Michelle Wimes

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Chief Diversity and Professional Development Officer

Ogletree Deakins

 

 

Kansas City, Missouri

 

 

 

Interview Transcript

 

PAMELA: Hi, my name is Pamela DeNeuve and welcome to Lawyer of the Week. I am very pleased today to introduce our guest, Michelle Wimes, who is the Chief Diversity and Professional Development Officer of Ogletree Deakins Nash Smoak Stewart PC. This segment, we’re going to be talking about Professional Development. We’re going to be talking about Diversity and Inclusion, and we’re going to be talking a little bit about gender equity and so forth, and Michelle really is an individual who’s on the front lines of this. We recently did a study. We’re actually going to be doing a white paper on Professional Development and the important part that they play in being the backbone of these law firms.

And let me tell you a little bit about Michelle. Michelle P. Wimes, as I said, serves as the Chief Diversity and Professional Development Officer for Ogletree Deakins Nash Smoak Stewart PC, one of the nation’s largest labor and employment law firms. In her role, Michelle leads the firm’s efforts to attract, develop, retain, promote, and advance a diverse group of attorneys across the firm’s national platform of 52 offices in the US, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Additionally, Michelle leads the firm’s Attorney Training and Professional Development efforts. She is based in Ogletree Deakins’ Kansas City office. Michelle has extensive experience in delivering strategic leadership, client development, and talent management programming. She is deft at implementing change management strategies necessary for comprehensive and effective Diversity and Inclusion and Professional Development initiatives and programming.

Previously, Michelle practiced law for 14 years, where she handled all aspects of employment litigation while serving as an equity partner at a Kansas City-based firm. She focused on matters involving employment discrimination, harassment, and civil rights issues, while representing clients before the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, The Missouri Commission on Human Rights, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, as well as local, state, and federal courts. Later, Michelle spent four years on a senior management team of a premier AM Law 100 firm as the Director of Strategic Initiatives, spearheading Diversity and Inclusion strategies in programming for lawyers across nine offices in the United States and Europe.

Prior to a career in law, Michelle was an elementary and middle school teacher in Kansas City. She received a BA from the University of Missouri and performed graduate work at the University of Seville in Spain and undergraduate work at the University of Xalapa in Veracruz, Mexico. Due to her studies and extensive legal work in Latin America, she is also fluent in Spanish. Michelle earned her law degree, with trial advocacy honors, from Tulane Law School. She is the proud wife of federal district court judge Brian C. Wimes and the mother of three lovely daughters, Sydney, Gabrielle, and Saige.

Welcome, Michelle.

MICHELLE: Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here.

PAMELA: Yes. You just have such a background in history, and not only Professional Development, but many initiatives on Diversity and Inclusion, and civil rights, and this is just so wonderful to have you as our spokesperson today.

MICHELLE: Well, thank you. I really appreciate you inviting me to participate and I’m looking forward to our discussion today.

PAMELA: Okay. Let me ask you our first Lawyer of the Week question: when and what made you decide to become a lawyer?

MICHELLE: Oh my goodness. I would say that goes back to the time I was probably 9 or 10 years old and I remember being in a Dairy Queen with my mom and there was a little girl- a little young black girl that was right in front of me in line- and she was not with a parent or an elder. She was waiting to be served and the lady behind the counter just kept ignoring her. And so, she took a white woman that came up behind us and she just was ignoring the girl, and I remember speaking up and saying, “Look, she was here before we were. She was here before this woman who you just took and you should be serving her.” And I was 9 or 10 and this little girl was probably- I don’t know- six or so, five or six- and I remember my mom saying to me as we left that Dairy Queen and after the little girl was served next, she said, “Wow! You really stood up for that little girl.” She said, “You have a knack for that. You should really consider being a lawyer- becoming a lawyer one day.”

And so that was the first time that the seed was planted for me, was, you know, the ripe age of 9 or 10. And then I remember telling my mom, you know, “Um- well, can’t I just skip the whole law school thing? I think I want to be a judge.” And my mom was like, “No, unfortunately, you can’t. You have to, you know, pass the bar. You have to become a lawyer and then, you know, you can become a judge.” So for the longest, I remember telling my mom, “Well, there’s two things in life I want to be. I want to be a judge and a cheerleader.” I ended up becoming, you know- I did do cheerleading in school, but then I married a judge.

PAMELA: That’s wonderful. I’m just curious- tell us a little bit about when you went to Mexico as- what? It was as graduate work?

MICHELLE: Yeah. Well, I went to Mexico as an undergraduate student and then I studied abroad in Spain- in Seville, Spain- the year after I graduated doing graduate work. And both of those opportunities came about because of mentors and sponsors that I had in my college. I was majoring in Spanish and Communication Studies. I had a joint degree that I was pursuing and, you know, I had wonderful professors of the Spanish language and literature, and both of them- one of them was the head of the department. The other one was a tenured professor, and the tenured professor has since passed and he was just such a wonderful man- Dr. Richards. And I remember him saying that, “Look, we have this group that we go to Mexico, you know, every summer and it gives you the opportunity to spend seven, eight weeks there. And really, you’re being taught by Spanish professors. I don’t teach the courses, but you know, we have, you know, Native-born speakers speaking, and it’d be a great opportunity for you to just kind of, you know, dab your toe in the water and just kind of see what a study abroad experience would be like.”

And so, that’s what I did. I went with a group of college students. There were about, I want to say there were about 20-25 of us, and we had a chaperone, and it was a wonderful experience because again, I stayed with a family- with a mom and her daughter- Monica was the mom and Carla was- no, Monica was the daughter and Carlo was the mom. She was a single mom and I suppose she was taking in foreign exchange students to, you know, to make some extra money.

PAMELA: Sure.

MICHELLE: It was a fabulous experience because we traveled all throughout Mexico. We went to school every day. You know, we were taught by Spanish professors there. And so, that was the summer I think between my sophomore and junior year of college. And then when I graduated, the department head said, you know, “Well, if you really want to become truly fluent, you’re gonna need more than just an eight-week program. So you really need to spend, you know, a year abroad.” And I said, “Okay, but I don’t want to do that until after I graduate,” because I was so concerned- I had a double major and I needed to get all my credits in, and I didn’t want to take a year off. And so I said, “I’ll do it after I- how about I do it after I graduate and I’ll do it as part of Graduate Studies?” And he’s like, “Great. That’s great.” So they picked two students every year to go for this particular foreign exchange program.

And so it was- I remember it was me- and Ricardo was my colleague, who was a junior at the time. Either a junior or senior himself. And so, we went together and it was a fabulous experience. Again, we went to the University of Seville in Seville, Spain, which was the sister city, ironically, to Kansas City, Missouri. So that was a big deal to be from Kansas City. [ ] It was wonderful because normally, like when I was in Mexico, nobody knew where Kansas City was. They were like, “Oh. Are you from LA? Are you from New York? Are you from Chicago?” They knew the big cities, but they didn’t know Kansas City. So I felt like a little bit of a celebrity because everybody knew where Kansas City was and it was fabulous. So yeah, that was my experience there. I spent a year there studying Spanish language and literature. I took art classes. I took art history classes. I took literature classes, history classes and it was fabulous.

PAMELA: Oh, really? That’s wonderful. And then, you know, you began to practice law and you practiced law for what, 14 years?

MICHELLE: Uh huh.

PAMELA: What made you begin to work in Professional Development and Diversity and Inclusion?

MICHELLE: So, you know, I practiced, like you said, for 14 years and worked my way all the way up from summer associate at my first firm that I went to right after law school all the way up to equity partner at a firm here in Kansas City. And I had a lot of wonderful experiences but at the end of it, I just really lost my passion for practicing law, so to speak. And so, I was looking around and looking for opportunities where I could leverage the knowledge that I still had because I felt like, you know, look I’ve been successful. I know what the practice of law takes, especially in a private law firm. So, how can I leverage and utilize experiences that I have had to help other people?

And what I recognized was, from the Bar Association work that I had done- I was a member at the Jackson County Bar, which was an affiliate of the National Bar Association in the [ ] and we had done scholarship programs for minority law students. We had done pipeline and mentorship programs and things like that. And I really enjoyed that. That was part of the extra curricular work that I really, really loved. And so, the opportunity came up to interview at my former firm- at Shook Hardy & Bacon- as their Director of Strategic Initiatives and I jumped on it because I said, “This is right down my alley. I’ll get to mentor younger attorneys. I’ll get to develop programming that helps them to be successful. At the same time, I’ll get to utilize the experiences that I’ve had as a practicing lawyer, being creative.” And the rest is history. I’ve never looked back.

PAMELA: Wow, that’s really great. Now, how long have you been in Professional Development now?

MICHELLE: I have been- well, I’ve been with Ogletree- it will be seven years in September, so I’ve been on the Professional Development side formally for almost seven years. I have been not practicing law now for almost ten years. The initial role that I had- I was formerly assigned to Diversity and Inclusion- I did a lot of Professional Development work within that because I feel strongly, as you and I have chatted before, that you can’t really do Diversity and Inclusion without doing Professional Development and Talent Management work because they go hand in hand. So even though I did that informally at Shook, it wasn’t until I came to Ogletree that I had it as part of my full-time responsibilities, that it became a formal job assignment for me.

PAMELA: Yes. I have been so impressed with the changes that Ogletree Deakins has been making, so could- let’s start off talking about what your firm is doing for gender equity.

MICHELLE: Yes, absolutely. Well, I will tell you- we have a very active Women’s Initiative- it’s called ODWIN, as in Ogletree Deakins’ Women’s Initiative, and it’s led by one of our shareholders here in the Kansas City office- her name is Kerri Reisdorff- she and I work very closely together- and we have just done a number of things. One of the things that I think has been very important is making sure that we have policies and practices in place that really help working moms because we recognize- I mean, I had three children myself, and trying to be an attorney and balancing all of that was very difficult at times. And so the firm has done, I think, a very good job of recognizing the fact that we need to have policies that are flexible. We need to have policies that encourage our women lawyers to be engaged and help them to be successful.

So a couple of the things that we’ve done is one, we have this active Women’s Initiative that I just talked about. So they host conversations around Diversity and Inclusion and women- we had a lean in conversation when Sheryl Sandberg published her book a few years back where we talked about some of the barriers that women face and what can we- what could we do to support women lawyers? Then we created a Reduced Hours Advisors program. And what that is is we had two women lawyers who were designated as Reduced Hours Advisors. And what they do is they work with women who are on a part-time or reduced hours schedule- and it’s not just women. We have men that are working reduced hours schedules, as well.

And so, they act as the go-between between those people working the reduced hours schedule and the supervisors of those folks, so that if there are ever any issues that come up or any problems of any sort, that they can be the conduit for receiving those kinds of issues and helping both parties to resolve it so that the working situation for the women and men who are on a reduced hours schedule is optimal, right? And so that they have a good experience. So that was one thing that we did pretty early on.

Another thing we did was, you know, when I first came to the firm, there really wasn’t a way for women to be an equity shareholder- so at the very top of the Hierarchy, I guess in law firms, are equity shareholders or equity partners- and everybody else could work a reduced hours schedule but not equity shareholders, ironically enough. And so, that was one of the first things that we did was we said, “Okay. We need to make it so that every single person, whether you’re an associate, or of counsel, or a non-equity shareholder, that if you want to go on a reduced hours schedule, you have the ability to do that.” So we- that was one of the first things that we did when I got here.

And then we did things like, in this past year for instance, recognizing that sometimes when women come- and men- come back from parental leave, it’s really difficult to ramp back up quickly because you’ve given away all of your casework for the most part because you know you’re gonna be gone for three months. And so it’s kind of hard to get back in and get the work that you need. And so, one of the things that we did was we said, “Okay, we’re gonna give people a ramp-up period.” And so, we passed a Ramp-up policy, which basically says that when you come back- first of all, we extended our parental leave. So now instead of 12 weeks, we now give people 16 weeks, which is great. Four months instead of the three months that we had initially and so we said after that four months, we’re also going to give you a period of time to ramp back up and reduce your billable hour requirement at the same time, and your pay will not be impacted by that. So you come back- I think the policy is that you have an additional four weeks after that- four to six weeks after that- to work this 80% schedule with no reduction in your pay whatsoever.

PAMELA: Wow.

MICHELLE: Yeah, that was a wonderful thing that we just had and we got so many notes- our Managing Shareholder, myself, we got our Director of Human Resources that we also worked with to get this done and our Chief Operating Officer was integral in designing this, as well. And I know that each of us just received quite a bit of, you know, just calls and emails from folks who were so grateful, you know, to have this kind of, I think, cutting-edge, forward-thinking policy that recognizes the real-life realities of people who are struggling to integrate work and life and struggling to balance it all. So that’s another thing that we’ve done. I would say – we’ve been really great about promoting women into leadership positions. We now have on our Board of Directors- we have three women who are on our 9-person Board of Directors, so we have over 30%, which is unheard of.

PAMELA: Wow. That is unheard of. More like 3%.

MICHELLE: Exactly. And I know there’s been a lot of, you know, organizations, both internationally and in the states, who have been promoting, “Well, let’s get to that 20% mark.” Well, we’re- we greatly exceeded that- we’re already at 33%. I think the other piece is that we have a Compensation Committee that determines our lawyers’ compensation at the end of each year. That committee, we now have two women that are serving on that committee, as well, so that- so we have, you know, I think that’s 45-50 percent diversity there. So I think we have done a good job in terms of equity and looking at our policies and making sure that they are responsive to the needs of the day, looking at our demographic representation of women on our highest levels of leadership within the firm, providing women with a forum to have candid conversations when things are- when we have issues, because every firm- no firm is perfect. No company is perfect. You’re inevitably, you know, you’re going to have issues.

And so, you need to have a forum in order to address those and we recently created a women’s ombudsman program, as well, that’s led by one of our former women board members, who basically acts as a conduit for any time people have a conflict with each other. And I’m not talking about like a legal issue where people feel like they’ve been discriminated against or harassed or something like that. We have a different mechanism for that. But this is, maybe you have a conflict with someone over a particular case or you have a conflict what just, you know, some kind of conflict, you can go to our ombudsman- ombudswoman, I should say- and she will help you to figure out how to address that within the structure of the firm. And so, who should be brought in to that, give you some potential solutions of ways that you can resolve that issue amicably with the other party. And so, it’s- that’s been well-received in the firm, as well.

PAMELA: Now you also have something for moms- traveling moms. The- is it called The Stork? Or what is it?

MICHELLE: Oh, yes. Thank you for reminding me of that. Yes, we have the Milk-Stork Program. Yes, and that was something, again, that we just signed up for this year, that was as a result of the Ramp-up policy. We signed up with an organization- and oh my gosh- whose name is slipping me right now, but Milk Stork. I think it is the Milk Stork Organization- and so, what they do is they allow for the shipping of breast milk while a woman is out on maternity leave, or when they come back from leave and they’re working and they’re on business trips and things of that nature, and they need to ship their breast milk back to their babies, right? Well, this gives them the opportunity to do that while they’re traveling.

They also, through this company that we partnered with, they also have mentors that they assign to women who have come back from leave so that they can have a buddy system and have somebody to talk to to, you know, just help them work through various issues that they may have, kind of re-integrating back into the workforce. We also have, in each one of our offices, too, we try to make sure that we have a room where women can go and pump during the day if they need to, so there’s a confidential place for that to happen, rather than having to go to the bathroom, which is what I used to have to do. Shut my door and put a sign on my door and hope that nobody walked in. So we try to have that in our offices, as well, so yeah, thank you for reminding me of that.

PAMELA: This is wonderful. Now, what is Ogletree Deakins doing for Diversity and Inclusion?

MICHELLE: Oh my gosh. Okay, so for Diversity and Inclusion, we have a number of things. I’ll start with, we have five wonderful- what we call Business Resource Groups, and those are groups that are led by shareholders, generally, within our firm, and so we have one for our African-American lawyers, for- I mentioned ODWIN, which is our women lawyers. We have one for our Asian-American lawyers, our Hispanic lawyers, our LGBT lawyers. And then we have one for OD Family, which is what I just kind of chatted with you about, people who are transitioning back from leave and they need some support. So OD Family just got started at the end of last year. So it’s a fairly new Business Resource Group. But the one thing I love about that is that these are folks who are championing the advancement, promotion, development of the lawyers that are in their group.

And so, we have all kinds of wonderful things like ODWIN. We just started a sponsorship program that just kicked off in the second quarter and what that program is is it’s partnering our non-equity women shareholders with really influential leaders in the firm, rainmakers in the firm, equity shareholders who already have great books of business, and asking them to be sponsors, asking them to provide opportunities for these women lawyers to help them make that last leap from non-equity to equity, right? And so, we’ve got that program that’s happening through ODWIN, we have a mentorship program that’s happening through our ODBAR, which is our Black Attorney Resource Group.

And what that program is designed to do is to eliminate isolation that our black lawyers feel, because- we have 53 offices. We just- you said 52 on the bio. We just opened another one last week. We are growing. So we’re in Portland, Maine now. We opened, I think, with four lawyers. And so the thing is, our offices don’t tend to be huge offices. You know, we could we could have anywhere from five lawyers, as I said in Portland, Maine, to, you know, 30, 40, 50 lawyers. It just kind of depends, but we don’t have any one office that has a hundred lawyers or 200 lawyers like a lot of firms do.

And so, what happens as a result of that is, that you do have situations where you may have only one black associate, or you may have only one black of-counsel. And so, they might feel a little isolated from other, you know, attorneys in the firm because they don’t see people who look like them on a day-to-day basis. And so, this mentorship program is really designed to partner them with other African-American attorneys and other offices, mainly shareholders, who can be a listening ear for them.

So if they happen to be having some Professional Development issues, or maybe there’s- they don’t have a social network where they are and they just need an ear to- someone to listen to and someone to talk to, or maybe they’re not really comfortable with where they are developmentally-wise and they need some help, you know, developmentally. Like recommendations for what they should be doing. This mentor is designed to be the resource for them to help them personally, professionally, socially. And so, that’s another great program that we launched last year that I think is doing pretty well.

**STAY TUNED FOR PART 2 OF OUR INTERVIEW WITH MICHELLE**

 

Links for Michelle:

LinkedIn Profile

Ogletree Deakins

Social Media:

Twitter: @WimesMichelle

Instagram: mwimes

 

 

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