Category: Interviews

The legal department serves the business and other functions, so it’s a great opportunity to put diversity in front of them. Our clients may get very comfortable with one lawyer, or one type of lawyer, but we are really pushing – for example, ‘This person is the expert on this topic’, or ‘This is someone that we’d like you to work with’ – and making sure that we are providing our lawyers with good exposure.

At the end of the day, decisions are not only made by me – I don’t get to pick the next GC on my way out; it’s a decision the CEO is going to make, so they will need adequate exposure to a number of people. It will be a decision the rest of the executive team and board is going to weigh in on – so how am I ensuring that folks I think could be candidates, no matter what their developmental path, are getting the attention that they need?

We didn’t have much of a pipeline when I joined Peabody in 2015, so I began to work with recruiting firms that I know focus on diversity. I’ve always made sure I’m given a diverse and representative set of attorneys for an open position – women, men, diversity from an ethnic standpoint, international, LBGTQ, war veterans. I then make sure that whoever is interviewing candidates understands this is an important element of our recruiting.

We’ve got a good mentoring program that we’re building through our HR department, and I’ve made sure that several individuals on my team – both men and women, but with a focus on women – have been part of that, so they are developing the right skills for the next level. Sometimes they’re not even thinking about moving up, so it’s really getting them to think about and own their careers, and nurture them, alongside me.

Some level of sponsorship is important. There are unconscious biases that can come into play, like the halo effect – someone looks like you, so you may be more willing to sponsor them or almost overlook deficiencies. It’s important to me that everybody is given that level of sponsorship and I’m there advocating for people who others may not be advocating for. I want to make sure people are giving folks that may not fit their definition of someone that should be developed that opportunity too. It really is, I think, taking that broader chance on people, including those who may look and think different from you, but do deserve a seat at the table.

If you don’t measure something, how do you know it’s actually happening? We create data and measure it with our in-house lawyers and external law firms in terms of who they are putting up front for us to work with. We don’t yet tie metrics to people’s goals, and that is where I think it would be most effective. The companies where I’ve seen it take hold are the ones that start to tie it to individual goals and commitments, which then moves the company’s commitment. I also think it’s important that not only the management team hold each other accountable; it’s about holding peers and direct reports accountable too. ‘I see what you’re doing for person X, what about person Y?’ And if they don’t have a particular skill, ‘What are you doing to help them develop it?’

Furthermore, there have to be clear-cut development plans in writing that you can hold people accountable to. I’ve seen too many people recall discussions they’ve had regarding development, and three or four years later nothing has happened because no plan was put together. I have strongly pushed to get plans in writing, work with HR, and then have quarterly check-ins to make sure movement is happening. I think it’s like anything else in developing a business – it has to be a process where people are held accountable, all the way up to the CEO.

There are a lot of people coming at diversity with the best of intentions – including me – and I think that we’re now stepping back and focusing more on data, and looking at what works for other companies and other industries. There’s a lot more partnering going on to make sure that we’re sharing strategies and efforts that work – and maybe discarding, a little faster, things that really aren’t moving the needle. For a long time, there was a lot of talk about mentoring and now we’re realizing it’s really about sponsorship.

You can’t do things the same way as in the past. For example, when trying to get women on the board, you can’t insist that people have a CEO background, because you’re going to find maybe five women who fit that. You have to be willingly flexible on requirements. And then you need to have the answers to individuals who say, ‘You’re just setting quotas and lowering standards.’ You’ve got to be able to play back to the data that shows it works. Sometimes we do have to take a chance if we think people have got the innate skills and there are maybe just some other things we need to work through to build that.

When we put out the RFPs for our convergence panel, to get our 100+ firms down to 13, diversity was very much one of the criteria we used to measure the firms. And it wasn’t just a soft criteria, we made it clear that we were going to reach out every month and ask for data, and have a monthly call with the relationship partner to talk through what’s working and what isn’t working – including diversity and inclusion.

We’re also going out to firms individually to talk about the relationship, meet with their affinity groups and associates, and ask ‘What can my team do differently?’ What we’ve heard is: ‘We need work on the biggest matters, but we also want mentoring and the sponsorship.’ One of the things we heard from those associates was that they need us to send the message back to the firm, so the firm is hearing about their work.

As a result, we’ve stepped back and really thought through what can be done differently so people can get noticed at their firm. We do surveys and rate associates we have worked with on a one-to-five scale. If they get a five, we send a letter back to the committees that are making decisions about who gets promoted to partner. That direct, one-to-one dialogue with the very individuals we’re trying hard to impact is very important.

The vast majority of firms on our convergence panel have been supportive and understood what we’re trying to achieve. There have been one or two who have said, ‘Well, we’re in a location where it’s very hard to hire diversely’, and I’ve challenged them: ‘Is it really? You may need to change your outreach or approach, there are likely ways to attract people and reach in earlier, through colleges or otherwise, in order to identify those students.’

We’re not kicking people out of our convergence, we are working with them to challenge such approaches. We’re also recognizing it will take more time with some firms depending on location or sophistication and their journey on this diversity pathway. We’re here to influence, not criticize.

To me, the next success is getting this built into goals: setting clear metrics and pathways over multiple years. I think people are already seeing the business benefit, but there are ways for them to see even more clearly. I’m not going to feel successful until folks are truly on board in a way that we can measure and demonstrate change.

Here in the US, the legal profession is among the least diverse of comparable white-collar professions. It should be the most. The law is supposed to be about justice, equality and opportunity and I think lawyers are particularly attuned to those concepts. It’s in the nature of their training and the work that they do.

However, historically, the law as a whole has been very slow to change – not just in the area of diversity and inclusion. Lawyers and legal employers are often cautious by nature. They can be more tentative to embrace change and feel more comfortable with the status quo, and I think that’s reflected in where the law sits with diversity and inclusion. There are a lot of legacy barriers and impediments that have not yet been fully addressed or eradicated, which the profession as a whole needs to continue to work against. We’d often prefer to rely on precedent, both in our case law analysis and in how we lead, manage and operate.

We’re at a place where women represent about half of all law school graduates, but they represent only about 23% of law firm partners, 19% of equity partners, 30% of Fortune 500 general counsel and 30% or so of federal district court judges. The numbers just aren’t up there yet. The category of things that still require change are those like unconscious bias, not enough mentorship or sponsorship opportunities, less recognition than should be provided, and fewer leadership opportunities. These are all things that we are very conscious of, are working against, and trying to resolve.

I believe very strongly in diversity and inclusion, not least because our Law Division is very much a human capital function. We don’t have a product, all we have is great people delivering advice and counseling our clients – and to do that well we really need diverse talent to bring diverse perspectives to the work.

As the leader, it’s very important that I am personally invested in this subject, that I speak to it regularly, and that I am very engaged and involved in the work we are doing. Various studies have shown that one of the single biggest differentiating factors as to whether diversity and inclusion programs succeed is the amount of time spent by the leader – whether that is the CEO at corporate level, or the general counsel at legal department level. So I invest a lot of myself and my time in this work.

We have a diversity and inclusion council that helps guide our efforts: a cross-functional group of professionals from across the legal department that looks at various issues and makes recommendations, and shares our work both inside our company and outside. We also have an individual diversity champion, who acts as a liaison between the legal department and bank-wide diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. We have a mentorship program that we are expanding and that is focused, initially, on professionals of color.

We’ve developed a ‘Spotlight on Talent’ program, which gives early-career women and diverse lawyers from outside law firms the opportunity to learn more about U.S. Bank, meet with us and present educational content to our entire legal department. We can then see first-hand how capable they are and begin to develop relationships to help sustain them for growth and development in their careers. We invite law firms to bid on this opportunity, and have conducted five sessions, with a sixth planned for this fall. The program has been very successful, to the extent that one law firm asked if they could recommend it to other clients. We, of course, readily agreed.

We look at demographic data that relates to our department to show how we are doing against our goals and objectives. Candidly, we have historically over-performed on gender diversity, but are not yet where we’d like to be with professionals of color, so that’s been a big emphasis and area of focus for us. Several elements of our diversity and inclusion initiatives have goals, so we look at those regularly and try to measure ourselves against what we set out to do. We also try to benchmark ourselves against what is going on in the broader profession and also, importantly, with other corporate legal departments. We’re involved in a number of groups and organizations that talk about this topic very regularly, and we compare notes and share ideas.

We approach diversity and inclusion work from the perspective that there is not necessarily an end goal; we are never going to be completely done with it as a constant work in progress. We’re always trying to do better to improve, achieve and accomplish our overall objectives, so we have to be eternally vigilant about the subject. It’s unlike the more traditional financial measurements or other data we might look at. There’s not some day out there in the future, whether it’s a month, a year or three years from now, where I’m going to say ‘We’re all done with this topic, and we can move on to something else.’

We are continually learning and trying to add new things, or get rid of elements we don’t think are working for us. One example would be related to recruiting. We have some specific recruitment guidelines that we use, so there is a lot of emphasis on diversity as we recruit. But previously, we were not always disciplined about a process for recruiting new lawyers, and relied significantly on word of mouth, referrals and people we knew. Not surprisingly, that approach didn’t produce sufficiently diverse candidate pools for us. We’ve since stopped that, and now have a more disciplined approach. For example, we created recruiting guidelines and require at least one diverse candidate for each open position, encourage searches outside of traditional geographies, and require panel interviews and consistent interview questions. We also work closely with affinity bar organizations for sourcing candidates.

There is both tension and collaboration between the in-house and law firm world, and people have different views on the degree to which in-house departments should be trying to drive diversity with our law firm partners and providers. I feel strongly that we have a unique opportunity to do so, and we use it to the benefit of the broader profession. We are very focused on the Mansfield Rule, which requires organizations to commit to considering diverse candidates in recruiting, developing and promoting people into leadership. The first version of Mansfield focused on law firms, which could voluntarily commit to the program and ultimately become certified. The in-house version just rolled out, and we were one of the first companies to agree and sign on – we’re very proud to be on the leading edge of that. We’ve since taken things a step further, and have actually asked about 40 of our leading law firms to formally commit to the Mansfield Rule. We’ve really challenged them to take this journey with us; in no small part because we view our law firms very much as an extension of our own in-house legal department.

At this moment in time, financial services is undergoing a dramatic transformation in terms of what types of products and services it provides, and how customers can access those. There is a lot happening with technology and innovation in banking and financial services – probably the best example is mobile banking. Our company, like a lot of companies and banks, is investing heavily in technology and innovation, while working hard to figure out what the future looks like and how to create that future.

To me, diversity is critically important to innovation. In many respects, I think it can help unlock innovation, and so although it’s important and critical to what we do, it’s that much more important in this broader environment of innovation that we’re operating in. We’re in something of a unique moment in time: while historically the law has been slow to change, globalization and technology are ascending, which is driving disruption and innovation in how legal services are provided. This change brings opportunity; the law has a tremendous chance now, in this moment, to rededicate itself and leverage the diverse talent we already have and focus anew on retention, development and promotion into leadership. The problem is not with diverse lawyers, it’s with the legacy structures, systems and behaviors that have made their path in the law uniquely difficult, and stood in the way of full equality.

It bothered me that we didn’t have any kind of support for women, so we started in 2012 by holding a summit in Chicago for the top 125 women at the company – not just lawyers – and we brought in high-profile speakers like the attorney general of Illinois who, at the time, was a female. We had a great program, and it kicked off a three-pronged women’s leadership approach: annual summits – which also included regional summits where we got deeper into the organization with more junior women – a women’s mentoring program, and a women’s employee resource group.

As I started working with women on those programs, one of my close friends became the President of the American Bar Association, and she asked me to participate in the Commission on Women in the Profession. It was through my involvement in that that I actually started to really understand the various ways to manage outside counsel and inside counsel in a way that advances diversity.

When we started this women’s leadership program, of course, I tried to get as many of the women within my department involved, although there was competition with women from throughout the whole company. But within the department, I really tried to make it clear that a person’s diversity of any sort should not in any way impede their ability to influence or participate in activities – and so it was really about leadership and sending the right message from the top.

At the same time, I looked at our outside firms and recognized that there is ‘power of the purse strings’. That being able to choose comes with the ability to ask for things that maybe firms wouldn’t otherwise do. So every year we assess our preferred provider program, and we evaluate business-related aspects of their performance. I started adding in (and this was something that I’d learned through the Commission on Women in the Profession) factors related to diversity – so we would ask the firms every year to provide us diversity statistics for the firm as a whole and for the team that supported us, and I also ask about succession planning: when the relationship partner is retired, who are you training to take over for this business? I make sure that, to the extent possible, client service teams for every matter are diverse.

One thing that I’ve always known is, if you ask people for this kind of information, they are really going to focus on it, and if you don’t ask, then they don’t think about it. So we collect this data, put it in a table every year, and plot it over multiple years. And when the leadership of the client service team, the relationship manager, comes in every year to visit during our annual review, these firms are concerned if their numbers didn’t improve firm-wide and client service team-wide.

It’s funny – the smallest firm in our preferred provider program, which is an 11-person firm, takes it the most seriously, and that was interesting to me. We have lots of conversations with the firms about what we expect, and I see that there is a greater effort to bring women into the teams. I actually even ask questions about compensation and who is getting billing credits – so it goes all the way down; it is a complete discussion. I think it creates a clear expectation on my part and it creates some good conversations, and I think it makes people make changes in how they do things.

The women’s leadership program evolved into a broader diversity program – including ethnic diversity. The CEO asked me to be the executive inclusion and diversity champion for the company – which was great, because I was excited about being able to do more.

Being able to take that role enabled me to push some issues. We expanded the program; we have so many more employee resource groups now than we ever did before – we have Women, Hispanics, African Americans, Veterans, Multi-generational, and Pan-Asian groups. And the last one we created, which I’m really proud about, and of which l’m the executive sponsor, is NiPride – our LGBTQ employee resource group. That was a really big deal.

I think being a woman is what influenced my work in this area. I don’t think being a lawyer is what matters; I think it’s being in a senior leadership role that gives you gravitas and authority, and people listen. You don’t realize how much people listen until you talk about difficult issues, and you get people to listen, and then to follow. People care a lot, but there’s also an element of having the courage to pursue it. It’s really easy to have a passion; it’s also easy to say ‘Well, they said I couldn’t do it’, or ‘They told me no’. You’ve got to have the courage to challenge pre-existing ideas and to move forward, even when it’s not necessarily the popular approach.

One of the biggest mistakes that I made in the beginning was not recognizing that in order to have an effective inclusion and diversity program, you cannot exclude the men – you have got to include women, men, everybody, because otherwise you’re talking to yourself and to the people who already get it. You need to be talking to everybody about the issues, because women alone can’t solve the problem. It’s got to be a conversation with everybody.

One of the things we found when we had the women’s leadership program, was that the men thought we were just going out and having fun, or drinking tea. We had serious, business-focused programming to develop the women based on various issues that they were concerned about at the time – but the men don’t know unless we tell them, right? And that’s the whole point: to let everybody know about the things that are of concern and work together on those issues. We want men to be mentors as well as women. Where does the power lie? The power lies in the people that are at the top and the numbers show that most of them are not women. So if you limit it to just women mentors, then you’d basically be diminishing the value of the program from the outset. It’s about being open and talking about it from the executive level down – and that includes both men and women talking about the issues and supporting what we’re doing.

We have to look outside – if we don’t, we’ll always be getting the same answer. I think it’s important to know what’s going on outside of our company, otherwise we will never make a change, or we might not make the best change. I think it is helpful to have consultants – you bring in outside firms for legal work when they have specialty areas that you don’t have in-house. Even though we have a small inclusion and diversity team at the company, obviously they can’t be up on everything, so I think it is important to have outside help, to know what’s going on and to really understand everything before we make changes – and to understand what changes we should make.

This can never be about just work-life balance issues. If you start doing programs that are founded on addressing those kinds of issues, they’re going to be viewed as trite, as not substantive and not helping the business. You’ve got to show that what you’re doing is going to help meet the business goals and achieve our business objectives. That’s why I’ve always insisted on having really substantive, meaty, development- and business-focused topics for any of the programming we do, and for any of the support that we provide. For example, there was a point maybe eight, nine or ten years ago where the big focus of the company was execution – that was the mantra of the CEO at the time. So our programming was about how to execute. We had speakers on execution for women, how women have challenges in executing compared to men, and so it was about tying the programming to the goals and the needs of the business at the time. You need to have it clear to everybody that it’s all about meeting the needs of the business, it’s not about benefitting women just for women’s sake.

At Kellogg Company, I serve on the executive diversity and inclusion council, the global legal and compliance department’s leadership team and I also lead the global ethics and compliance function. I serve as the head of the people team within the legal and compliance function, advising on global D&I issues, and am also the former executive sponsor of K Pride and Allies – Kellogg’s business/employee resource group (B/ERG) dedicated to LGBTQIA employees and their allies.

In the wider profession, I collaborate with external law firms that are passionate about diversity and inclusion. I serve on the board for the LGBT Bar Association and the board of trustees for the National Judicial College, which educates and inspires the judiciary on topics including diversity and inclusion.

At Kellogg, we know that people are our competitive advantage and we know we must nurture a diverse, inclusive environment in which all our people are empowered to bring their authentic ‘whole selves’ to work and achieve their full potential. Our focus on diversity enables us to build a culture where all employees are inspired to share their passion, talents and ideas. They become part of a team that works to better serve the needs of our diverse consumers by delivering fresh thinking, product innovations and quality brands.

Our legal and compliance team helps to advise the company on how to create a diverse and inclusive environment, so it’s essential that we’re leaders and role models in supporting, developing and growing diverse talent. It’s a competency that demands time, attention and leadership. The team is a testament to our ability to lead, as we are incredibly diverse – our leadership team is roughly 60% male and 40% female, and 50% of the team is a racial minority. We are also inclusive of other dimensions of diversity, including LGBTQIA people and persons with disabilities.

We are very intentional about developing and supporting an environment that fosters inclusion and a sense of belonging for all. We want to be a high-performing team, and that starts with trust. Trust is about confidence in your team members, assuming positive intent, and being open to being vulnerable and learning together. To me, it makes a personal difference to be able to bring my whole self to work, so I strive to ensure that others can do the same. We are very intentional about varying facets of diversity and factor this in as we aim to ensure everyone has the chance to speak and be heard.

We have a variety of companywide diversity and inclusion initiatives. For example, our Kellogg executive diversity and inclusion council (EDIC) is chaired and actively led by our chairman and CEO, Steve Cahillane. The council meets at least quarterly to review workforce data including representation, hiring, promotions and turnover data, by gender, race/ethnicity, people with disabilities and veterans. EDIC is comprised of all global function heads, ensuring that diversity and inclusion considerations filter into each functional area.

We also have eight B/ERGs, three of which have global chapters. Each B/ERG is dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce within the context of our company’s mission, values and business objectives. These help to create an environment of inclusion and belonging, enabling our employees to bring their authentic selves to work and achieve their full potential. The B/ERGs also work in innovative ways to share their valuable insights to positively and strategically achieve our business goals and objectives.

The company provides training around the topics of unconscious bias, gender speak and microaggression to help ensure our leaders are aware of how their personal experiences can impact talent decisions.

At Kellogg, our legal team leads and influences the diversity and inclusion strategy, but is only one voice in this space. It all starts with us modeling diversity and inclusion in our department and advising on what has worked for us. One of the initiatives of which we’re very proud is our collaboration with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Law Fellow program. During this summer program – in partnership with the NAACP – students travel to Kellogg headquarters for an immersion in Kellogg’s culture and legal practices, and for exposure and interaction with many of our executive leaders.

I think it’s absolutely critical for outside legal service providers to be diverse and inclusive. If I’m receiving advice on how to manage employment and diversity issues, I want to be assured that it’s effective advice, and I want to see the providers demonstrate that they believe in their counsel.

At Kellogg, accountability for diversity and inclusion starts at the top. Annually, we provide an update for our board of directors that includes our workforce metrics, movement and qualitative efforts to drive improvement, and our board is actively engaged in our diversity and inclusion agenda.

At the B/ERG level, success is measured through our global opinion survey, which is administered to all employees, as well as through key performance indicators such as community service contributions and business impact.

Within the legal department, we monitor our strategies to see if they are working – we have an expert in data analytics who measures our work within the company and our own department to determine success and impact. We also benchmark ourselves against other companies. And, while we continue to do well in this space, we always strive to do better.

We find value in benchmarking best practices among competitors, as well as companies with world-class D&I programs. This helps us to stay at the forefront of the diversity and inclusion conversation. When reviewing these best practices, we discuss what works and how we can make it even better. Innovation is a core competency at Kellogg and we carry it into everything we do, including determining innovative ways to integrate diversity and inclusion practices throughout our organization.

Throughout our journey, we’ve learned that providing training on diversity topics is not enough. We need to focus on creating an environment where employees feel included, can develop a true sense of belonging and feel comfortable bringing their authentic selves to work. We understand that this can only be achieved by creating a culture of trust, driven by leaders who are visible champions of inclusion. Employees have confidence in leaders who take the time to know them as individuals.

The Rooney Rule is used in the football arena to make sure that when NFL teams are hiring professional staff supporting sports teams, they have some diversity options. An organization called Diversity Lab has developed something called the Mansfield Rule – a spin-off from the Rooney Rule – which is a framework to make sure that as you’re considering new talent to promote or to attract laterally, you ensure the people being considered represent the population as a whole, or represent a significant level of diversity. The format that takes is to make sure that 30% of the candidates you are screening, and 30% of the candidates that you’re bringing in to interview are diverse. We use the Mansfield Rule very heavily for recruiting, retention and promotion, including recruitment of outside counsel.

We participate in local initiatives – we’re part of the Law in Technology Diversity Collaborative, which is a collaborative of seven companies in the Bay Area that recruit diverse summer interns. These are people who law firms, for whatever reason, have not recruited from law schools but who are incredible superstars. Each company partners with a law firm. We host the intern for five weeks each, with the idea that they then have both technology company and big-name law firm experience. The hope is that they can get an offer from the law firm at the end of the summer, which is a real jump-start to their career, particularly for diverse and exceptional students who have been left on the outside by law firms in the campus recruitment process.

In the legal team, we are very focused on our own initiatives. The Law in Technology Diversity Collaborative is a legal-only collaborative, and so is the Mansfield Rule. Where we lean on the company-wide initiatives are in elimination of bias training, mentorship opportunities, affinity group memberships and meetings – we have a women’s internal network that meets fairly often and finds initiatives, so it’s a nice pairing. We hold hands with the company-wide initiatives, but we are very focused in our own group on making things happen just for the lawyers and legal staff.

As a general matter, we rely very heavily on internal elimination of bias training, to make sure that people are aware of their own biases. Unfortunately, people tend to interview for people who look like them or remind them of themselves, so we try to raise awareness of that fact in a way where people don’t feel defensive, but have some awareness of their own contours.

Honestly, it’s a really fine balance between token diversity and looking around and understanding if we’ve been successful, because we all have a unique upbringing and story, and we don’t want to discount people’s humanity. But we also want to advance and promote traditional diversity here; finding, promoting and retaining women leaders is one of our top corporate goals and so we have company-wide and group-based metrics where we look at the percentage of women in each position, the percentage of fallout year over year from each level, and people in the pipeline. We have internal development programs that we send high-performing women and other diverse talent to, and we have an equal pay study going on. We look at the numbers, we understand who is at what level by ethnicity and gender and where we have gaps, and then we try and fill those gaps based on precise outreach.

D&I efforts are such important, complex initiatives. Of course, ‘diversity and inclusion’ is easy to say out loud, but each person is a complex set of circumstances. I have two young kids, and I’m very aware that when you have a young kid, it’s a tough thing to figure out how you do your work and pick them up from school. Figuring out how to accommodate different life stages and demands in order to make the workplace welcoming and accommodating to all forms of talent is critical. The learning curve is steep, and that’s one of the reasons I’m very appreciative of the support of Diversity Lab and others to help us climb that curve. Diversity Lab certifies outside counsel as Mansfield-compliant – which means that the outside law firms are considering 30% diverse candidates for partners, track and for lateral hires, etc. If you get the certification, then you get to come to a conference with in-house counsel. And it means that we can rely on that certification to know that, in hiring, we’re promoting and living our own corporate and personal values.

Diversity Lab creates many forums for senior lawyers to get together and share tips and tricks. For example, if you have pumping rooms at work with hospital-grade pumps, that is something that tends to promote women returning to work – and staying once they have returned. Having some flexibility in job scheduling, job sharing, extended maternity leave, Milk Stork – these are things that support moms.

You can promote diversity in outside counsel through either financial incentives or financial penalties, or through simply asking a lot of questions to determine how credit is allocated at the firm and who is financially rewarded for bringing in and/or doing your work. Promoting diversity and inclusion outside our organization is as much of a concern for us, so we ask a lot of questions when trying to hire for our matters; asking about matter credits is a sign that you care about where your money goes and that its path reflects your values.

If you have the right culture in legal, then it tends to be a group of people that are listened to within a company. Legal teams are in a position of strength to lead by example, because people do listen and I think it can have significant weight – so using that for good, and to express strong corporate values is really worthwhile. So, talking about it, but also leading by example, is important, and also offering easy ways to do it. The Mansfield Rule makes it really easy: you just don’t bring candidates onsite for interviews until 30% of the pool (or more) is diverse. The hiring manager has to be disciplined enough to say, ‘We’re not ready to bring people onsite; these are the metrics that we are trying to meet in diversity, we are not yet ready to take action in hiring because we haven’t been able to consider the things we are committed to considering.’ Essentially, you have to commit to not letting the urgent overwhelm the important. Hiring is always urgent but doing it to reflect your values is critical.

Fintech tends to be very dominated by men at the executive leadership level. In my case, I didn’t think about it; I followed my nose to what was interesting. When I left my law firm, I joined a fintech start-up that was run by two women, and then my next general counsel was a woman, so I think I’ve had a little bit of an anomaly of an experience where I’ve had women around me in an otherwise male-dominated industry.

I think that there are a lot of people that are incredibly focused on this and think it is a really urgent issue. I also look around and notice, particularly in fintech, that there are very few senior female lawyers by percentage, so something is being lost between A and B. But,in my experience, people think this is an urgent issue.

I think you see a desire to have more women in senior roles in legal and also across the board in fintech, and what I’ve come to realize is that in legal – like finance, like marketing, like engineering – the need is to prepare and promote women to leadership. And because legal is a service function, there has to be a business need for a leader, so the business has to recognize women as those leaders. And you can generate a bit of inertia: because women may show the same biases that we’ve been talking about, in that they tend to recognize talent that reminds them of themselves, one of the good things is that if you have more women senior leaders, you get more women senior leaders. If you have more diverse senior leaders, you get more diverse senior leaders – because they can and do recognize talent that might otherwise go unnoticed.

My goal has been to lift while we climb: essentially, to help other women who are really successful, smart, leaders and make sure that they, in their groups, are having opportunities. To advocate for them and point out – in meetings, at events, in emails, everywhere – how great their work is and what an impact they are having on a project or a team or the company or culture – to make sure that people are seeing them as senior leaders.

I often try to go to women-owned staffing businesses when we’re sourcing contractors. Any time you’re spending money, you can spend it in accordance with your values, and I keep that in mind with individual people and with service providers. There’s plenty out there that can satisfy what you’re looking for, and I think a rising tide floats all boats.

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.

SoundCloud’s mission is to give people the power to share and connect through music. The platform’s community of creators and listeners are a young and an incredibly diverse group, and we work hard to ensure our employees reflect this diversity as well. SoundCloud approaches diversity as fundamental to our business strategy, not a secondary part of our HR function, because a diverse workforce enriches and adds real business value in terms of our company and the platform.

As general counsel, I proactively recruit and work to retain a diverse business and legal affairs team. The team works hard every day to make SoundCloud great, and they do this because not only are they hard workers, but they are each represented, valued and – in turn – vested in our collective successes. That’s diversity in action.

SoundCloud is unique, as it sits across multiple industries. For example, the music industry overall still has work to do in advancing diversity and inclusion commitments that truly reflect the breadth of the music community. The tech industry, on the other hand, has a steeper climb because of the lack of representation across women, people of color and LGBTQ. I was on a panel several years ago with other openly gay black men in tech, and everything I heard there confirmed the need for the tech space to do better at all levels, from hiring and cultural processes, to supporting STEM diversity. The good news is that people, from the CEO down, see the problems, which is the first step in creating change. I’m proud to work at SoundCloud knowing almost half our board of directors, and three quarters of our lead board members are people of color. It’s important for me to continually work and build on this achievement, while leading by example.

When it comes to improving diversity, as a leader, you need to first and foremost focus on visibility, because optics are everything. I present at as many external events and panels as possible. I say yes to as many networking opportunities for students and young lawyers as I can accommodate. I’m always willing to share my story – the good, the bad and the ugly! I also actively look for ways to raise the visibility of my team at all levels of the organization and sing their praises. We succeed when everyone gets an opportunity to shine, and I want to celebrate the good things and spread the love.

Recruitment is clearly the critical place to drive diversity and inclusion, and I focus on this area in my efforts at SoundCloud. First, it’s important to go to where the talent is, and ensure job postings end up on sites that draw diverse audiences. I then alert and activate my personal network, which helps funnel young and diverse talent that would benefit my department and SoundCloud as a whole.

It’s also important to have patience in the recruiting process to ensure we identify and interview diverse candidates. SoundCloud uses interview panels, which include multiple stakeholders with different viewpoints to help candidates get a strong sense for individual departments, such as my business and legal affairs team, and SoundCloud as a company.

SoundCloud also offers diversity resource groups (DRGs), which help to recruit talent and forge connections while building community. I personally encourage participation in these groups, because it’s not just enough to bring someone in the door, you want them to stay and contribute. Part of being able to do so is feeling comfortable, and DRGs provide an opportunity for people to find that comfort level, make connections, and feel empowered to bring their whole selves to work. For those who are not DRG members, these groups can provide a platform and an opportunity to learn about the backgrounds, culture and experiences of people who are unlike themselves. If we’re going to talk about our product road map or what’s next in music, but have gaps in understanding between our organization and our creator community, then there is a disconnect and a missed business opportunity. DRGs provide a concrete structure for bringing insight and connectivity to SoundCloud.

I serve as the executive sponsor of one of our DRGs, Clouds of Color. This means I have to truly show up, be available to the employees, champion and advocate for them and their ideas, and represent their interests. It’s a role I take as seriously as being general counsel.

Diversity should also be a topic of discussion with external partners. I ask law firms that are pitching us their services how they approach diversity in their ranks and, specifically, whether diverse lawyers will be covering my matters. What connects law firms and in-house departments is the relationship and level of comfort you have. Fundamental to building this up is simply the ability to have a conversation about these issues. It’s important to constantly nurture that comfort level for the relationship to grow. It’s important to me, my team members who interact with outside counsel, and to our company, that the firms we work with reflect SoundCloud values, and it’s my hope that the firms we work with hold us to an equally high standard. The more that companies engage in dialogue with potential clients, the better for everyone, both for the industries being served by law firms and also for the legal industry.

Looking to the future, SoundCloud needs to continually seek out ways to diversify our ranks, promote more diverse employees into leadership positions and foster a culture of inclusiveness. Going above and beyond is what SoundCloud does really well for the 20 million plus creators on the platform and our listeners who come to SoundCloud to discover what’s new and next. I always want to bring that same energy and thinking to our diversity and inclusion strategy, and watch it thrive.

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.

In the legal industry, we have a challenge with promoting diverse talent, particularly at the senior levels of the profession. We do pretty well with diverse representation at junior levels, in part because law schools – while not graduating totally representative classes – are graduating a high percentage of women who make up more than 50% of top law school graduates and around 40% of all law school graduates. People of color are also increasingly well represented in today’s graduating law school classes. As a result, many opportunities exist to get fairly representative junior classes of lawyers into firms.

What law firms are not good at is retaining and promoting this diverse talent. If firms – or in-house legal teams – want to address this challenge and effect real change through a diversity and inclusion (D&I) strategy, several things need to work in tandem.

First, the entire talent strategy needs to treat all the members of the organization as valuable people whose professional development is important. If you try to build a D&I strategy without an overarching talent strategy that takes into account the importance of all contributors, you run the risk of backlash against the D&I initiative because it is seen as supporting a subgroup while not taking care of the overall organization.

Second, there needs to be serious, focused attention on diversity in the talent acquisition model – and by that, I mean more than simply ensuring that you go through the formality of including diverse candidates in each panel of candidates. Rather, the organization needs to understand where it may be lacking in diversity. For example, in both legal organizations that I have led, we’ve had a majority female organization at the more junior levels and very low representation of people of color at all levels. As such, an explicit focus on the diversity gaps in the talent cohort is very important, and a clear understanding of the need to fill those gaps must be understood by everybody who is involved in the talent acquisition exercise.

To get a bit more granular, I think it’s very important to use techniques of interviewing that are designed to identify attributes that will help you find people with leadership competencies: people who have the ability to rise through the organization. We do that through an interview process designed to identify emotional intelligence – to put interviewees a little bit on their heels, make them understand that what we really want to find out about them is their ability to think on their feet, approach unexpected situations with confidence and exhibit authenticity and candor.

The third component of the D&I strategy is to create a diverse leadership pipeline. This involves creating a succession plan and making sure that you’re giving due regard to diversity in your talent-shaping agenda. The way that I did that at MetLife was by conducting an assessment of all of the non-officer talent – people who are below the manager level in the organization – and their leadership aptitude. To identify the leading non-officer candidates for future leadership, we assessed these individuals through a combination of survey techniques with clients, peers, managers, subordinates, and the senior leadership of the legal organization. The leading candidates – about 10% of the non-leaders – are invited to participate in a leadership academy that involves allocating stretch assignments and providing sponsors who are accountable for making sure that they get experiences, exposure and training to develop their leadership aptitude. It’s not an exercise that’s focused exclusively on diverse talent; in fact, it must be bias-blind. This is important because, in my experience, existing leaders usually tap future leaders on the shoulder, a model that allows unconscious bias to figure very significantly in the leadership development process.

In order to ensure a bias-blind approach, I stress the importance of going outside of the organization and asking the business partners who are actually receiving the advice and advocacy of lawyers to evaluate these emerging leaders on six-to-eight leadership attributes in a very simple survey instrument. In the past, we’ve tried to get at least 20 individual evaluations of each candidate so that you can measure trends about the various individuals in the organization. It’s not a precise science, but it does end up identifying some of the strongest candidates. It’s good to do it annually so the organization can continue refining and correcting its approach to identifying candidates for future leadership.

One of the things I learned at MetLife was to leave people in the leadership academy as long as they are growing and performing well. If you find that is not the case, release them from the leadership academy, have a thoughtful and constructive conversation with them about why they are being released, and discuss what they should do if they want to be readmitted. At the same time, continue to evaluate the population that wasn’t selected for the leadership academy, and consider bringing new people in.

It’s critical to make sure that this kind of initiative has a salutary effect on the organization as a whole and doesn’t end up producing the opposite effect by making individuals who have been excluded feel like their exclusion was unfair. Of course, communication is key, and you need to introduce thoughtfulness and flexibility into your strategy.

As part of the leadership development program at MetLife, I also created a stewardship initiative that involved one-on-one sponsorship relationships to cultivate future leaders. The sponsor and the protégé create a leadership development plan that includes specific objectives to achieve in a three-to-five-year timeframe, with milestones along the way. The plan could include experiences, training, exposure – any number of different things – and there is a timeline associated with each of the articulated objectives. You also measure the performance of both the protégé and the sponsor by looking at accomplishment or non-accomplishment of the stated objectives and milestones. If you are not successful, you figure out whether you have a weakness on the protégé side, on the sponsor side, or both.

At MetLife, we presented our stewardship initiative to our outside counsel. We showed them what we were doing to hold senior leadership accountable for the retention and promotion of our diverse talent and the obligation of all officers in the organization to sponsor a rising leader and be measured on their results as a sponsor.

As part of the discussion on sponsorship, we gave our outside counsel a deadline to put in place specific plans and strategies to hold their leadership team accountable for the retention and promotion of diverse talent in their organization. We promised to support them in this effort, but if we could not come to an agreement on an acceptable D&I sponsorship program within two years, we would exclude them from our approved counsel list. That proved very effective.

When we identify very strong candidates for advancement, we frequently find it difficult to hold on to those people, because they have so many opportunities put in front of them. You are often disappointed by having lost someone that you had in your mind’s eye as a key component of the future leadership of the organization. But those are just things that you have to manage – the ordinary challenges that come with running a corporate organization.

I look forward to implementing these initiatives in the legal division at Freddie Mac and I am very confident and optimistic that we’re going to have a very successful D&I strategy and execution. Freddie Mac’s human resources leadership is looking at our D&I strategy as a pilot that it’s considering implementing throughout the rest of the organization, so I’m very enthusiastic, flattered and encouraged by that.

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.