HRchat Podcast
Listen to the HRchat Podcast by HR Gazette to get insights and tips from HR leaders, influencers and tech experts. Topics covered include HR Tech, HR, AI, Leadership, Talent, Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Recognition, Wellness, DEI, and Company Culture.
Hosted by Bill Banham, Bob Goodwin, Pauline James, and other HR enthusiasts, the HRchat show publishes interviews with influencers, leaders, analysts, and those in the HR trenches 2-4 times each week.
The show is approaching 1000 episodes and past guests are from organizations including ADP, SAP, Ceridian, IBM, UPS, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Simon Sinek Inc, NASA, Gartner, SHRM, Government of Canada, Hacking HR, McLean & Company, UPS, Microsoft, Shopify, DisruptHR, McKinsey and Co, Virgin Pulse, Salesforce, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Coca-Cola Beverages Company.
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Podcast Music Credit"Funky One"Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
HRchat Podcast
Cultivating Diversity in the Legal Industry with Juan E. Zúñiga, Rimon Law
Imagine a legal landscape where diversity isn't just a buzzword, but the bedrock of practice—a scenario where the symphony of different voices shapes the law itself. That's the vision Juan E. Zúñiga, Managing Partner of Rimon Law, brings to the table in our latest discussion.
With a bicultural heritage fueling his work in international transactions, Juan illustrates how a background rich in diversity can be a powerhouse of success in the legal industry. As host Bill Banham and Juan unfold the layers of RImon Law's approach, they examine Rimon Law's groundbreaking economic model that champions transparency and equity, a stark contrast to the inner circles of larger firms.
Venture further into the heart of the legal world's diversity challenges and triumphs with stories that reveal the stark realities minority and women lawyers face, and the catalytic effect of leadership in cultivating an environment where diversity flourishes.
The second chapter of our dialogue shifts focus onto the influence of leadership in promoting diversity in the ranks and the necessity of mentorship for nurturing top-tier talent from underrepresented groups. Listen as Juan confronts head-on the biases remote workers wrestle with in the legal sector - contrasting the traditional emphasis on being physically present with the innovative, remote-first structure that Ramon Law embraced long before the pandemic reshaped the workplace.
If you enjoy this episode, check out HRchat episode 540 with Rimon Law's Tom M. White.
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Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello, this is your host today, bill Bannum. In this episode, we're going to hear from Juan E Zuniga, managing partner of Ramon Law, about culture within law firms. Listen to as he shares tips to attract more diverse candidates into smaller firms. Plus, he talks about the power of mentorship. Juan is an international transactions attorney who has worked on cross-border deals throughout the US, latin America and elsewhere. And, by the way, listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, I'd encourage you to check out HR Chat episode 540 with Ramon Law's Tom M White. Juan, it's my pleasure to welcome you to the HR Chat Show. Welcome.
Speaker 3:Thank you, bill, and I appreciate you having me and sharing your platform with us. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Beyond my reintroduction just a moment ago, why don't you take a couple of minutes and tell our listeners a bit more about you and what you get up to?
Speaker 3:Oh, my pleasure. Thank you, bill. And lawyer in the space of ERISA and employment matters. My role today is as managing partner, is to lead the law firm, and amongst other tasks that I have is to be intimately involved in recruiting, and a big focus for me is essentially creating a robust DEI platform, something that we didn't have at the firm previously, and so for the last year, we've actually put together a DEI committee that covers both the attorney experience but also for staff, including everyone from, say, paralegals to accountants to IT professionals.
Speaker 3:I've been a practicing lawyer for about 30 years, a little bit more than that by way of personal history. I was born in the United States, in Southern California, but I was raised in both Southern California and in Mexico, and my personal cultural heritage is very much like that. My life experience has been straddling the border between the US and Mexico and, of course, I'm fully bilingual, in English and Spanish, and my legal practice essentially is representing clients who are doing investments across the border, with a particular focus on real estate, and those investments can be a person in the US investing southbound into Mexico or perhaps somewhere else in Latin America, but also, vice versa, mexican and Latin clients who are investing into the US, and so, in that particular role that I play as a cross-border lawyer, I have to be a facilitator on a variety of different levels not just simply legal interpretation, but also cultural interpretation, linguistic interpretation, the interpretation and translation of business practices and habits. One of the things that I tell my clients is that if you're going to cross borders, do not expect to have the local system change for you or accommodate itself for you. You need to be agile and nimble and be able to accommodate yourself to what is the reality on the ground. And then again, that encompasses a variety of different aspects From a legal perspective, it could be corporate, it could be employment law, it could be tax law, it could be real estate law, it could be finance law, because the rules are different.
Speaker 3:And so one of the things that I actually appreciated, many, many years ago, I sat in on a forum with a colleague of mine.
Speaker 3:Her name is Elizabeth Flores, she practices out of Miami and she was in an alumni forum for us at Harvard Law School, and she said something that really resonated with me, bill, which was when you are bicultural, you have the ability to be able to be, I think, much more agile in the nuanced way of thinking, because you've got to be able to understand two different realities and harmonize them at the same time.
Speaker 3:So when we bring that into the DEI sphere, me as the managing partner, one of the things that I want to be able to do is to bring that sort of bi-cultural experience that allows me to think laterally in two different ways, so that I can appreciate the experience of my attorneys and my staff when it comes to those who are underrepresented, let's say, in the legal industry, and that can be women, that can be attorneys of color, that can be attorneys from the LGBTQ community, the prevailing and we can get into this a little bit more, but the prevailing sense is that the legal industry is not particularly diverse, and much less so in what we would call the big law universe, and so big law tends to be very, very skewed towards white and male domination at the ownership, partnership and management ranks, and some of the things that we're trying to do at Ramon is to break down those barriers.
Speaker 4:Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at HRGazettecom. And now back to the show.
Speaker 2:Okay, thank you very much. So, just continuing on from that in terms of bringing that bi-cultural experience into the firm, then Can you maybe share how Ramon fosters principles of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging?
Speaker 3:Sure. So I think we have to step back and look realistically at the economic model that we bring to the table. That is different than what is typically the experience at big law, and our economic model is very transparent in the sense that there are sort of two very basic concepts for which an attorney gets compensated, and that is the origination, which is the clients that you bring to the firm the ones that you originate and the production, meaning how much do you actually work for a client? At other law firms there are more complicated and opaque compensation formulas that tend to reward networking politicking, internal clickishness, if you want to call it that that tends to skew economics more in favor of for lack of a better term the insiders. And who are the insiders?
Speaker 3:At our firm we don't really have insiders and clicks and administration and bureaucracy.
Speaker 3:So what that allows us to do is, when we recruit for lawyers to join our firm, we are really looking at lawyers who can fit into that community and have a very transparent economic value bargain to bring to our law firm, and so what that means is we'll be looking at a female attorney or an African American attorney or a white attorney, all on the same basis, all on the same par, which is, what value do you add to the firm, as opposed to how well are you going to fit into some administrative or political click, which is how you climb the ladder at other law firms.
Speaker 3:So if you start with transparent economics, you're really going to create and foster a culture of inclusion, quite frankly, because what we're talking about is transparent economics lead to more community building and lead to more collaboration amongst lawyers in our environment, and so what that ends up is producing a very refreshing change of pace for underrepresented lawyers who are feeling excluded in their big law universe because they do not particularly participate in, say, management or administration or a particular click, and leave them economically disadvantaged. When the formula is paid out In our firm, those lawyers actually feel liberated, if you will, to practice in the manner in which they want and to develop their client base in the manner in which they want. So we kind of let lawyers have a lot more autonomy and less restriction from having to participate in what I'll call for lack of a better term the political game that plays out in big law atmosphere.
Speaker 2:Okay, thank you very much. So what I took from that, then, is, while diversity is absolutely key, so is cultural fit, certainly within your organization. That culture fit, the mindset that needs to be on par as part of that initial attraction and onboarding process. Would you agree with that?
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely Absolutely, by all means. First, we're looking at quality of lawyering. Excellent professionals develop legal spiggles and experience, but we certainly do require people who are both entrepreneurially minded in the way they practice law and also, like you're saying, bill, culturally friendly to our notion that what we're trying to do is to build community and collaboration across our platform. And so when we find that combination of economic vitality, entrepreneurialness and collaboration minded spirit, on top of the fact that, as a default, we require excellent lawyers I mean top quality lawyers and top quality clients we end up with a very inviting community so that it's welcoming to people from all types of backgrounds, because it's again dependent on the transparent nature of how we collaborate. And so what we're looking is building trust and bonding across our community, regardless of a person's background.
Speaker 2:Okay, thank you very much. So on this show we like to offer lots of tips, okay, lots of takeaway. So, in terms of that attraction, that recruiting piece, how would you recommend organizations can get better at attracting a diverse pool of candidates? I'm assuming part of your answer there is, of course, you've got the right culture, but the benefits and the salaries are totally important. To tell us a bit more about the best ways to attract a diverse pool of excellent candidates.
Speaker 3:Well, if I were to address your question with respect to my particular background right, it would be addressing the issue from a practicing lawyer who came up the ranks in large transnational law firms. The culture of those firms is based on a very different economic model than ours and one of the key tenants of that is you hire a lot of very, very young lawyers at very lucrative salaries and you work them to death. And there's also an implication in that formula that the work that those lawyers produce is essentially the profit base for the firm. But most of those lawyers like, say, 95% of those lawyers will never ascend the seniority ladder to becoming equity owners in that law firm. Most of them will eventually drop away or be terminated and move to, say, another law firm over time or set up their own practices or go work for government or go work as in-house lawyers for clients and whatnot. So when you've got a culture that has built in the notion of attrition at, say, a rate of 90 to 95% of your incoming class of lawyers, what you are doing is basically telling people you know, the first day when you start as a junior lawyer at some top level New York law firm is look around the room and the 20 other associates who are working with you and starting that same day with you, 19 of them will be gone by the time you know, 10 years into the practice. And so then the question becomes well, if there's 19 who are gone, who are you letting go and why? And who is surviving and why? And are you creating the conditions to allow underrepresented attorneys to actually ascend that ladder when that ladder becomes very steep and very narrow? In other words, the manner in which the structure is created disincentivizes opportunities for people to advance when you're underrepresented, and you see already at the top that it's dominated by when, and it's dominated by the cultural majority. So, for what it's worth I mean, if you're asking me to give tips about how to create the conditions to foster greater diversity, equity and inclusion it's almost like the model itself is broken and doesn't really give you the ability to do anything meaningful in the sense of diversity. Just because, just because it's inherently disincentivized to that. You know for what it's worth.
Speaker 3:There is, there's an organization called Leopard Solutions and they track trends in the legal industry, and during the pandemic there was an amazing amount of attrition of female lawyers away from private legal practice and large law firms and when they surveyed those female lawyers, what they found out was that they felt particularly undervalued, especially during the pandemic, when everyone had to work from home and they no longer had the ability to try and like, argue their case or assert their case to remain relevant in a large law firm by being physically present. There was a great quote that said male lawyers are promoted on potential and female lawyers are promoted on performance. And I say I'm sorry, female lawyers are promoted on performance, and I'd say that you could actually extrapolate that to other underrepresented lawyers as well, that we've got to work that much harder to be able to extend the ladder of seniority in firms, because the deck is stacked against us. So if you ask me for tips and tricks, I don't know what the tips and tricks are, because I think the cultural inertia of the large law firm institution doesn't even allow itself to scratch the surface of creating true diversity and equity and inclusion.
Speaker 3:When the model is the way it is, it's almost like you have to break the model, and that's one of the things that we've tried to do at Ramon is. But we're not going to be what's called the leveraged pyramid associate driven model. We're going to be focusing on partners, and by focusing on partners we can take anyone from any kind of background. So I don't have an answer to your question if you're talking about big law, because I think big law bill really is inherently created not to incentivize diversity, equity and inclusion. And in my experience and I'm pretty cynical about it, but in my experience my attempts while working at big law to try and create a culture of diversity were generally met by lip service at the end of the day. Now, granted, this is 15 years ago when I left big law and started my own practice, but in part I left because I didn't feel valued, I didn't feel appreciated, and part of it was the structure, the way the economic model is set up.
Speaker 2:This is very interesting. So you'd say that's a typical experience.
Speaker 3:Oh, overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly. If you look at, lawyers of my generation. Who would?
Speaker 3:have graduated law school in the early to late 90s, let's say, and maybe even before that.
Speaker 3:So these are people who are pretty much going to be at the peak of their legal career, say in their 50s, right, and you will see a whole raft of refugees from big law firms who felt that they were not valued and eventually, you know, excluded from the most important work that was necessary to get yourself promoted to the next level.
Speaker 3:So you know we're talking about whatever the 90s and 2000s, maybe even the early 2010s, when I was still involved in that universe.
Speaker 3:But there gets a point where you're looking around yourself and you're saying you know, how do I make myself, how do I make myself economically relevant in an economic formula that is weighted against me, right, when 19 of 20 of the incoming class of 1992 are going to be weeded out, how do you make yourself be the one that survives? It's not a fair equation and I'm sorry I don't have a good answer for you because I just think that's the way the legal industry is conducted. So what you end up seeing is a lot of lawyers who actually spin off and find a handful of their partners and create boutique law firms of, say, three or four or five lawyers who were friends and colleagues either in law school or through the associate ranks in big law, and that's where you're going to find, I think, a lot of your most talented minority and women lawyers in the profession who are in my age bracket, you know, in their 40s and their 50s. We just we found that it was not a level playing field and we had to leave.
Speaker 2:Well, I guess on the other side at least it fosters an entrepreneurial spirit, wanting to get your own thing going, you know, and showing the big guys that there are better ways of doing it. So you've got clients in real estate, in hospitality and various other sectors. I wonder if maybe you could point to other industries that are doing D I B better, who are getting it right, from the conversations that you have with your clients.
Speaker 3:Well, you know my experience there is that the clients who get it right are being led from the top, okay, and what I mean by that is they're being led by CEOs and C level executives who see diversity as a very, very valuable element within their organizations. It's really hard to lead from below when it comes to diversity, especially if the top doesn't really care. It really needs to start at the top, at the C level, that this is a set of values that we believe is going to make our business or our company or our or our enterprise more valuable, more robust, more agile, and I think there's a lot of value to thinking in those terms, because what diversity brings to the table is the ability to articulate a variety of different points of view. If everyone is thinking in the monolithic fashion, you're not going to be able to solve complex problems as efficiently. But when you're bringing diverse voices to the table and diverse experiences, you're going to be challenged more and sort of that pressure testing hopefully results in better products or better services or whatever.
Speaker 3:In my experience, I've really seen that leading from the top is what gets a much more inclusive environment within an organization, and that's what I'm trying to do at remote right. I'm trying to lead from the top. Not that we didn't have previously a set of values related to diversity, equity and inclusion. What I've just tried to do is sort of programatize it, institutionalize it, create opportunities for discussion around it. But I think that's all so important we need to have that on the table. So, yeah, I think top-down leadership is really what gets you the most results, bill.
Speaker 2:Okay, so top-down leadership, get that, but in terms of change, change can come from the bottom as well. Right? If you're hiring that diverse workforce, including younger folks, folks from different backgrounds they're inherently going to come with their own ideas, their own value systems, and that's going to create change within the organization, correct?
Speaker 3:Potentially, yes. I mean. I think the premise is solid, but it needs to be followed up by something else, which is not just simply hiring at the bottom, but promoting from the bottom and moving those people into positions of responsibility over time, basically giving them leadership roles. So, like I said before, in the big law firm model you can go hire 21st-year lawyers fresh out of law school and maybe you hire a good number of women and a good number of underrepresented community members. But if what you're doing is creating a structure in which only one of those 20 is going to survive to equity ownership at the end of the day, what does that get you? You've really got to be able to open the path to advancement, as well as hiring from the bottom, so that those voices from the bottom eventually rise to the top and make decisions and are engaged in being influence makers within an organization.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay. How important is mentorship to developing top talent, to bring those people through so they do get to be partners In your career. From what you've seen, how important is mentorship from leadership?
Speaker 3:I think it's very important. I think it's tremendously important, and that's always been part of the challenge is that, again, when I started in the early 90s and the mid 90s, there were very few women partners in big law firm ranks. There were very few Latino partners, african-american partners, and so there was almost a prevailing sense that aspiration was outside your grasp if you're coming from one of these communities, in part because there were not enough mentors who mirrored your experience, who could help guide you through the different nuances of how to advance, because some of those nuances are technical aspects of some legal issue, whether you're an employment lawyer or a real estate lawyer or whatever. But technical tasks, at least in a legal profession alone, are not enough. You need to be able to navigate the skills of negotiation with counterparties, you need to be able to handle client relationships, you need to have a particular expertise or be the go-to person in something so that you add value. I mean, that's something that I eventually learned over time was that my value add was going to be I was going to say, exploiting I don't particularly like that word in this context how about in maximizing the potential from my cultural background to create a niche for myself in a legal area where a few people had made their claim. Stick their flag, if you will. So those are things that mentors teach you over time and guide you.
Speaker 3:I think anyone needs guidance. When we're children growing up, we need the guidance of our parents. When we're young professionals going up, it's great to be able to have mentors to guide you through the profession and to guide you through an organization and understand what those organization's values are and to shepherd us through the course of advancement. So, yeah, mentoring is incredibly important. But mentoring for young, diverse lawyers is also hard to come by, just because, again, the balance is not there. We're not represented at the top. So who do we have mentor us that makes us that understands the experience that we're coming from? It's not a lot of opportunity there for mentoring in the legal industry.
Speaker 2:Okay, so so far we've spoken about the challenges faced by folks with different, diverse backgrounds. We've spoken about in terms of culture, race, gender. Here's another one for you that you mentioned earlier in the context of the pandemic, and that's people who work remotely. I'm just fascinated to know within the legal profession, are there any biases towards folks who prefer to be working remotely compared to folks who are, for one of a better word, prepared to come into the office and have lots of face time? Does that create any biases that you've seen?
Speaker 3:So I'm so glad you asked Bill, and the reason I say that with such emphasis is that our law firm, ramon, was established in what 2007, 2008. And it was established on a platform that was meant to leverage technology. In other words, we were meant to be remote by design. We were remote well before the pandemic and we grew to be over 100 lawyers with a remote experience, so when the pandemic hit, it did not require us to miss a beat whatsoever. Yet, growing up in big law, face time was incredibly important. I'll go back to the commentary that I was making before with respect to the associate experience and what we call the leveraged pyramid. If the economic model of big law is to hire a whole bunch of younger lawyers as associates and to make them work horrific hours as an associate, one of the things that you had to do to ensure advancement was to make sure that you were in the office all the time and that you were seen, and I remember there were experiences that what you felt you had to do was be in the conference room at 8 o'clock at night when the delivery food order arrives, so that everyone could see that you were still working at 8 o'clock at night having dinner in the office and working till 9.30 so that then you could go home and be back by 7.30. I mean, the notion was you had to be in the office all the time. This was your life, and so when the pandemic arrives, can you imagine the dislocation to that sort of set of cultural values? How would an attorney who is now working from home prove that they were working those horrific 12 billable hours a day? And it became a challenge for those attorneys to established the case that they're still economically relevant to their law firm organization. And so, for what it's worth. Now what you're seeing a lot in the law firm world is trying to get lawyers back to the office, because part of that model require that very expensive real estate, that very expensive office lease for 50 lawyers in, you know, downtown Los Angeles or Menlo Park or Seattle or Chicago or wherever. And when those offices went empty and lawyers started working from home, you ended up finding ways to be productive from home. And what you're seeing now is law firm stress by those very expensive leases, trying to get lawyers going to go back to the office who don't want to go. You know our model is well, don't go, because you work just as well from home anyway. I mean, I'm still talking to you from home today.
Speaker 3:So you know, the pandemic played out interestingly for the legal industry as well as other industries. But in our law firm it didn't affect us. It actually created a type of competitive advantage for us, because lawyers who realized, hey, you could actually be productive from home and who were dissatisfied with the pressures and stresses of big law came to us and saying, hey, how did you guys do this over the course of the last 10 years prior to the pandemic Can I join you? And we actually had incredible growth. We had 20% growth in 2020, 2021 and 2022 during the pandemic. I mean, we grew by leaps and bounds. So, yeah, it's been a very interesting ride to see what's happened in the legal industry as a result of the pandemic.
Speaker 2:Okay, thank you very much. We are almost at the end of this particular conversation already. Before we wrap up, how can folks connect with you and how can they learn more about Ramon Law?
Speaker 3:Well about Ramon Law. It's really basic. You can go to RamonLawcom, of course. You could go to various social media, particularly on LinkedIn. You can find my biography there as the managing partner for people who are lawyers and disaffected by the big law experience.
Speaker 3:Within our website, there is a white paper that was written by one of our founders.
Speaker 3:It's called Disrupt and, although I think it's a bit pretentious when one refers to themselves as a disruptor, I don't think disruption in an industry happens intentionally, so much as it happens by a variety of different factors, many of them out of our control, but the notion there was in writing that white paper to show how the history and the development of the economic model for big law has created a number of these circumstances that I was referring to previously, which result in many, many dissatisfied lawyers, and particularly dissatisfied and alienated lawyers of color, female lawyers, underrepresented lawyers, lgbtq lawyers, who just do not feel that they belong in their law firms.
Speaker 3:And so, by trying to create a different model, what we're trying to do at Ramon is to create a welcoming place for those lawyers who feel disaffected and alienated and who want to find a refreshing and liberating way to practice. So you can see that on the Ramon Law Website. Probably just go look for Disrupt and you'll find that white paper. And if anyone wants to look me up on LinkedIn, bill, I'm happy to have a discussion all day and all night. Diversity is one of my passions, personally and professionally. I think I've used it as a way to add value to my clients and to my career, and I'm glad that you have a site dedicated to it. This is wonderful.
Speaker 2:Well, this conversation has been wonderful, and it just leaves me to say for today, thank you very much for being my guest.
Speaker 3:It's been my pleasure. Bill, thank you for having me, and I look forward to any number of conversations in the future.
Speaker 2:And listeners. There will, of course, as always, be links in the show notes, and that just leaves me to say for today, as always, until next time, happy working.
