Restructure This! Podcast Ep. 13
The Gender Gap in Restructuring with Cullen Drescher Speckhart and Rachel Ehrlich Albanese
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Listen to the original podcast released September 7, 2022 here:
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Sheppard Mullin's Restructure THIS! podcast explores the latest trends and controversies in chapter 11 bankruptcy, commercial insolvency, and distressed investing. In this week's episode, we're joined by Cullen Drescher Speckhart, Chair of Cooley's business restructuring & reorganization practice and partner in charge of its Washington, DC office, and Rachel Ehrlich Albanese, Chair of DLA Piper's U.S. Restructuring practice and a partner in the firm's New York office, to discuss the ever-present challenge of recruiting, retaining and advancing women lawyers and professionals in the restructuring industry.
Guests:
Rachel Ehrlich Albanese
Rachel is Chair of DLA Piper's U.S. Restructuring practice and a partner in the firm's New York office. She has nearly 20 years of experience representing secured and unsecured creditors, debtors, equity holders, purchasers of distressed assets, and other parties in interest in a wide range of restructuring matters, including cases under chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, out-of-court workouts, and cross-border insolvency proceedings.
Rachel has been involved in Puerto Rico's current restructuring efforts since their earliest days when she participated in dozens of meetings with U.S. Congress members and staff to develop the law that ultimately became PROMESA. She has subsequently been instrumental in many of DLA Piper's PROMESA-related matters.
Cullen Drescher Speckhart
Cullen is Chair of Cooley's business restructuring & reorganization practice and partner in charge of its Washington, DC office. She is a top advocate in corporate restructuring and financial litigation, with a diverse practice spanning a range of industries, including healthcare, life sciences, technology, energy, and retail.
In addition to her deep experience in complex insolvency litigation, Cullen has led some of the largest and most significant restructuring engagements in a multitude of jurisdictions, including serving as lead restructuring counsel to official creditor constituencies in Mallinckrodt and LTL Management (Johnson & Johnson), Le Tote, and 24 Hour Fitness.
Transcript:
Justin Bernbrock:
On this installment of Restructure This, we are pleased to welcome Cullen Drescher Speckhart and Rachel Ehrlich Albanese. Cullen is chair of the Business Restructuring and Reorganization Practice at Cooley and Partner in Charge of the firm's Washington D.C. office. Rachel is chair of the U.S. Restructuring Practice at DLA Piper. Each has represented clients in some of the largest bankruptcy cases including Mallinckrodt, Lord & Taylor, Puerto Rico, and the Weinstein Company.
They've agreed to join us to discuss the ever-present challenge of recruiting, retaining, and advancing women lawyers and other women professionals in the restructuring industry. As always, stay tuned for after the interview for a quick rundown of current restructuring news and notable stories.
Welcome back to another installment of Restructure This. As I mentioned in the intro, we're so very fortunate today to be joined by Cullen Drescher Speckhart and Rachel Erlich Albanese, both of whom are heads of their respective firms' restructuring practices, and so grateful to both of you for joining us and talking about what I hope to be a really fascinating topic, so thank you both. And if we could just briefly start with each of you introducing yourselves and say briefly where you're at, what you're doing, and then we'll get into the meat. So Rachel, do you want to kick us off?
Rachel Erlich Albanese:
Thanks so much, Justin, for having me on the podcast. It's really a privilege to be here with you and with Cullen. I am a restructuring partner in the New York office of DLA Piper, in charge of our US restructuring practice. I have about 20 years' experience representing secured and unsecured creditors, debtors, equity holders, buyers of distressed assets, and lots of other parties and interests in a variety of restructuring matters. Primarily Chapter 11, but also out-of-court workouts and being at DLA, quite a number of global matters, including cross-border insolvency proceedings. I have a bit of a subspecialty in PROMESA, which is the law governing Puerto Rico's restructuring and specifically, Title III.
Justin Bernbrock:
Excellent. And Cullen?
Cullen Drescher Speckhart:
I'm Cullen Speckhart, and I am the chair of Cooley's Business Restructuring and Reorganization practice. I'm also the partner in charge of the firm's Washington, DC office. I'm incredibly privileged to be here. It's really lovely to share the microphone with Rachel and to participate in this podcast. About my practice, I would say we have a strong presence representing creditors and creditors’ committees, and we also represent debtors and companies in bankruptcy, around bankruptcy, in and out of court turnarounds and workouts.
And right now, I'm particularly focused just given the macroeconomic environment and the forces of the economy in helping the business organizations at Cooley deal with the challenges associated with that current environment. So thanks again for having me.
Justin Bernbrock:
Excellent. Well, thank you both, and it's truly, truly a pleasure and very excited to talk substantively about what I view as one of the more significant challenges that plagues the restructuring industry, and that is the lack of parity among men and women. I think that probably fair to say that men make up a majority of the restructuring industry.
And by that, I mean lawyers, financial advisors, bankers, and we want to do whatever we can to change that and to improve on that, so can we just start with identifying the problem or to the extent that there is this lack of parity, where does that resonate for each of you? What are your observations as you look across the restructuring industry? Rachel, I'll ask you to kick us off.
Rachel Erlich Albanese:
This is something that I've noticed since the beginning of my career, and I'm pleased to see that it's actually improved over the course of the 20 years that I've been involved in restructuring. I was really lucky that when I started my career at Weil Gotshal, Marsha Goldstein was one of the co-heads of the group. So I did have a very significant female role model in leadership and restructuring, but that was somewhat of a unicorn, but now happily, there are more women in leadership positions at law firms, at least.
I think the FAs are making great strides as well. The investment banks have some more work to do, and they know it, which is good. There are also more independent directors who are women and diverse candidates. There's been a push across the corporate world to increase for diversity and I think that the restructuring community should embrace that push as well. I actually wrote a little blog post on that very topic, but this is an issue that will take time, maybe even generations to rectify.
Justin Bernbrock:
You mentioned something, Rachel, that Cullen, I'm very curious as to your take, but it's the idea that having women in leadership roles, it's an important aspect to raising, promoting, encouraging women to aspire to those heights. Does that resonate for you? Can you identify with looking upwards at successful long practicing women in your experience? And thinking that, "I can do that because I see that," does that ring true for you, Cullen?
Cullen Drescher Speckhart:
It does ring true for me, and I think Rachel hit the nail on the head and she said that we are making progress. I think that that progress is in part due to having strong females in leadership positions. I have this sense just based on what I've experienced during the course of my own career, that a lot has changed in that regard. And certainly there's still a lot more that needs to change. I'll tell you that right now, my own day-to-day experience and practice at Cooley does not involve a sense that I'm being marginalized or undervalued on account of my gender.
And for me, that's a distinct change from the way that I felt when I started out as a much younger person in the industry. And at that time, I believed that the only way to succeed in this business was to act like a man and speak like a man and to argue and engage like a man, and I don't feel that way at all anymore. I fully realize that not every woman has this lovely privilege of practicing in a way that allows the freedom to be feminine as I call it, which is just a way of saying that one day, I hope that all women in a legal profession can feel free to bring their real selves to what they do professionally without feeling some artificial mandate to mimic masculine behavior.
And for me, that is what has changed, and it's because there are so many examples of women practicing authentically without having to emulate or mimic this otherwise masculine behavior.
Justin Bernbrock:
Rachel, do you get the sense ever that restructuring in particular, it has a masculine sense, or there's a perception that it's masculinity dominated? Just curious as to your observation.
Rachel Erlich Albanese:
I think that's probably a pretty widely held view, that restructuring is male dominated. It's not uncommon to be on a call and have 20 men and one or two women. And now that we're on Zoom and Teams more often, we can actually see the little boxes and you can count the number of women and even less diverse attorneys, because the restructuring industry definitely has a diversity issue broader than just gender.
I think the corporate world probably still has this problem and the restructuring community is a relatively tight knit group. So we are very aware of the issue. When I was an associate, there was an editorial in the Wall Street Journal about how restructuring is male dominated and will always remain so. And a group of women lawyers from another firm or women partners wrote a really impassioned response to that editorial saying, "Yes, it may be male dominated, but it doesn't always have to stay that way. And here we are a group of really powerful, successful women lawyers in restructuring, and we should work to achieve that parity."
Justin Bernbrock:
Yeah. So now each of you, you are heading your respective firm's practices. If you look downward into your respective groups, can you speak a little bit about what women are experiencing today, and how it might be for them to come up in Cullen's group or Rachel's group? And curious about how that experience might be from your perspectives, and Cullen, I'll come back to you with this question in the first instance.
Cullen Drescher Speckhart:
Yeah, look, I think we've all had this experience. I see people who work with me who are junior to me also having this experience of being maybe the lone woman in a board meeting or the lone woman to speak in court or the lone woman to lead X, Y, Z engagement. And while I did have a similar experience just yesterday, I do think that that's happening less and less. I think maybe a more insidious aspect of this is in the conversational dynamic that sometimes appears in those situations where you might have a client who's standing on the sidelines, watching his or her female lawyer interact with a group of men and suggesting or even demanding that that woman speak up more and be more aggressive and take more assertive positions and just act differently than that female lawyer otherwise would, and I've been in that position too.
And it's hard, especially in litigation because we all want to please the client and we all want to act in a way the client wants to be represented. And I think in the end, it comes down to having a trusting relationship with the client where you can say, "Look, please don't expect me to be the one yelling loudest on these calls. I'm not expending my energy jockeying to be the first, and those who are really aren't adding anything to this in a constructive way. So I'm going to wait until this posturing piece is over and then say something that I think actually matters, so that I can bring some value to this conversation in a way that better suits my style and serves your ultimate interest in achieving a result."
And I think for younger people, it's all about finding your style and finding your voice and doing what you feel naturally and developing the relationships with your colleagues and your clients, so that there's enough trust to let you think. And everyone will know that you're going to be excellent on the day and deliver the best result that you can.
Rachel Erlich Albanese:
That's such a good point, if I could jump in, Justin. It's so important to be authentic in who you are and how you practice, because if you're just putting on a role and impersonating a tough guy lawyer, it's not going to resonate with your adversary and it's not going to resonate with your client or your colleagues. Cullen and I happen to have a similar approach in that regard. I'm sure many other people listening to this are on the opposite end of the spectrum, and fine. It's whatever works for you in your practice. But if it's not authentic, it's not going to be successful.
Justin Bernbrock:
For the men in your group, and same for you, Cullen, do you find that you devote time and energy and effort into helping men understand the contributions that women can have in this context, in this practice, beyond that which I would say is pure exemplar of your being chairs of your respective firms' practices, do you explicitly make it a point to say, "This is another perspective that's really important to hear, and it's important for you men to know and understand that?"
Cullen Drescher Speckhart:
We do focus a lot, and I focus a lot on this concept of male allyship. And we do it at the practice group level, in my leadership in the DC office, and through my roles that are connected to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and also in women's initiatives at the firm. And I would just say, Justin, that for me, it's less about telling men what they should be doing and more about responding to the questions that come from men about how they can help, because it really is a priority to make sure that women who are advancing into leadership roles, women who are junior and aspiring to feel as though they're supported by everyone in the firm, regardless of gender.
And sometimes I find that men feel like they have a giant blind spot there. They don't understand what actions they can helpfully take to make sure that they're supporting us in the best way possible, so we provide a lot of information and programming around that and it definitely is a priority, and a great facet of what we do at Cooley.
Justin Bernbrock:
What are those instances that very possibly, men are just totally unaware of? And perhaps it's a board meeting that is dominated by men and there's one or two women, or perhaps it's a call or a courtroom? Can we talk a little bit about some more specific, more detailed instances of things that occur? It may not even occur to them that what they're doing and saying is having an adverse impact to women. So Cullen, I'll ask you to start on that one.
Cullen Drescher Speckhart:
I think one big thing when we're talking about a group gathering, whether it's a meeting or a board call or whatever it is, I think if we can counsel each other, men and women included, to just take a half a second or three quarters of a second and pause before speaking when a question is called, or to be more thoughtful about redirecting the conversation when a topic hasn't concluded. I think just creating that kind of space for people to be able to jump in and respond, it might be a woman and if it's a woman, I should allow her to jump in before I attack the question with my response.
So that's just one example where just tiny course correction can mean a whole lot of difference for someone who's wanting to interject and maybe doesn't feel quite confident in doing that because of all of the people and all the men around the table.
Justin Bernbrock:
How about you Rachel? Any additional thoughts?
Rachel Erlich Albanese:
Yeah, I think some of the things that I've noticed men do, which they do because they think they're being polite are actually in the vein of micro-inequity, singling out the woman at the table or in the room, and it could be... and I am not saying that I'm offended by these things, because I recognize the motivation behind it. But it's things like changing your language or apologizing for curses on a call are things that just call attention to the fact that there's a woman in the room on the call. And I think the whole point is to say, "Look, we're all professionals here. We can all just be treated equally, and if you want to curse, curse."
Justin Bernbrock:
So I think another aspect or another way to just round out the parameters of the problem would be to hear why each of you think that more progress has not been made. But what are the barriers? What's causing the lack of parity that I think we all perceive? Cullen, I'll start with you.
Cullen Drescher Speckhart:
I think restructuring is one of those areas where there is the tremendous amount of conflict and adversity. And that's a real thing. That's not a misperception. And I think it ties back into something we touched on earlier about the kind of approach, the kind of personality that some might think is required to deal with that on a consistent basis, and I think as we noted, there's more than one way to skin a cat in this, than might meet the eye on a superficial review of the industry.
And I happen to believe that this is the most fun you could probably have as a lawyer, regardless of gender. I hope that I can help people see that, and I think as more women do take leadership positions in restructuring, the more women who are elevated into boardrooms and advisory positions, the more we see our male colleague counterparts stepping up to support them, that to me is precipitating a change in how communication happens in adversarial context.
And I think that's a window for more young female professionals to see that they too can do this successfully and well, even if aggression is not something that comes naturally to their personality type. Go back to the point about being authentic.
Justin Bernbrock:
And Rachel, what do you think?
Rachel Erlich Albanese:
Yeah, I agree. I mean, it's also a very demanding profession in that our clients are often dealing with crisis situations or if they're not, the company dealing with the crisis, they're a constituent impacted by that crisis. So sometimes, all the best plans get scrambled because you have to deal with something on an emergent basis. So it can be difficult for women who tend to be the primary caregivers, for better or worse, to scramble their schedules and make that work, unless they have real solid support at home. So that's an extra layer of work-life balance that women have to navigate in many cases in order to make this career work.
Justin Bernbrock:
I want to dive in more there and I appreciate that we're getting more societal than limited to the restructuring community. Specifically, say a mid-level associate woman wants to start a family and knocks on your door and says, "Partner and I want to start a family. Will I be adversely affected in my goal of becoming the next Cullen Speckhart or Rachel? Is this going to hold me back from achieving the satisfaction that I would like to achieve in my career?" How do you address those questions? And how has that been in your own experience? Rachel, since you gave the segue, I'll kick it over to you.
Rachel Erlich Albanese:
It's a great question, Justin. For me personally, I had a windy career path where I actually did go part-time when my second child was born and I was counsel for a time and I tried all of these alternative career structures. And ultimately, I found that because of my personality, I'm pretty type A, as so many lawyers are, particularly restructuring lawyers, I just was giving more than I was being paid for in some instances.
The firm was making out better than I was, but ultimately, I wanted to be more present in the job than I was. And so I went back to full time, but what I did, I said, "Look, I'm full time, but I'm going to work it in a way that makes sense for my family and my life, so I might leave the office earlier than another person who doesn't have little kids, but I'm going to go home. I'm going to deal with their dinner and their bedtime, and then I'm going to log back on after they're in bed and I'm going to continue working later into the night and another person might who works straight through."
And that's how I was able to structure it for me to commit myself fully to the career as a full-time employee. So what I would say to that associate who comes in and says, "I don't know what I have to do," I would say both it's a very hard decision and a personal one, so if you're committed to the job, then your decision with respect to your family should not take you off track. It just may make it a little bit longer of a path or windier, or just may take a little bit more work on your part.
Justin Bernbrock:
I'm curious, Cullen, if you think one of the potential parts of the calculus that negatively impacts a woman's advancement in law practice is our innate focus on graduation from law school, year of admission to practice titling people, a fifth year associate, a sixth year associate. And there's a market standard as to typically when in that life cycle, someone is promoted to partner or elected to a partnership.
Yeah, I mean, I think innate, it starts in law school. You're a 1L, you're a 2L, and it's very conveyor belt in its structure. And I've encountered women fifth year associates who are technically, and their EQ is levels above partners that have been practicing 20 years. Is that a hindrance, do you think?
Cullen Drescher Speckhart:
I got off the conveyor belt and I've had a very unique career path. So in my personal experience, the preordained pattern for someone who wants to succeed in big law was not my model. And I don't necessarily believe that that is how it should be, or it has to be for anyone who wants to take an active role in designing their own career.
I started out in big law as a young person, and I did not stay there for very long. In fact, I struggled so much at the beginning part of my life as a lawyer, that I was very close to quitting, and instead of quitting, I left big law. I was about a second year associate at the time and I promised myself I would never go back. I went to a much smaller firm where there was no restructuring lawyer, there were no restructuring partners, and I was just bound and determined to build the practice I wanted for myself.
I got very lucky. I had a lot of highly accomplished and extremely generous mentors at big firms in big cities. I just worked as hard as I could learn as much as I could in that period of time. But part of my business model in growing that practice was to partner up with the big firms to do the arms and legs and boots on the ground work in bankruptcy matters all over the country.
And in 2015, I ended up working on a major litigation in the Eastern District of Virginia, which continued for about four years. And the firm that I partnered up with to do that was Cooley. And in 2019, when Cooley decided it needed a new bankruptcy partner, I was fortunate enough to get the call. And by then, I knew that it was okay to break my promise to myself because Cooley had proven to me that it was different.
I don't feel less than because I'm female, if anything, it's quite the opposite. I want to show people, men and women, that it is possible to have a fulfilling career, an outstanding career without having to pretend like you're anything other than exactly who you are, including someone who wants to have kids. I think that I would respond to someone who's contemplating a family by saying that having a child is one of the most professionally and personally enriching things that I've ever done. It gives me a different perspective, and part of that perspective very happily is that I have never been more proud of who I am and what I do than when I see myself through the eyes of my nine-year-old girl.
Justin Bernbrock:
So shifting gears a bit, I want to dig in on your respective personal development and how you came to be the women you are today, not only in your practice, but in your lives. And very curious to learn more about your personal experience and why you do what you do, and what you think of as far as that which has had the greatest impact on your success in this industry.
And part of my hope here is for listeners and particularly women listening, that they can hear your story and start to pick out those points in their story and learn how to capitalize on experiences to promote and promote themselves and promote other women. So Cullen, will you sing a few bars on that one?
Cullen Drescher Speckhart:
Yeah. I love getting the question of why restructuring for me. I get that question a lot and I always appreciate it, because it allows me to talk about my family growing up. And my parents who raised us in a small steel town called Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which was home to one of the largest steel printing companies in the world. Bethlehem Steel was the name of the company. My parents both worked at Bethlehem Steel. That's how they met, then they married.
And they raised my two brothers and me in that community, where everyone was somehow connected to the company or dependent on it for their livelihood in some respect. And when the company started to struggle in the 80s and the 90s, everyone felt it in some way, including my parents who both lost their jobs on the same day in one of the company's mass layoffs. And I remember a lot about that particular time because it was so unbelievably scary for my family and me and a lot of other people too.
My dad was fortunate in that a short time after he was laid off, he was rehired. He ended up going back to the company with his close to 30 years of institutional knowledge and experience to help Bethlehem Steel with the restructuring of the business, to try to stabilize it and to assist in the reorganization of the company on its way into Chapter 11. And by this time, I was in high school and I was on my way to college and thinking about my own career and watching this process in a very up close kind of way, listening to my father talk about the bankruptcy lawyers, who were the people who had a plan and the skills and the power to save jobs and to save pensions and to find homes for the assets. What these people were delivering to my parents and my town was a lot more than their bankruptcy knowledge.
It was a feeling of hope in a time that was characterized by so much uncertainty. And I just thought, "Wow, what would it be like for me to have the ability to do this, to come into a big problem and make a plan and save a company?" And having seen that, I never really wanted to do anything else with my life. Nothing was ever as compelling to me as that once I had seen it, and I feel very privileged to practice my purpose, that purpose at the firm that values all the things that make me, including my gender and my background and my unusual career path included.
Justin Bernbrock:
I'm curious to hear, as you mentioned that your daughter is now nine, and to the extent you're willing to share, do you have conversations with her today that whether explicitly or something of an undercurrent help her understand that what you are modeling is that women can be as successful as men in any arena that they elect?
Cullen Drescher Speckhart:
It's a great question. And in response to it, what comes to mind is how my husband has handled her ever since she was I would say four or five, old enough to recognize that when I got out the suitcase, it meant that I was going somewhere and I wouldn't be back for some number of days.
There came a point where she started to get very upset when she would come to the understanding that I was leaving, and I left a lot, because as Rachel mentioned, part of the demand of this industry is quite a bit of travel and moving around and long hours. So when she started to complain about it or to grow upset about it, tears, the whole thing, he would say, "Avery, let's not talk about how much we're going to miss Mommy. Let's talk about how proud we are of Mommy," and that theme, I mean, he's been very consistent about reinforcing that theme in all of the years of her life and her development.
And I think more than missing me, she is proud. And I think it's embedded in that message that yes, we can as a family rally around my career because it's awesome. And I hope that she grows up in a way where she never has to question. She never has to ask the question that you just did, Justin. She never has to ask the question about whether it's possible for her to be incredibly successful at anything she aspired to, because she's just grown up in an understanding that's been so implicit and explicit that the answer is yes, she can.
Justin Bernbrock:
Rachel, how about you? What is the whole of restructuring that has kept you engaged and what other experiences do you attribute your success to?
Rachel Erlich Albanese:
Well, I don't have a Field of Dreams story like Cullen, which I love, by the way. For me, I had a fantastic bankruptcy professor in law school, David Skeel, who listeners may know as the chairman of the Federal Oversight Management Board in Puerto Rico, but he also has a day job as a professor at Penn Law School who teaches bankruptcy and corporate governance and also Christian theology and its impact on law.
But he was a really inspirational professor, so I liked the area of bankruptcy. Then I clerked for a district judge after law school and was still unclear about what I was going to do for my career. So I used the clerkship as a process of elimination and all of the different matters that we handled in chambers. I thought about, "Well, could I see myself doing this every day for however long I practice?" And that included things like employment disputes and securities litigation and criminal law and patent litigation and bankruptcy appeals.
I was lucky that my co-clerks did not want to handle those bankruptcy appeals. I thought they were fascinating. I liked the issues. I liked the real world implications of them. So that suggested to me that yes, this is a practice area that I could find intellectually interesting and challenging. And that's how I found my way into bankruptcy.
And I'm glad that I did find an area of law that I have a genuine interest in. I'm a bit of a self-professed bankruptcy nerd, because I find it interesting on a level where I like to read about it. I'm going to plug Professor Skeel's book actually called Debt's Dominion, which is a great history of the US bankruptcy law and in a very readable way. So I read that and I thought, "Yeah, I want to know more." So over the course of my career, I've used that genuine interest in the subject matter to further my career and my development.
And I don't think you can spend the kind of hours and time and energy that big law requires or any legal career requires if you don't actually have that substantive interest in the law that you're practicing. So that's on the substantive side, that's what I would say is how I've stayed in restructuring for so long, or how I found it and stayed in it. And then I also like Cullen, I've had some really incredible and supportive advocates and mentors along the way at each firm that I have been at, both men and women actually.
So I thank my longevity in the practice of having those mentors and being able to ask questions and rely on them for guidance, working on challenging issues with them, putting in the hours on the cases with them, and also with a really great group of people who comprise the restructuring community. Some of my closest friends in the industry are the ones where I was an associate with them in the early years.
So you develop these friendships and relationships that sustain you through all of the long hours and crazy cases. And one other thing that I really enjoy about restructuring is that yes, it's contentious, and it can be really hectic, but ultimately, especially if you're on the company side, the goal is to save a company, save a business, save jobs, help a company emerge from the process in a better place than when it started.
And if you're the creditor side, to try to get as much value out of the company as you can, whether that's an ongoing business relationship or a claim that's paid in full. So as opposed to regular way litigation, or just fighting all the time about something, there is a bit of a making the world a better place element to restructuring. It sounds a little bit Pollyanna, but I do like that aspect of the practice.
Justin Bernbrock:
Yeah, I can certainly identify with both of the experiences and how it brought you to where you are now. So let's look forward. And rather than asking you to comment on your specific firms' approaches to gender inclusion, you've both already said that your firms are doing quite a lot, which I think our firm is doing as well. And I think that's tremendous. So let's talk about a hypothetical large law firm in 2022 and looking forward for the next 10, 20, 30 years, what are things that law firm leaders, what should they focus on improving the parity among women and men lawyers, restructuring lawyers in particular? Rachel, why don't you start?
Rachel Erlich Albanese:
That's a big question, Justin. So I'll give just a little drop in the bucket of ideas that could be helpful. I mean, one of the things that I would suggest for law firms and for corporations in general is removing barriers to advancement such as a lack of childcare. So without getting into politics or anything, I think a lack of childcare is one of the main reasons why women get held back because if you have to choose, you're going to have to not go into work because your caretaker called out sick.
So having appropriate childcare available, especially for women as primary caregivers in many cases could do a lot to removing that barrier to advancement. Also ensuring as a practice group leader, I try to make sure that all of the associates, whether they're male or female are staffed equally on matters and that there's no gender preference for any particular person, that the mentorship I think historically has been easier for males, or male partners may feel less awkward about asking a male associate out for a meal than they would be for a woman associate.
So it just involves being a little bit creative and taking the female associate out for coffee, if they're uncomfortable with taking them out later in the day, or coming up with ways to equalize the mentoring opportunities.
Justin Bernbrock:
Rachel, following up on a point you just, just of came up for me, as you were sharing it, you're inviting a woman associate or woman partner to coffee rather than drinks later at night for fear of the perception. But is that something that collectively as leaders and partners of law firms, we should try to break through and just say, "If you're having a reservation about inviting someone to whatever that thing is, if you would invite a man to that, then you've got to get through whatever your hang up is with inviting a woman to that and you need to just be equal?" I mean, should we just be breaking through that?
Rachel Erlich Albanese:
Yeah, in an ideal world? Absolutely. But we don't live in an ideal world. And this is a time when I think people are skittish about being perceived as doing something inappropriate and getting in trouble for it. So I think it's baby steps. It's getting people comfortable with mentoring associates of the other sex if they don't already. And that goes for women too, because I think some women only want to mentor women associates and that's not good either.
Justin Bernbrock:
Right. So Cullen, how about you? Projecting to the future and how collectively we can work to improve the conditions for women attorneys.
Cullen Drescher Speckhart:
In terms of improvements, one big thing for me is helping women feel confident, actually helping anyone feel more confident because my observation is that confidence is just such a key ingredient to successful client relationships and effective advocacy and business development and leadership advancements, and the list goes on. I think that sometimes, there's a belief that once you get enough experience, enough seniority, then confidence just appears. And I think entirely differently about it.
I think that confidence is a skill that you can pursue and master for yourself, no matter how young or old you are, or your level of experience, and maybe it's like learning a language or an instrument or something. So one thing that I've done at Cooley with the help of our Women's Initiative is to lead a team in designing and creating a leadership training platform that focuses on confidence.
It's a whole program that's designed around effective public speaking and developing a personal brand and overcoming imposter syndrome. And what is the connection to mapping out a successful career path is to remember that no matter what, you're always in control of it, take an active role in designing the career that you want, which does not have to involve a straight line through the ranks of big law. If that is what you want, fantastic. A lot of people do, but if things start to feel not quite right, if something feels off or out of alignment with your values, your preferences, and your sensibilities, then perhaps your instincts are trying to tell you something that needs to change.
And I'll tell you something of which I'm absolutely certain, which is that if I had decided to stay and tough it out in those very early years when I was miserable, I would never be on this podcast sharing the microphone with Rachel, because my instincts were right in saying that my path to success was not there. It was somewhere other than where I was at the time and the path that my instincts took me to, learn by doing and build a practice and lead a team, I've dealt with hard issues. Now so many years later, it's exactly those skills that I developed from a very young age that are helping me in all of the roles that I currently have at Cooley. I'm very, very grateful for that non-linear path.
Justin Bernbrock:
Thank you both so much for the time. I will ask one very last question quickly. If you were not a restructuring lawyer and assuming no limitations, world without end, what would you be doing?
Cullen Drescher Speckhart:
I would be a professional horse jumping equestrian.
Justin Bernbrock:
That's a good one. Rachel?
Rachel Erlich Albanese:
I would be a preschool teacher who is also a florist.
Cullen Drescher Speckhart:
I love it.
Justin Bernbrock:
That's great. Well, again, truly, thank you both so much for the time and for sharing your thoughts on a very important topic.
Cullen Drescher Speckhart:
Thank you, Justin. Thank you, Catherine. Thank you so much, Rachel.
Rachel Erlich Albanese:
Thank you, Cullen, Justin, Catherine, this was such a treat.
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