When Georgia Dawson was elected senior partner of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer last fall, she made history as the first woman to lead a Magic Circle firm. Now, as she’s taken over the role and split her time between Singapore and London in order to do so, she’s at the head of one of the industry’s most interesting firms. In this interview, which took place on International Women’s Day, she reflects on the welcoming reception her fellow Big Law leaders have shown her, contemplates Freshfields’ big splash in Silicon Valley and lessons from a year of remote work, and explains why she thinks there’s room—and need—for lawyers to have a little fun in their practice.
This conversation has been lightly edited.
Ben Seal: We’ve perhaps never had a time when leadership was more important across all walks of life, including within law firms. How do you view the responsibility of leadership and how are you planning to orient yourself and the firm as its senior partner?
Georgia Dawson: There are numerous leaders across a law firm. All partners play a leadership role in looking after their teams and bringing people together and looking after them through challenging times like we’re experiencing at the moment. I think our partners on the business services side, our senior leaders, have really risen to the challenge. The key has really been providing clarity day to day on working arrangements and the future outlook to the extent we can provide it. While everything else is a bit less certain around them, we can provide that sense of direction and common purpose about where the business is going, where their practice is going. The other thing has been keeping people engaged and motivated, so we’ve probably had more communication across the firm than we would typically have.
BS: How are you working to shape the firm’s direction?
GD: There’s a lot about the way the firm already runs that is doing well. We have a great client base, we have very strong practice areas, we have great people, so those things I wouldn’t want to change. I want to preserve those things that are special about us. Looking forward, it’s about what we need to do to make us even stronger. It might be more tech adoption or more agility in our practices. It might be being more creative in our use of office space. What do we need to be doing to take the firm into the next phase?
BS: Given that it’s Women’s History Month, I’m interested in your thoughts on what it means to be among a relatively small group of female heads of major law firms and the first among the Magic Circle. What does that mean to you personally?
GD: The group of women leaders of other law firms are an unbelievably warm, welcoming and supportive group. Once my election became public a very large number of them were in touch and offered to share their experience, which I took up in every instance. They’ve been incredibly helpful and offered the opportunity for an ongoing dialogue about shared experiences, shared challenges. I’m very fortunate to have that very warm welcome to the role.
In terms of being a woman leader more generally, entering into the senior partner election it wasn’t something I was particularly focused on. I was simply focused on the issues that I thought the firm needed to debate and the direction that I thought we should be taking into the future. Subsequent to the election result coming out, the fact that I am a woman leader has become one of the main points of discussion, certainly in the media, and so it does make you more conscious of it than you might have been. I’d like to get to the point where we’re simply focused on leadership qualities and the results that are being delivered, but I recognize that we’ve got a long way to go. It’s good to see that in other firms there are more women running for leadership roles.
BS: Does it feel like the tide is turning in that way?
GD: There’s still work to be done, but I’m full of hope that in the law generally we will see more diverse leadership coming through so that we are more appropriately reflecting our populations as well as our communities. As part of that, we’ve recently announced our diversity and inclusion commitments for the next five years and there’s a real focus there on improving D&I across the whole firm, but a specific focus on leadership, because role models are just so important to driving change and allowing people to see a path in their organization.
BS: We’ve heard so much during the pandemic about the difficulty of working from home with school-age children. What do you think the past year has taught us about the challenges that women, and especially mothers, face succeeding in Big Law? Are there meaningful lessons that law firms can take forward from all this?
GD: It’s been tough on our male and female colleagues. There’s certainly studies out there suggesting that in certain families the responsibilities have fallen more squarely on the shoulders of women and that’s an additional challenge when they’re already facing demanding jobs and client demands. In terms of lessons, hopefully this is not the way of the future where we all have to homeschool our children, but what’s been useful for us is having an open dialogue within teams about people’s commitments outside of client work. We were reasonably good at that before, but there was a bit more of a divide between personal and work lives. And being beamed into everybody’s home office has changed that and made everybody more aware. It has brought some of these personal aspects of life to life. So that communication and being a bit more transparently human is something that I think would be great for us.
We’ve had flexible and agile working policies at Freshfields for a very long time, but I think we’ve really lived it in the past 13 months or so and I’d like to see that continue. There are real benefits to agility as well as being in the office. Finding a balance is the challenge. I’d like to see that continue so we can help families and all colleagues to have independence and flexibility.
We’ve been focused on mental health for a while and had a great dialogue across the firm. But the importance of that and the need for that has come to life. We’ve set up a well-being hub on our intranet where people can access a range of material, including apps that we’ve provided. So those three things I would hope are here to stay in terms of improved overall working environment.
BS: Firms say all the time that their culture is what sets them apart. How would you describe the Freshfields culture, and what are you doing to maintain it through such challenging circumstances?
GD: It’s very hard to reduce these things to a few words. In my experience the firm is focused on excellence in terms of the quality of what we produce, but we’re not particularly hierarchical. We have a relatively flat internal environment on the whole, which I think allows all team members to contribute to mandates. The firm’s very supportive of people’s development, and really wants people, whether they make a long-term career at the firm or not, to develop and succeed. And one of the overriding things on a global basis is collaboration—getting the right people around the table to help a client find a solution to an opportunity or challenge it’s facing.
I think there’s a sense of fun at the firm as well. I don’t think we take ourselves too seriously. We all give so much of ourselves to our jobs. Everybody at the firm loves their job, they love contributing in whatever function they might be performing. And the time commitment can be quite large at times. So you’ve got to make it a good place to work. You’ve got to make it fun.
BS: I’d like to hear your thoughts on the firm’s efforts in Silicon Valley thus far. How has that endeavor gone through the first several months?
GD: We’ve put a really phenomenal team together on the ground to be the first defining feature of what we’ve done in Silicon Valley. We’ve listened to clients about what they say they need and put a team together with the right skill sets to deliver on that. Clients have freedom of choice in who they select and we’ve been fortunate that since opening they have been choosing us. We’ve gotten really great mandates on the transactional side, IPOs, de-SPACs, advisory work on CFIUS or antitrust, and also on the disputes side as well. It’s a key pillar of our U.S. practice and is being developed as such. One of the three key pillars, the other two being New York and Washington.
BS: More broadly, how does the firm intend to compete over the long term with the entrenched elite law firms in the U.S.?
GD: We’ve been developing U.S. business for a number of years and are really invested in the areas where our clients need us that are complementary to our global platform. It’s a combination of listening to what our clients’ needs are and playing to our strengths. Globally, we have leading practices in the M&A and transactional space, in antitrust and litigation, and we’re making sure we are building something in the U.S. that ties into that global platform. As with all law firms the focus is on talent and making sure we’re hiring and retaining and developing the leading lawyers of the future.
You might have seen that we have invested for the long term in office space in Silicon Valley. Given how the practice is doing so far and given what clients are telling us, I think we will continue to see growth in the U.S. practice and in Silicon Valley as well. The opportunities in the tech and life sciences space are significant and we are building a practice to meet them.
BS: The firm has announced efforts recently to reduce its environmental impact. Over the past year, firms have been very publicly considering the ways in which they operate as members of their communities. As Freshfields’ leader, what are your priorities in the coming years regarding the firm’s contributions to broader society?
GD: We had developed a pro bono program for many years that was up and running and very established by the time I got here 17 years ago. Similarly, regarding corporate social responsibility, we’ve had a range of programs all around the firm for many years. And on the environment, we were the first firm to commit to being carbon neutral, in 2007. So in a way I’m very fortunate because I’m inheriting a firm that’s very well set up and I just need to maintain that and take it to the next level.
We have what we call our responsible business program, which brings together pro bono, CSR, environment and diversity and inclusion, the idea being that there’s so much intersectionality between those different areas and we want to make sure that as a firm we can make more of an impact rather than dispersing our effort. It’s a very effective tool for maintaining focus across the firm. Our recently announced environmental targets set us up for making even greater strides over the next five years. Recognizing that the way we operate as a business has changed, we’re able to cut down our use of paper, cut down carbon resulting from travel, and by the end of this year we’ll eliminate our use of single-use plastics.
On pro bono, we’ve worked on some unbelievably impactful matters. They’re really rewarding. It’s one of my favorite parts of practice. In the U.S. our colleagues are currently working on matters involving women’s rights, LGBT+ rights, and projects focused on racial discrimination and things like the selection of juries and policing practices. We’ve had some COVID-related pro bono mandates around ventilator projects as well as a project around animal rights and animal welfare.
We’ve just announced our diversity and inclusion commitments and targets, and that’s a key part of being a sustainable business. We’ve made very clear as a leadership team that this is a key part of our strategy for the firm.
BS: What keeps you up at night?
GD: It’s largely time zone differences that keep me up at night—and then I sleep very well.
It’s been a really tough year on people. The disruption to routine, the stress of worrying about family and friends, the additional burdens of homeschooling if you happen to have children, losses of family members, and just the ongoing uncertainty about when you might be able to get back to something akin to what your life was like before, or be able to travel to see family. So for me personally, I haven’t seen my family in Australia in well over a year now, I’ve lost some family members in Australia and also in the U.K. on my husband’s side, and not being able to see family for an extended period of time has been quite tough. So the focus has got to be on making sure our people feel supported, motivated and engaged, because it’s a difficult time and doing what we can as an organization to ease that is really key.
