actively involved in CLOC [Corporate Legal Operations Consortium], which is focused on optimizing and creating industry standards for the legal ecosystem – and that includes diversity and inclusion best practices. We’re collaborating within CLOC to try to develop a diversity and inclusion framework.

There is no such thing as the silver bullet solution – this is a very complex and longstanding issue, so our general approach is to try to learn what we can and then share our learnings with others. We try to open source as much information as we can; for example when we undertook unconscious bias training, we made that training public because we wanted others to benefit from the investment we had made and to think about how it might benefit the retail community, or society, more generally.