This year I’ve been nearly entirely absent from blogging, because 1. COVID; 2. At the outset of 2020, I made an intentional decision to dedicate my time to mentoring, and was blessed with the opportunity to work with fantastic interns, and 3. I’ve spent endless hours having important conversations with my own mentor about everything from legal work, to the social injustices we’re seeing today. Regarding my mentor, as someone who has been a pioneer of race throughout his (professional) life, and who has stories of being mentored by a certain formidable figure by the name of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, engagingly in these conversations have been how I’ve chosen to spend my rare free time this year. 

This post is for my mentor, my mentees, those in the legal profession, and particularly those outside the legal community who may have heard of, but may not be as familiar with the legal titan that was Ruth Badar Ginsberg. Even if you’re not a lawyer, lessons from her life translates to any profession. 

A personal note:

The “life cycles” of my profession overall have continuously surprised me. Like any other young lawyer, I entered the legal profession wide-eyed and entirely inspired by the future. What I instead faced was a steep learning curve they didn’t teach us about in law school: how to be a respected member of my profession. 

More bluntly, the art of commanding respect as a (female) lawyer. Commanding, not demanding.

Over 1000 days into owning my firm, I still deal regularly with opposing counsels who refuse to speak to anyone other than my “male counterparts”. Recently, a letter I wrote to opposing counsel was criticized as “too abrasive…not worth of a response.” My male co-counsel read it verbatim in a negotiation, and that OC thanked him for being so “level-headed”. 

When my career began, I worked in a largely male-dominated industry. So dominated, that as I’ve shared before, one of the proudest moments of my career was the moment a judge with 50+ years on the bench (one of the first I appeared before), asked me to his chambers, so that he could “shake my hand, and thank a pioneer in an industry” that women like his own wife, and icons like RBG had fought for. According to him, at the time, I was one of less than 10 female practitioners practicing solely in my industry at the time. From day 1, there were no questions about what it would take for me to be a successful lawyer. It would never be about being the smartest. It was, and likely will always be: how do you practice law as a female without being a “female lawyer”? In other words, how to be professional and command respect, yet not attention. How to be firm, yet kind; strong, yet not “abrasive”; kind, yet not a pushover; enough, but never “too” much. Again, commanding rather than demanding. 

I chose to write this article now because I know that many of us have felt like the “other” when we are in positions of being pioneers. That can be starting out as the youngest doctor on a hospital rotation, to the youngest member of a firm, to business owners of every kind. 

Everyone wants to be a pioneer, but most forget that pioneers bear scars the rest will never fully see. 

I’ve always known I wanted to be a lawyer; I never planned on starting my own firm. Instead, I landed my hard-earned first job, and then experienced a life-threatening health crisis that nearly killed me, and made me face the real question of what truly mattered. 

As I’ve said before, “In my life, I’ve been applauded for being a pioneer in an industry, & in the same week, called too girly for being “weak” when I had to be a pioneer in a different way at Mayo Clinic. Starting this firm, I was applauded for being a “girl boss”….& “ called a “raging feminist”, just for my choice of career.”

My journey has taught me that outside opinions are of absolutely no import. As long as you can do your job well, with integrity, keep blazing forward. 

In the exact same week I spoke to that judge, I experienced extreme acts of harassment. In response, I reached out to one of my best friends, whose mother is an absolute pioneer in the legal industry, for guidance. Never eschew mentorship from those who’ve gone before you. 

In the early days of my firm, people were mostly curious to just see what would happen. And then it succeeded…and the criticism rolled in. Family members stated that because I worked hard, I was a failure of a wife; and “no wonder I was sick”. Friends eavesdropped on conversations, and then accused me of being “too much a female lawyer”. To this day, that is the most flagrant insult that can be levied at me.

My goal since day 1 has been to do my job, to the best of my ability for my clients, without all the BS that distracts by who I am. This is where my mentor comes in, who has experienced what it feels like to be criticized for getting “handed rungs up the ladder” because he’s a person of color corporate lawyer, when in reality, it was (is) the exact opposite. This is where RBG comes in as well.

“Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you“.

–Ruth Bader Ginsberg

No matter who you are, I encourage you to read about RBG. Admittedly, my first introduction to her came from some of my favorite Constitutional law classes, and then an interest in the fact that my mentor knew her personally. However, I wanted to share a few of my favorite selections from her biography:

• Your political inclinations do NOT have to dictate your friendships: “Though a liberal, she and the court’s conservative icon, Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, were the closest of friends. Indeed, an opera called Scalia/Ginsburg is based on their legal disagreements, and their affection for each other.” (NPR, “Champion of Gender Equality“).
• You don’t have to be loud for your thoughts to change the world: “When she began her legal crusade, women were treated, by law, differently from men. Hundreds of state and federal laws restricted what women could do, barring them from jobs, rights and even from jury service. By the time she donned judicial robes, however, Ginsburg had worked a revolution. That was never more evident than in 1996 when, as a relatively new Supreme Court justice, Ginsburg wrote the court’s 7-1 opinion declaring that the Virginia Military Institute could no longer remain an all-male institution. True, Ginsburg said, most women — indeed most men — would not want to meet the rigorous demands of VMI. But the state, she said, could not exclude women who could meet those demands. “Reliance on overbroad generalizations … estimates about the way most men or most women are, will not suffice to deny opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description,” Ginsburg wrote. She was an unlikely pioneer, a diminutive and shy woman, whose soft voice and large glasses hid an intellect and attitude that, as one colleague put it, was “tough as nails. (Id).
• You don’t need to have your circumstances handed to you to succeed: Ginsberg married a law school classmate, subsequently moved to Fort Sill, Okla., for his military service, and then returned back to Harvard Law, graduating at the top of her class. “She was one of only nine women in a class of more than 500 and found the dean asking her why she was taking up a place that “should go to a man.”At Harvard, she was the academic star, not her husband. The couple were busy juggling schedules and their toddler when Marty Ginsburg was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Surgeries and aggressive radiation followed. “So that left Ruth with a 3-year-old child, a fairly sick husband, the law review, classes to attend and feeding me,” Marty Ginsburg said in a 1993 interview with NPR. The experience also taught the future justice that sleep was a luxury. During the year of her husband’s illness, he was only able to eat late at night; after that he would dictate his senior class paper to her. At about 2 a.m., he would go back to sleep, Ruth Bader Ginsburg recalled in an NPR interview. “Then I’d take out the books and start reading what I needed to be prepared for classes the next day.” Marty Ginsburg survived, graduated and got a job in New York; his wife, a year behind him in school, transferred to Columbia, where she graduated at the top of her law school class. Despite her academic achievements, the doors to law firms were closed to women, and though recommended for a Supreme Court clerkship, she wasn’t even interviewed.” It was bad enough that she was a woman, she recalled later, but she was also a mother, and male judges worried she would be diverted by her “familial obligations.“ (Id).
• She never accepted her current reality as having “made it”: One of my deepest admirations for RBG is that even when she was pioneering her way through the legal system, she never accepted the status quo or outsourced her work ethic. She would often work through the night, just like law school, in order to care for her children and her job. “In 1971, she would write her first Supreme Court brief in the case of Reed v. Reed.  The constitutional issue was whether a state could automatically prefer men over women as executors of estates. It was the first time the court had struck down a state law because it discriminated based on gender. And that was just the beginning. “The words of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause — ‘nor shall any state deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.’ Well that word, ‘any person,’ covers women as well as men. And the Supreme Court woke up to that reality in 1971,” Ginsburg said. (Id).

“To the end of her tenure, she remained a special kind of feminist, both decorous and dogged.”

NPR, “https://www.npr.org/2020/09/18/100306972/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-champion-of-gender-equality-dies-at-87“

Again, you don’t have to even be remotely interested in the legal profession to learn something valuable from RBG, nor do you need to start a business, as is glorified so much online. As RBG demonstrates, you can be commanding without demanding; firm, yet kind; a trailblazer, yet considerate. Anyone can learn from RBG: 

• You can be “tough as nails”
• The work you may do now may feel small at times, but future rewards does not equal present unimportance 
• You can work harder than everyone around you, with around you knowing it. And while you may not receive laud at the time, it will pay off 
• You can be a pioneer, and a disruptor, a leader, all by leading by example, and without having to force your opinion upon someone
• A moment of a meeting can display your kindness (a la my mentor)
• Your legacy can be one of both kindness & grit

For more information about this legal titan, read more here, here, here, and here, as well as The Daily podcast: Part 1: The Life Of Ruth Bader Ginsberg.