Biglaw, Gay, Minority Issues

How Reed Smith Partner Daniel Winterfeldt Plans To Address Intersectionality Issues In The Legal Profession

What can law firms do right now to have an immediate impact on diversity and inclusion?

By  
on

diverse diversity lawyers businesspeople“United minds of the Americas, minds of Africa and the Caribbean / And the Europeans and the Asians and Australians / It’s not just race, we’re all in this together.” — Arrested Development

Four years ago, the London-based Interlaw Diversity Forum published its Career Progression Report, which reflected economic, demographic, perception, and attitudinal answers from the Forum’s inaugural survey of lawyers and other professionals in the United Kingdom (U.K.). This comprehensive report is the first of its kind to explore the intersections of gender, ethnicity, social mobility, disability, and sexual orientation of lawyers and business service professionals.

This year, the Forum hopes to gather this type of information from lawyers in the United States and other countries as well. If you have a minute, please fill out the survey. It will help us to discover where we stand as a profession.

This week, I had the opportunity to catch up with Daniel Winterfeldt, a U.S. securities lawyer and the co-chair and founder of the InterLaw Diversity Forum. Winterfeldt is an alumnus of Fordham University School of Law. He was an associate at Hughes, Hubbard & Reed and Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a senior associate at Jones Day, a partner at Simmons & Simmons, and the head of international capital markets at CMS Cameron McKenna. He is currently a partner at Reed Smith in London.

Here is a (lightly edited and condensed) write-up of our conversation:

Renwei Chung (RC): What attracted you to the law and how did you choose Fordham University School of Law? 

Daniel Winterfeldt (DW): My undergraduate degree from Washington University in Saint Louis was in Biology and Spanish, including a junior year abroad in Spain. I wanted to combine a business-focused career with having an international focus, including using my language skills and experience.

Sponsored

I chose the Fordham University School of Law due to its prestigious European Law Program led by Professor Roger Goebel, and I was able to complete all the European law LLM courses during my JD. I was also able to intern at Schering-Plough for my second summer and worked two days a week during my third year of law school in their international corporate department.

RC: It seems like diversity and inclusion initiatives have always been important to you. Why is this, and what motivated you to launch the InterLaw Diversity Forum?

DW: I think most lawyers are drawn to the profession, at least in part, because they have a passion for justice and equality and a desire to be of service to others. This first arose in my day-to-day practice assisting clients doing corporate transactions in New York and London and later exclusively capital markets work from 2005.

I have been out since law school and throughout my career, but struggled to integrate my full self into my work life. When I arrived in London, there were very few out or diverse senior lawyers as role models. This was isolating and sometimes discouraged my thinking that I had a long-term career in the law rather than just a job.

RC: Tell us about how you founded the InterLaw Diversity Forum and what it does now.

Sponsored

Once I became a partner in 2008 and started working with Stonewall, the leading LGBT charity in the U.K., I realized that there was a sector-wide problem that needed to be addressed. I didn’t want anyone to feel isolated or unsupported as I had at times and I wanted to create a path for LGBT professionals to move up the ladder to higher levels in the profession. At that time there were only three law firms that monitored sexual orientation and that had LGBT networks in London, and there were no legal employers in the Top 100 Employers of Stonewall’s prestigious Work Equality Index (WEI).

We rapidly grew and now have over 1,500 members and supporters from over 70 law firms and 45 corporates and financial institutions. We do monthly meetings with networking opportunities, panel events, legal studies, projects (such as Purple Reign), and community support and fundraising. Our patrons and longstanding supporters include both LGBT and straight allies such as Baroness Patricia Scotland, Secretary General of the Commonwealth; the Rt Hon. Fiona Woolf, CBE Alderman of the City of London & Former Lord Mayor of the City of London; and Helen Grant, MP and Former Minister of Justice and Equalities.

We are particularly proud of raising over $500,000 over five years for the Albert Kennedy Trust and their vital work with homeless and at-risk LGBT youth. A further initiative by the InterLaw Diversity Forum is the Apollo Project, in collaboration with the Financial Times (FT) and supported by General Electric, Wal-Mart, National Grid, Lloyds Banking Group, CMS, Reed Smith, and others.

RC: For those who haven’t had the opportunity to read the Career Progression Report, could you share with us some of the most surprising findings?

DW: We conducted our groundbreaking Career Progression Report in the legal sector in 2012 with almost 2,000 responses to our survey from across all strands of diversity, which asked for both hard data on career progression mixed with impressions of fairness around key issues such as promotion, advancement, work allocation, flexible working, social mobility, etc.

The most surprising finding was that little seemed to have changed from the 1980s in the U.K. legal profession: white, elite-educated men earned the most and thought everything was the fairest, and the more diverse you were, the less you earned and the less fair you thought things were.

This told us that we had a lot of work to do and that “Diversity 101” wasn’t working, and our key recommendations were for law firms to create meritocratic workplaces by changing culture, training management and addressing social mobility concerns (literally almost all top earners went to Oxford or Cambridge, to the detriment of all graduates from other universities in the U.K.).

We are very excited about the opportunity to update the Career Progression Report for 2016 to see the progress we have made in the U.K., as well as to compare where we are at in the U.S. and Europe.

RC: What do you believe are some things law firms can do right now to have an immediate impact on diversity and inclusion statistics in the industry?

DW: As our work in the InterLaw Diversity Forum has spread out to cover inclusion and to address the multiple identities that we all have within the legal sector, we believe that law firms must focus on:

(1) bringing about cultural change to create meritocracies where all individuals have a level playing field for promotion and advancement;

(2) training managers to operate within this new arena and to monitor and reward success based on established targets and goals within the organization; and

(3) creating a talent matrix and supporting your talent across the board to ensure that they have the tools they need to be successful. (N.B.: Fair support is not always equal support.)

RC: It was great chatting with you. Is there anything else you would like to share with our audience?

DW:  Renwei, thank you so much for this opportunity to talk with you and your readers. We would encourage everyone reading today to:

(1) Participate and Promote the Update to the Career Progression Report — fill out the survey links below for the update to the Career Progression Report if they work in the U.S., U.K., or Europe (see links below) and to promote them to their colleagues in the legal sector and via social media using #CareerProgressionReport and tagging @InterLawLGBT;

(2) Submit Innovative Projects for Cultural Change to the Apollo Project — encourage their organizations to submit innovative projects with evidence that change culture to the Apollo Project or ask any other organizations they know doing groundbreaking work to do the same. Submissions are only 1,000 words and full details of how to submit and former winning submissions are on the website.

RC: On behalf of everyone here at Above the Law, I would like to thank Daniel Winterfeldt for sharing his initiatives with our audience.

If you have a minute, make sure to check out the the original Career Progression Report and complete the 2016 Career Progression Survey as this will help us to analyze where we currently stand as a profession.

Renwei Chung is passionate about writing, technology, psychology, and economics. You can contact Renwei by email at projectrenwei@gmail.com, follow him on Twitter (@renweichung), or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Topics

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,