Clifford Chance

Rina went from banking lawyer to founding a business that is dedicated to helping create more inclusive workplace cultures.

After training as a lawyer in the US, Rina joined Clifford Chance’s London Banking practice in 2000, where she also qualified as an English law solicitor. This proved invaluable when advising banking clients such as Goldman Sachs on major global transactions, typically leveraged buyouts by private equity firms.

“It was an exciting period. My first time working in London, practising in one of the top firms in the world. It was great for my development,” she says, adding that teamwork was a key feature. “Everybody within the team knew exactly what they needed to do and within that context we had a lot of autonomy.”

Five years on, while still enjoying the intensity of her role, she was beginning to think that it left little time for anything else in her life. She realised that “the commitment and sacrifice required from me to get what I wanted from my career was more than I could give”.

In 2005, she joined the in-house team at European bank ING as a legal director, advising on banking transactions – from strategic considerations to legal and reputational risks. As her career at ING flourished, Rina became involved in a number of areas highly relevant to her current area of expertise. These included designing and delivering legal training, coaching and mentoring, and becoming a founding member of the diversity and inclusion committee.

Then, after nearly a decade at ING, Rina felt she was reaching a turning point. “Did I want to stay on this path for the rest of my career? Or do something more personal that I felt passionate about?”, she explains. Having enjoyed empowering women through her mentoring and coaching, she decided this was something she wanted to pursue further. She also began to reflect on the way big organisations work, noting how they favoured a relatively narrow ‘type’, while those who do not fit the precise mould tended to make much slower progress.

Rina founded Voice At The Table in 2013, finally leaving ING and the corporate life behind her in 2015. Voice At The Table helps organisations ‘tap into the diversity of their people with consulting and training in diversity and inclusion’. While the focus was initially on delivering training, talks and workshops for companies, Rina started realising “that while these activities did broaden horizons for people, they weren't impacting on the culture of the organisation”. A reset was required and Voice At The Table now focuses on ‘how to build inclusive cultures by making leaders recognise the value of difference’. This varies from raising awareness about the benefits of diversity to developing strategies and diagnostics to implement and measure it. Put simply, Rina believes a lack of diversity and inclusion in an organisation is a waste of talent and opportunity. By only promoting a narrow band of thinking and attributes, she believes that organisations are missing out, particularly as the world around them is changing so quickly. “Black Lives Matter quickly made people recognise more about the perspective and experience of their black colleagues, and made organisations want to put diversity and inclusion consulting at the forefront of their organisation,” says Rina.

She believes that, for law firms, the key benefits of diversity and inclusion are twofold. The first is around retaining and developing talent, which is vital as “today’s graduates are far more savvy. They look upwards and if they don’t see themselves in those at the top, they move on”. The next benefit relates to the lawyer’s role as adviser, “to better understand your client, you’ve got to offer a diversity from within, a perspective that takes into account different views and experiences”, she explains.

Rina welcomes Clifford Chance’s progress in this sphere, including the recent publication of the firm’s Inclusion Report. She remains a keen member of the alumni network, keeping in touch with friends and colleagues across the world, lockdowns permitting.

Any advice Rina might give her younger self would, she says, be wasted. “I’d never have listened,” she laughs. But her views on the future of legal firms are all about listening. She believes that big law firms have actually always had a diversity in gender, race, geography and thought. “The key is to unlock its value and that begins with listening,” she concludes. With Voice At The Table busier than ever, organisations are clearly keen to hear what Rina has to say.