Eefan David: This series is brought to you with the kind support of Evershed Sutherland. As a global top 10 law firm, Evershed Sutherland provides legal services to a global client base. With more than 3,000 lawyers, the firm operates in over 70 offices in more than 30 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. The firm recognizes that having diverse talent across its business brings many benefits. It is committed to accessing a wide range of views, perspectives, and thinking in all of its teams, and in this way is building a culture of inclusion where each person feels able to be their true self at work and reach their full potential. Diversity and inclusion is fundamental to the firm’s purpose of helping their clients, their people, and their communities to thrive, and inclusive is one of its 5 values.
Meriam Nazih Al: Never let external anything define how you are going to forge your path. Decide it for yourself. I had to. You will be lucky if you have a sponsor or someone who speaks and is the vocal cords for you and lifts you up and pushes you forward and I did not have that. That to me was a blessing. To some it’s not, but for me, it taught me the following: define your career, define what you want. And the most important thing in doing that, when you decide what it is you want and go after it without any voices, just wash out those voices, all the naysayers, is choose the purpose. Define your purpose. And then it will define how you wish to proceed in your career. And let all the excess noise drown out, especially the negatives.
Eefan David: I’m Eefan David, and welcome to this 50 Faces focus series, which showcases the richness and diversity of inspiring people in the law. I’m joined today by Maryam Nazeem Al-Rashid, who is Global Co-Chair of International Arbitration and co-head of the Latin American Arbitration Practice at Evershed Sutherland. She’s based in the New York City area. She is also an adjunct professor of law at Fordham University Law School, a peer review board member of the American Review of International Arbitration, a committee member at the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice, and the holder of numerous other arbitrator roles. Her areas of focus are international dispute resolution, international trade and commercial arbitration, as well as human rights and international law. She’s also the president and co-founder of Illusionist Pictures, a film production company. Welcome, Miriam. Thanks for joining me today.
Meriam Nazih Al: Thank you, Aoifinn. It’s so nice to be here. I really appreciate it.
Eefan David: Well, you have a fascinating background, and I’d love if you could start with that, where you were born and what you studied initially.
Meriam Nazih Al: Absolutely. So I was born in Logan, Utah, of all places, from parents that came from Basra, Iraq, and Alexandria, Egypt, and met there. And that’s how I managed to be born in a random spot, being half Iraqi, half Egyptian, and being raised between Logan, Utah, and Iraq through my childhood. From there, I kind of grew into— from all the travel that I did throughout my life to the Middle East with my parents and my diverse background, really, of course, it was diverse, especially in Utah. We were all of, I think, 5 Arab families, 1 of 5 Arab families throughout all of Logan, Utah. Because of that initial upbringing and my parents really pushing the culture and travel and growth globally and thinking about the world, not just our little bubble, I think that’s where I developed the urge and the calling to work in international law. So that is how I moved myself into that space. I started out in Los Angeles working as a litigator for just 2 years out of law school and very quickly realized that it wasn’t for me because of the reasons I just stated and thought, what is the fastest way to get myself where I need to be in international law? And I thought of international law, not necessarily in international arbitration, but I thought of it very much in a broad scope. So that’s how I’ve managed to grow my practice is very broadly with human rights, business and human rights, international dispute resolution, investment arbitration. Commercial arbitration, all internationally based. And the fastest route was to go get a master’s in international and comparative law from George Washington University. And there is where I got my teaching experience at GW, teaching two courses for a master’s program while I worked full-time for a law firm, not in international law, but just to pay the bills. And while I also finished my master’s and my thesis at GW. So it was quite a ride until I finally got my foot in the door. At Crowe Mooring and their international arbitration team. And it all started from there, from— for the international law work as I grew my specialty.
Eefan David: Well, we are going to dig into a lot of aspects of that because that is just so rich and so fascinating a background. Can we go back first of all to your childhood, spending time between Logan, Utah and Iraq? That must have been an extraordinary juxtaposition of different backgrounds, different cultures. How did you adjust between them and what do you think you learned from that period that you bring to yourself as a professional now?
Meriam Nazih Al: Well, I’ll tell you, let me start with the last part of your question is without a doubt, you either learn one of two things or maybe both. You learn one of two things or both if you’re placed in that position. You learn resilience and adaptation very quickly, or you learn how to retract in unknown and uncharted territories, or you’re unadaptable to change. I was the former. I adapt very quickly to change. I am very actually excited by change. I don’t like complacency, and I believe very much, as we’ll talk through, I’m sure, more of our discussion, I consider myself rather resilient. Some days I want to fall and crumble to the ground, but I always pick myself up, and I think that’s what resilience is. So that’s sort of the back end of your question. The beginning of your question, how was it? I was born in Logan, Utah, as I said, my sister and I. My sister is living in California now with my family, my immediate family, and she’s a physician. And we were both born in Logan, Utah. My mother and my father finished their post-doctorate and their PhD— father, my PhD, my mother, post-doctorate in aerospace physics, and my father in industrial sociology. And when he finished, he said, well, time to go back to Iraq. My country’s paid for my education. I must go back and give back to my country. And my mother did not expect that. So it was sort of an existential crisis and also very practical crisis for my parents, my mother being Egyptian, my father being Iraqi, and no idea that during the Iran-Iraq War in the ’80s that my dad wanted to move his entire family back to a country where there was a very aggressive war happening at the time. I spoke English and I understood Arabic, but I was young and I would speak a few words in Arabic, but I understood all of it. But my communication at the age of 5, when we left Logan, Utah, back to Baghdad, Iraq, we moved to the capital, not to Basra. My primary language is English. So going to Iraq, I very quickly, quickly adapted back to Iraqi Arabic, right? The dialect, Iraqi dialect. And went to school there. And it was during, as I say, the Iran-Iraq War. My sister, I can’t recall if she adapted, but we both sort of pushed each other along. And what that did was expose me to, as I said, the changes, but exposed me to what I thought was my culture living in Logan, Utah within my very small little household, but to a broader culture I didn’t actually quite understand until I was there living day in, day out with all the geopolitics that were involved at the time with the war. You learned what a bomb meant. You went into bomb shelters. You heard what the bomb alarms would be when you were in school. And so you had to run to the house as quickly as you could with your family, or you’d go to the closest bomb shelter and then wait till you were let out and get back on with life. You just got on with it. So I think that that has contributed a great deal to the way that I approach work is there’s a lot of stumbling in the area of international law, a lot of unknowns, and I have to oftentimes myself And my team, we stumble across things, we fall to the ground, we get back up, brush ourselves off, and figure out how to just move on forward. Moving back was probably the hardest part. When we left Iraq, we actually escaped. Although I was an American citizen, my mother had a green card, my sister was an American citizen, my father was not. And moving back to the States from Iraq at the time would have been had the United States sent my father back because he did not have an appropriate visa. He did not have all the relevant legal material for it. At the time, of course, the U.S. Was very open to immigrants coming in and seeking asylum of any kind or saying, I can’t go back to my country because this is what will happen to me. Today, that’s not the case, as we know. It was very interesting because that was the traumatizing part for, I think, me and my sister coming back, watching our parents struggle. We came with nothing in our pockets. We had to come as though we were coming for a 2-week vacation, not moving, because we could not let anyone in Iraq, including my father’s family, know that we were leaving for good. So we left like we were going on a 2-week vacation, left all our things— home, pictures, things I can’t ever replace, of course— in Iraq, and came with my father, all of us very worried. Of course, my sister and I less so, we were children. Too young to understand really, but with my father and my mother thinking if he goes back, he’s either going to be prosecuted, put in jail, or, or potentially executed for being a dissenter. So we didn’t seek asylum, but when we came in, we came in with nothing back to the US. And that formed a new picture for me, which was again, quickly adapt. Now I had to go back to school. I was about 9 at the time. I had to quickly get my English back on. I remember it took a month. I was pretty much silent throughout school. And what I did realize is by the age of 10 or 11, as a child where there was a lot of bullying, a lot of bullying, you could not break me. I just felt like I had owed it to my parents at that point. In that age, I was very cognizant. I could not let them down. I was not going to go home and cry about being bullied or anything. I just fought right back. So it just taught me a great deal of resilience, but there was definitely some trauma involved in it that I think plays part in work and personal life.
Eefan David: Well, thank you for sharing those very personal reflections. A lot of it resonates. I’ve spent time in emerging markets, not like you, not at that age, not in a war zone, but I think it does force you to realize that life goes on on the ground, even in the most so-called catastrophic circumstances as the media might depict them. There’s often people have a basic need to live their lives, and that is often overlooked sometimes. Also, what you said very much resonated with me in terms of how much lives hang in the balance with immigration issues. We were green card holders and we had to go through immigration uncertainty. And there is nothing quite like that feeling of helplessness when you are at the subject of the mercy of an immigration officer, you may say. So I understand that. And thank you for your reflections on some of the first world problems perhaps that were no longer an issue for you given what you’d seen. I want to just move to another part of your hinterland, which is fascinating to me, which is your time as a professional dancer, because I’d love to know a little bit about that. And again, what skills you brought from that. Into the work you do today?
Meriam Nazih Al: Yeah, when we were in Utah at the age of about 4 for me, my sister was 5, my mom insisted that we take some either music classes or, or dance classes. She really wanted us to sort of feel like we were making friends at that age. And again, we hadn’t moved yet from the US. So we started dance classes. I had about 2 years of that, and then we moved. When we came back from Iraq, it became even more, I guess you could say, critical to my mother, specifically my mother. And there was a cultural difference between my mom and my dad saying dance a certain way, but my mother felt very, very strongly that we needed to get back in and integrate. And to explain this, to make it resonate a bit further on the dancing side of things, my mother’s an aerospace physicist, one of brightest women I know. Only female professor in Alexandria University, only female in her physics department, and then a professor, of course, at the time in the ’60s and early ’70s. When I went to school back from Iraq, we walked in— this is probably why she moved us into dance and what it’s done for me today for work— the auditoriums you go in when you start the first year of school. And I recall walking in and looking to my right and my left and now everywhere around the room, feeling a little bit uncomfortable. I remember my mom sort of holding my neck and moving it forward, shifting it. She was behind me, shifting it forward. I looked back and I thought, why’d you do that? And I felt really embarrassed, right? Other people could have been— no one was paying attention to us, but I felt embarrassed. She said, never walk into a room and look around like you don’t deserve to be there. So she wanted me to just walk in with my head straight. That immediately informed my confidence levels, my mom teaching me that component. My father was very much that way. Dance, that moved her into the idea of I need to get her back in dance, I need to get my sister back in dance. Now with dance, I excelled. I went straight into competition. I was touring. I choreographed. I mean, I could have made a career out of dance, but it would have been a very short career because you just don’t go beyond 38, 40 years old. But I was very talented at choreography. I can say that now because I no longer do it, so I don’t feel like I’m being arrogant about it. However, when you compete, you’re on stage. You are on stage and you don’t see a lot of the people in the audience because you have the lights glaring into your eyes. You have to know the spot that you’re standing in, know the next formation. You have to memorize the dance moves, which use a certain part of muscle of your, of your brain. And you have to continue to practice it and then perform it to perfection, or as close to perfection or excellence as you can. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as perfection, but excellence, in order to compete and get the highest scoring. And you’re on a stage, you’re performing, you don’t get to reverse time. It’s live. It’s— that’s it. So I had that, I did that pretty much through all my formidable years from the age of 9 up till the age of 23 into law school. I was even teaching. And if you have to be on a stage and remember every single dance move, every intricate detail, all the technique, all the choreography, all the formations, when you are a litigator and you’re before a jury or before a judge and you have to remember your entire case, all the intricacies, all of the details, if you see what I’m saying, I’m making the parallels. That certainly aided my ability to be a litigator. So performance, which is very much part of what we do as disputes lawyers, was something I grew up with in dance. And so the two correlated.
Eefan David: Absolutely fascinating. I was thinking also adaptation probably is a key part of choreography too. If something goes wrong, you may have to adapt.
Meriam Nazih Al: Quickly.
Eefan David: Yeah. No, fascinating. Well, one more stop on your creative journey before we go back into discussing the legal profession. Your work as a creative on the film side, can you speak a little bit about that and the film company that you founded and about the company and your vision for that?
Meriam Nazih Al: Yes, thank you for asking that question. Dance was my creative outlet. At the age of 23, moving into 24, I stopped teaching. It became less creative for me and felt more like a job because I was teaching. And I think being in law school and then going straight into a law firm, it didn’t give me that creative outlet anymore for whatever reason, which is sad, but I continue to take classes now and then. So there was a pause between 2004 to 2009, 10 where I would take dance classes but didn’t feel that I was really exerting that creativity that I like, that artistic side of myself that feeds my soul. So I’ve always loved film, but the parts I’ve loved about film is I can watch a film 12 times over And the reason for that, the same film I can watch over and over again, is because I like the detail in watching whether from one scene to another the individual in a production of a film who’s supposed to have the continuity— so the person who handles continuity from scene to scene— if they’ve picked up on whether someone’s hand was used, they were using their right hand or their left hand, or something. Was the mug filled with something that we can see or wasn’t it? Those tiny intricate details I constantly paid attention to in films. And then I’d watch it over and over again because the dialogue always meant something different to me each time I’d watch a movie. So I became very interested in the production of filmmaking. And the acting, of course, of just the creative side of it was very interesting to me. But I liked the whole concept of how does this all get put together? Because dance, again, you move from one 8-count to another 8-count to another 8-count to another formation. Again, it’s all about this whole thing about moving things together and creating a formation, and all of it comes out into this beautiful product. That’s the whole thing. So film interested me in that way. In 2010, I went to the Cannes Film Festival. I was living in London at the time. My friend had a film that was going and premiering there, beautiful film, the title I now forget, and went to the Cannes Film Festival and something just reignited the love of film. And I thought, well, why can’t I do this? I’m a lawyer. Okay, lots of lawyers go into film production. Fine. I don’t want to be just a tell-all like any other lawyer that goes into production. I want to really make something of it. But something was always stopping me. When I went to the Cannes Film Festival and saw this, just sort of, I don’t know, it just invigorated my senses, my creative senses in particular. And so I kid you not, Aoifinn, I traveled back from France, went to London, called my business partner who’s in Los Angeles, whom I grew up with and who is an actor. And I said, listen, you’ve been talking to me about doing film production for some time. Let’s do it. He had always been doing it, and I tried to write a film script probably 3 or 4 years prior to that, and it was the worst piece of written product I’ve ever written in my life. I mean, the worst. So I knew I couldn’t write scripts, so I knew that was something I couldn’t do in film, but I didn’t know whether I could or could not produce films, which is different from writing a script. So when I went to him and back from the Cannes Film Festival, his response was sort of shocked. He said, but we don’t have any money, we don’t have any projects, we don’t have anything to start us off. I said, no one starts with everything. If they do, they’re lucky, but doesn’t everyone start from nothing? So what’s to stop us from starting from nothing? We did just that. And today we have a series of films for Illusionist Pictures, one of which we started with a short called Skin with Jamie Bell, and it’s based on a true story on discrimination in America between the Ku Klux Klan and Black Americans. And it’s based again on a true story. So The short was made out of it. It won an Oscar in 2019, the short, but we had already started production in 2018 on the actual feature full-length film. And of course, it came out in 2019, the feature full-length film as well. But that’s not the only film, of course. We have many. And it feeds my creative side. It’s a lot of work, but it keeps me sane. That’s where I go for my creative outlet.
Eefan David: Well, I completely identify with that as well, creativity keeping one sane. Let’s move back to your career in law. So you’ve taken the road less traveled and have forged your own path. Why do you think that law firms tend to prefer more traditional roadmaps? And how would you recommend tackling a career in law with a less traditional path as you have?
Meriam Nazih Al: It’s such an interesting question, because recently I have been receiving a lot of questions from young lawyers finishing their LLMs mainly, coming from a different country to New York to do their LLM so that they could start practicing in the international law space in the United States or in the United Kingdom. And they’re always perceived by law firms, including my own, as the less normal path into law firm and private practice. And oftentimes I hear from not just my firm, other firms and other lawyers, well, this is just a very unique road they’ve traveled here. It’s just not very typical. I think we should look more at the summer associate programs that we do and those associates coming out of there that we can hire for full-time first-year positions. I have a visceral response to people who tell me, this is how we do it or have done it, so this is how we will continue to do it. I do not hold back. My firm has heard this from me a million times because my bio, as you said, demonstrates that I have not taken a road most traveled. I have taken the road less and least traveled, a very unique one. I don’t think that it is logical to say, when you look at the world just in general, the world in geopolitics, in history, that it is logical in any way, shape, or fashion to say the phrase, well, this is how we do it, or this is how we’ve always done it, so we’re going to continue to do it that way. Well, if that were the case, I don’t know where we’d be today. We’re not in a great place in the world, that’s for sure, but we would be in a much worse place. And I won’t go into details of all all the very unfortunate historical facts that we have throughout the globe, but we would be in a far worse place if that was the logic that we all used. So, I always went to that in my mind. But see, again, I always went back to my parents. Neither of my parents went through their careers and their life, our personal life as a family, their personal life as a married couple in their day and age at being Arab, my mother being older than my father, he didn’t know her age until even the day they were married. He never asked the question. And she was married at a late age, at age 37, had me when she was 40. At that time, she was considered old, drab, and not to be thought of. So her personal life was unique. My father’s personal life was unique where he came from. He worked for years before he decided to do his master’s and PhD. So I had an example around me, as did my sister, of an entire world where you could create success and a happy life that is meaningful and a career that’s meaningful that does not have to follow parameters or rules set by external forces, people or otherwise. So that is how I always constructed my life and I continue to do it that way. I continue to renew myself. I continue to grow different practices and niches because I see a vision for it. And when people tell me that’s not going to go anywhere, I tell them, yes, it will. So, I don’t like that approach. Now, why do firms do that? Because lawyers are lawyers. We are risk-averse, and being part of risk-averse is looking at our business approach to a law firm and our business plans. And part of that is to continue to do what— if you look at COVID, if you look at what’s happening with the salaries of associates, firms follow other people. It’s a sheep sort of mentality. We’re going to go follow the construct, what everybody else is doing, because that’s the safest approach. It’s the risk-averse approach. The problem with that is you do not capture the best talent. The best talent are those who have had to struggle and find creative ways to get to a place of success. I certainly know, and I had many adversities. I don’t know if we’ll get to this question. I think you might want to— want, you know, the low and the high points of my career. I had many adversities. No one would ever have thought I’d make partner at the age that I did if you looked at the adversity I had and the road less traveled that I took to get here. So, no one would ever have guessed that, but I am an example and I say this to everyone who asks me who’s doing LMs and struggling the exact same way that I did. No one believed that I could get in this space. I tell them, never believe that. There’s 20 different ways to get to the same place. You just have to decide the one that’s the best for you and that is authentic to yourself and your personality. And firms unfortunately just need to get out of the headspace of, we’ve always done it this way, we’re risk averse, other firms do it do it this way, so we’re going to stay within the safe space. Safe space does not always lead to the greatest success.
Eefan David: Well, that’s so insightful. And I also— that’s the importance of role models too, because it’s one— all very well to hear maybe that it can be done, particularly in the area of diversity, where I’d say there the lip service is being paid to trying to do things differently, but you still need to see those role models of examples of how they’ve succeeded and the path they’ve drawn. And I just want to take the conversation now to that aspect because maybe as a contrary to an area where people want to do things as they’ve always done them, with diversity, there is a concerted effort to change the face of the legal profession, make it more diverse, both ethnically and by gender. How would you score it in terms of what you’re seeing, and has it improved throughout your career, the diversity and inclusion within the profession?
Meriam Nazih Al: It’s improved by performative standards, and when I say improved, let me be very frank, I say improved in a relative term, right? So, I’m not saying improved as in, oh, we’ve done better in that we’re doing well. We’ve improved just merely by the relative statistics. So, unfortunately, I think if I had to score the legal profession on diversity, equity, inclusion, and where we are today, I would say we are a D. Not a B as in baby, a D as in David. We are a D as a legal profession as a whole. And here’s one example, I’ll tell you why. If any legal institution, whether it be an arbitral institution, a court, a law firm, you name it, an NGO that is based around law, the Mansfield Rule really troubles me, right? So, the idea of that we have to meet the lowest common denominator percentage troubles me. Why? Go on merit. Merit alone will get you well above the lowest common percentage or lowest common denominator. And an example of what I can give you directly that I took a pretty hard line on an arbitral institution and said I only wanted arbitrators, gender diverse arbitrators, racially diverse arbitrators tend to happen in our, in our field, in my space, but ethnically and racially diverse arbitrators, but the gender component was not, it was always 3 females and 7 male, typically white, older men, and the 3 mainly sort of commonly named female arbitrators. And a list of 10. And I continued to reject that list and said, until you give me a 50/50 gender, 50/50 list, we will not be picking an arbitrator and doing the selection process. And this was an arbitral institution, and there are several of them that continue to boast and say, we have gotten to the 30% or the 33% in female diversity. That is our goal. That is a very meager, sad number. It should be 50%, and there’s absolutely no reason in the world. There are plenty of very qualified women in the space of law, not just in international. I’m speaking broadly of legal profession, very talented, very capable, simply not given a platform and 5 steps behind. And so there needs to be a push forward, there needs to be a fast forward, and there needs to be a requirement of 50/50, a requirement of 50/50 equal opportunity to be seen and heard such that we can see the gender gap, the pay gap, the inequities, all the issues surrounding DEI actually come to fruition. Until then, we will remain at a D and not move forward.
Eefan David: Very interesting. I think you’re absolutely right. Force the issue. And we can find the candidates. There’s usually not an issue. It’s that kind of relaxing and settling for less in terms of standards I want to just quickly go back to, before we return to personal reflections, go back to your area of practice, international arbitration. I’d love to hear what excites you most about this area now. I’m sure many of the listeners, it’s certainly one of the highly desirable areas to focus on, I would imagine, for new entrants.
Meriam Nazih Al: Yes, absolutely. It’s the go-to, everyone wants to get into it. And I remember those days where I was writing for 2 years, endless emails and letters asking for just a chance, just a foot in the door. What excites me most about the space of international law, and within international law you have international arbitration, which is sort of private practice, and within international arbitration you can break that down. Well, you could, and now it’s growing. That’s the exciting part, which I’ll get to. You break down this private practice into public international law investment arbitration. So investor-state disputes, matters that are involving sovereign states or sovereign-owned and controlled state entities and them being sued. And you’re either representing the claimant investor who has sued the country, the sovereign state, or the state agency, or you’re defending the sovereign state against the investor’s claims for violations of international law, customary international law, and treaty law. So within treaty law, it could be bilateral investment treaties, multilateral investment treaties, and it’s growing. And then under this umbrella of international arbitration, as I said, that’s the private element. You have this investment arbitration. Also under the private international law space, under international arbitration, you have the commercial arbitration work, which is contractual. So business to business, a contractual breach. But even then you can have a state sovereign in the contract. So you’ll still have a sovereign state involved in a commercial dispute, commercial arbitration, rather than in what they call the investor-state arbitration, which I just defined here, which has more of the public international law public policy components to it and customary international law. The exciting part about this space is that international arbitration is now, I don’t want to say it’s merging, but rather let’s say there’s a convergence between international arbitration and international human rights. So business and human rights, the supply chain, countries being more committed to the concept of human rights. The very fact that right to a healthy, clean environment and clean air is now considered a human right. Just goes to show you how close we’re getting into the human rights space, the real public international law, the stuff that matters about the right to self-determination. An example of that is even choices of your citizenship, for instance, that play part in investor-state disputes that I described. That’s a human rights issue. That’s the right to self-determination. There’s other treaties entirely separate from investor-state treaties that are now converging together. So you’re seeing all these very interesting public international law, environmental law issues, the right to a healthy, clean environment, the right to self-determination, the right to statehood, all these things coming in, maritime boundary disputes, border disputes, all converging with this private international law space of international arbitration.. And the two are coming together and forming this business and human rights umbrella underneath it as well. So you have international law and then business and human rights is coming into effect. So we are not sitting in a world where we’re just trying to make money anymore, as much as everyone wants to believe, and that’s what we are doing. There is a component of, you really do have to step back and say, do I want to represent this party, whether it be a state sovereign or company? Or two companies in what they’re doing in X country or in this X business that’s causing some particular damage to people, to a society, to a community, to the globe, to climate change? We’re all being forced in this world of international law to ask those questions of ourselves. We don’t always come up with the right answer, or an answer for that matter, but that’s what’s exciting to me. Now we have to become people, not just the lawyer. We have to be people, not just robots as lawyers and just defending. Or representing.
Eefan David: It’s absolutely fascinating because I see a real parallel between what you’re saying and the world of investing, where ESG integration has now almost become the norm. It’s a hygiene factor. The focus on sustainability is seen as commensurate with a focus on something that will make a good investment return. And equally, if we look at, say, the focus on emerging markets and ask whether they are investible, often it becomes down to a moral judgment. As to whether an area is investible or not. It’s not simply about the money. So really interesting how that’s happening in parallel in the legal profession. I want to move now to some personal reflections because I think you, I’m sure you have many. And the first one, just to touch on something you raised earlier about setbacks and challenges, you mentioned that you had them over the course of your career. You persisted nonetheless. Were there any in particular that you learned lessons from or that you can share?
Meriam Nazih Al: Getting into the space of international law was a really big struggle for me personally and professionally. Obviously, as I said, I was doing my master’s degree, finishing my thesis while I was working at a law firm in antitrust litigation, which was not the space I wanted to work in. Great space, but it was not my passion. But while I was networking to try to find a job in international arbitration, international law, and I was teaching two master’s courses. Preparing a curriculum is not an easy thing for a master’s program and two courses a week. During that time, while I was networking to get into international law, Wow, did I get told how I was not equipped for this. I remember a recruiter saying to me, “I don’t think you’re smart enough to be in this space, if I’m being very honest, Maryam.” Those were the words that were used. And I couldn’t believe that a recruiter would ever say that to me. And they went off of my grades in law school because I wasn’t in the top 10 percentile. And in the top 10 percentile, what international arbitration practitioners back in the early 2000s, one of the phrases that was used with me, I shall not name the person who stated this. Said, we are the neurosurgeons of law. And that was to say, you have to be at the top of your game, as though neurosurgeons are the only, you know, the smartest and the brightest doctors. I mean, that’s not the only, right? There are other very high-level thinkers in the medical space. But that was the comment that was made to me. And somehow that kind of trickled down to, you’re not smart enough because you weren’t in the 10th percentile. So if you weren’t in the top 10 percentile, you couldn’t possibly be as smart as the top neurosurgeons of law in international law. So that was setback. Again, resilience. It goes right back to resilience. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to quit, move back to California. I was in Washington, DC at the time and go straight back to the law firm that had the open door for me. My prior firm where I first worked, loved them. They still today, I still speak to my old boss, my very first boss. And he always said, you have an open door here any day. But I just kept saying, no, who is this person or that person or these people to tell me who I am and what I’m capable of? So that was one very large setback. Another was when I actually entered and finally got my foot in the door at Crowe Mooring, I had some really rough experiences. There were people, again, no need to be naming people, but there were people who used the word, “You’re not cut out for this.” And it was always testing. There was always a mental game in the process, a mental test in the process. “Oh, maybe you’re not cut out for this.” No matter how hard I worked, I remember one time a book was thrown at my head. Because the person didn’t like the way that something was written. It was it actually— was me and another associate in the room, actually. It’s not just me. So we both ducked in opposite directions. I picked the book back up, threw it back at the person, and said, next time I won’t miss. And of course, my legs were shaking. I thought, oh man, I’m gonna get fired. But of course, that was a setback, and it was all based on, you’re just too stupid to figure this out. Now, the brief was filed as it was drafted with minor edits. It was just merely the personalities in this space. So I’ve learned a lot of difficult personalities in the space of international law because it comes with a lot of ego. And I started at a time— a lot has changed from the early 2000s or mid-2000s to date. I came into it at a time where it’s changed so drastically. At that time, you could get away with way too much as a partner at the top of your game, especially if you were a privileged white male. You could get away with so much. And so I had those setbacks and I had to cry it out. I had to fall to the ground, but I never crumbled. I got myself up and I just pushed on. And I remember one phrase, if there was something I could give to someone to say from a personal reflection. My father said to me, when I said every week, I said, I’m quitting, I’m quitting, I’m quitting, I’m quitting. And I, and I was there for a good 7 years, loved it. I would, and I loved the firm. It had nothing to do with the firm. It was just the industry. It felt like I was constantly being battled against or, or punched or pummeled. And my father said to me, you seem to think that they, whomever they were, they being the difficulties, the strife that I was facing, they and that will outlast you. What makes you think you can’t outlast them? And when I just stopped and reflected on that, it was hilarious to me. I thought, wait, wait, yeah, I’m thinking like this is going to go on forever. I said, well, what do you mean? He says, nothing ever stays the same. So just sit down, wait, have patience. You will outlast what is wrong. And the moment he said you’ll outlast what was wrong, I knew I was in the right, that was the wrong, and I just hung in there. I mean, I could go on and on about that, but those were the main two events and my father’s words to me that really stood out and made a difference for my resilience and how I overcame a lot of the setbacks.
Eefan David: It’s really interesting because we talk a lot about imposter syndrome, and that’s the sense of that comes from within of not being good enough. I can’t imagine the stress of having that even coming from the external force that one wasn’t good enough. And I’ve also heard that sometimes a focus on perfectionism within the legal profession, particularly, can be a source of great psychological stress and physical stress. So, it’s good that you share your experiences there and how how how you, you, you were resilient throughout. My last question is around any key piece of advice that you received throughout your career or any creed or motto that you live by. Is there anything you can share there?
Meriam Nazih Al: Yes. Never let external anything define how you are going to forge your path. Decide it for yourself. I had to. You will be lucky if you have a sponsor or someone who speaks and is the vocal cords for you and lifts you up and pushes you forward. And I did not have that. That to me was a blessing. To some it’s not, but for me it taught me the following: define your career, define what you want, and the most important thing in doing that, when you decide what it is you want and go after it without any voices just wash out those voices, all the naysayers, is choose the purpose. Define your purpose, and then it will define how you wish to proceed in your career. And let all the excess noise drown out, especially the negatives.
Eefan David: Well, thank you so much, Maryam. This has been a wonderfully rich discussion. I think the term Renaissance woman doesn’t even come close to doing you justice. The way you fuse your creativity your passion for law within law, the way you blend different disciplines and your advocacy and overall message of resilience and mission is just such a great collection of takeaways. Thank you for coming here and sharing your insights with us.
Meriam Nazih Al: Thank you so much for having me. I’ve enjoyed it so much. I really appreciate your time and it’s been an honour. Thank you, Aoifinnan.
Eefan David: I’m Aoifinnan Devitt. Thank you for listening to our 50 Faces Focus Series. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring lawyers and their stories, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for information only and should not be construed as investment or legal advice. All views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations of the host or any guest.
Eefan David: This series is brought to you with the kind support of Evershed Sutherland. As a global top 10 law firm, Evershed Sutherland provides legal services to a global client base. With more than 3,000 lawyers, the firm operates in over 70 offices in more than 30 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. The firm recognizes that having diverse talent across its business brings many benefits. It is committed to accessing a wide range of views, perspectives, and thinking in all of its teams, and in this way is building a culture of inclusion where each person feels able to be their true self at work and reach their full potential. Diversity and inclusion is fundamental to the firm’s purpose of helping their clients, their people, and their communities to thrive, and inclusive is one of its 5 values.
Meriam Nazih Al: Never let external anything define how you are going to forge your path. Decide it for yourself. I had to. You will be lucky if you have a sponsor or someone who speaks and is the vocal cords for you and lifts you up and pushes you forward and I did not have that. That to me was a blessing. To some it’s not, but for me, it taught me the following: define your career, define what you want. And the most important thing in doing that, when you decide what it is you want and go after it without any voices, just wash out those voices, all the naysayers, is choose the purpose. Define your purpose. And then it will define how you wish to proceed in your career. And let all the excess noise drown out, especially the negatives.
Eefan David: I’m Eefan David, and welcome to this 50 Faces focus series, which showcases the richness and diversity of inspiring people in the law. I’m joined today by Maryam Nazeem Al-Rashid, who is Global Co-Chair of International Arbitration and co-head of the Latin American Arbitration Practice at Evershed Sutherland. She’s based in the New York City area. She is also an adjunct professor of law at Fordham University Law School, a peer review board member of the American Review of International Arbitration, a committee member at the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice, and the holder of numerous other arbitrator roles. Her areas of focus are international dispute resolution, international trade and commercial arbitration, as well as human rights and international law. She’s also the president and co-founder of Illusionist Pictures, a film production company. Welcome, Miriam. Thanks for joining me today.
Meriam Nazih Al: Thank you, Aoifinn. It’s so nice to be here. I really appreciate it.
Eefan David: Well, you have a fascinating background, and I’d love if you could start with that, where you were born and what you studied initially.
Meriam Nazih Al: Absolutely. So I was born in Logan, Utah, of all places, from parents that came from Basra, Iraq, and Alexandria, Egypt, and met there. And that’s how I managed to be born in a random spot, being half Iraqi, half Egyptian, and being raised between Logan, Utah, and Iraq through my childhood. From there, I kind of grew into— from all the travel that I did throughout my life to the Middle East with my parents and my diverse background, really, of course, it was diverse, especially in Utah. We were all of, I think, 5 Arab families, 1 of 5 Arab families throughout all of Logan, Utah. Because of that initial upbringing and my parents really pushing the culture and travel and growth globally and thinking about the world, not just our little bubble, I think that’s where I developed the urge and the calling to work in international law. So that is how I moved myself into that space. I started out in Los Angeles working as a litigator for just 2 years out of law school and very quickly realized that it wasn’t for me because of the reasons I just stated and thought, what is the fastest way to get myself where I need to be in international law? And I thought of international law, not necessarily in international arbitration, but I thought of it very much in a broad scope. So that’s how I’ve managed to grow my practice is very broadly with human rights, business and human rights, international dispute resolution, investment arbitration. Commercial arbitration, all internationally based. And the fastest route was to go get a master’s in international and comparative law from George Washington University. And there is where I got my teaching experience at GW, teaching two courses for a master’s program while I worked full-time for a law firm, not in international law, but just to pay the bills. And while I also finished my master’s and my thesis at GW. So it was quite a ride until I finally got my foot in the door. At Crowe Mooring and their international arbitration team. And it all started from there, from— for the international law work as I grew my specialty.
Eefan David: Well, we are going to dig into a lot of aspects of that because that is just so rich and so fascinating a background. Can we go back first of all to your childhood, spending time between Logan, Utah and Iraq? That must have been an extraordinary juxtaposition of different backgrounds, different cultures. How did you adjust between them and what do you think you learned from that period that you bring to yourself as a professional now?
Meriam Nazih Al: Well, I’ll tell you, let me start with the last part of your question is without a doubt, you either learn one of two things or maybe both. You learn one of two things or both if you’re placed in that position. You learn resilience and adaptation very quickly, or you learn how to retract in unknown and uncharted territories, or you’re unadaptable to change. I was the former. I adapt very quickly to change. I am very actually excited by change. I don’t like complacency, and I believe very much, as we’ll talk through, I’m sure, more of our discussion, I consider myself rather resilient. Some days I want to fall and crumble to the ground, but I always pick myself up, and I think that’s what resilience is. So that’s sort of the back end of your question. The beginning of your question, how was it? I was born in Logan, Utah, as I said, my sister and I. My sister is living in California now with my family, my immediate family, and she’s a physician. And we were both born in Logan, Utah. My mother and my father finished their post-doctorate and their PhD— father, my PhD, my mother, post-doctorate in aerospace physics, and my father in industrial sociology. And when he finished, he said, well, time to go back to Iraq. My country’s paid for my education. I must go back and give back to my country. And my mother did not expect that. So it was sort of an existential crisis and also very practical crisis for my parents, my mother being Egyptian, my father being Iraqi, and no idea that during the Iran-Iraq War in the ’80s that my dad wanted to move his entire family back to a country where there was a very aggressive war happening at the time. I spoke English and I understood Arabic, but I was young and I would speak a few words in Arabic, but I understood all of it. But my communication at the age of 5, when we left Logan, Utah, back to Baghdad, Iraq, we moved to the capital, not to Basra. My primary language is English. So going to Iraq, I very quickly, quickly adapted back to Iraqi Arabic, right? The dialect, Iraqi dialect. And went to school there. And it was during, as I say, the Iran-Iraq War. My sister, I can’t recall if she adapted, but we both sort of pushed each other along. And what that did was expose me to, as I said, the changes, but exposed me to what I thought was my culture living in Logan, Utah within my very small little household, but to a broader culture I didn’t actually quite understand until I was there living day in, day out with all the geopolitics that were involved at the time with the war. You learned what a bomb meant. You went into bomb shelters. You heard what the bomb alarms would be when you were in school. And so you had to run to the house as quickly as you could with your family, or you’d go to the closest bomb shelter and then wait till you were let out and get back on with life. You just got on with it. So I think that that has contributed a great deal to the way that I approach work is there’s a lot of stumbling in the area of international law, a lot of unknowns, and I have to oftentimes myself And my team, we stumble across things, we fall to the ground, we get back up, brush ourselves off, and figure out how to just move on forward. Moving back was probably the hardest part. When we left Iraq, we actually escaped. Although I was an American citizen, my mother had a green card, my sister was an American citizen, my father was not. And moving back to the States from Iraq at the time would have been had the United States sent my father back because he did not have an appropriate visa. He did not have all the relevant legal material for it. At the time, of course, the U.S. Was very open to immigrants coming in and seeking asylum of any kind or saying, I can’t go back to my country because this is what will happen to me. Today, that’s not the case, as we know. It was very interesting because that was the traumatizing part for, I think, me and my sister coming back, watching our parents struggle. We came with nothing in our pockets. We had to come as though we were coming for a 2-week vacation, not moving, because we could not let anyone in Iraq, including my father’s family, know that we were leaving for good. So we left like we were going on a 2-week vacation, left all our things— home, pictures, things I can’t ever replace, of course— in Iraq, and came with my father, all of us very worried. Of course, my sister and I less so, we were children. Too young to understand really, but with my father and my mother thinking if he goes back, he’s either going to be prosecuted, put in jail, or, or potentially executed for being a dissenter. So we didn’t seek asylum, but when we came in, we came in with nothing back to the US. And that formed a new picture for me, which was again, quickly adapt. Now I had to go back to school. I was about 9 at the time. I had to quickly get my English back on. I remember it took a month. I was pretty much silent throughout school. And what I did realize is by the age of 10 or 11, as a child where there was a lot of bullying, a lot of bullying, you could not break me. I just felt like I had owed it to my parents at that point. In that age, I was very cognizant. I could not let them down. I was not going to go home and cry about being bullied or anything. I just fought right back. So it just taught me a great deal of resilience, but there was definitely some trauma involved in it that I think plays part in work and personal life.
Eefan David: Well, thank you for sharing those very personal reflections. A lot of it resonates. I’ve spent time in emerging markets, not like you, not at that age, not in a war zone, but I think it does force you to realize that life goes on on the ground, even in the most so-called catastrophic circumstances as the media might depict them. There’s often people have a basic need to live their lives, and that is often overlooked sometimes. Also, what you said very much resonated with me in terms of how much lives hang in the balance with immigration issues. We were green card holders and we had to go through immigration uncertainty. And there is nothing quite like that feeling of helplessness when you are at the subject of the mercy of an immigration officer, you may say. So I understand that. And thank you for your reflections on some of the first world problems perhaps that were no longer an issue for you given what you’d seen. I want to just move to another part of your hinterland, which is fascinating to me, which is your time as a professional dancer, because I’d love to know a little bit about that. And again, what skills you brought from that. Into the work you do today?
Meriam Nazih Al: Yeah, when we were in Utah at the age of about 4 for me, my sister was 5, my mom insisted that we take some either music classes or, or dance classes. She really wanted us to sort of feel like we were making friends at that age. And again, we hadn’t moved yet from the US. So we started dance classes. I had about 2 years of that, and then we moved. When we came back from Iraq, it became even more, I guess you could say, critical to my mother, specifically my mother. And there was a cultural difference between my mom and my dad saying dance a certain way, but my mother felt very, very strongly that we needed to get back in and integrate. And to explain this, to make it resonate a bit further on the dancing side of things, my mother’s an aerospace physicist, one of brightest women I know. Only female professor in Alexandria University, only female in her physics department, and then a professor, of course, at the time in the ’60s and early ’70s. When I went to school back from Iraq, we walked in— this is probably why she moved us into dance and what it’s done for me today for work— the auditoriums you go in when you start the first year of school. And I recall walking in and looking to my right and my left and now everywhere around the room, feeling a little bit uncomfortable. I remember my mom sort of holding my neck and moving it forward, shifting it. She was behind me, shifting it forward. I looked back and I thought, why’d you do that? And I felt really embarrassed, right? Other people could have been— no one was paying attention to us, but I felt embarrassed. She said, never walk into a room and look around like you don’t deserve to be there. So she wanted me to just walk in with my head straight. That immediately informed my confidence levels, my mom teaching me that component. My father was very much that way. Dance, that moved her into the idea of I need to get her back in dance, I need to get my sister back in dance. Now with dance, I excelled. I went straight into competition. I was touring. I choreographed. I mean, I could have made a career out of dance, but it would have been a very short career because you just don’t go beyond 38, 40 years old. But I was very talented at choreography. I can say that now because I no longer do it, so I don’t feel like I’m being arrogant about it. However, when you compete, you’re on stage. You are on stage and you don’t see a lot of the people in the audience because you have the lights glaring into your eyes. You have to know the spot that you’re standing in, know the next formation. You have to memorize the dance moves, which use a certain part of muscle of your, of your brain. And you have to continue to practice it and then perform it to perfection, or as close to perfection or excellence as you can. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as perfection, but excellence, in order to compete and get the highest scoring. And you’re on a stage, you’re performing, you don’t get to reverse time. It’s live. It’s— that’s it. So I had that, I did that pretty much through all my formidable years from the age of 9 up till the age of 23 into law school. I was even teaching. And if you have to be on a stage and remember every single dance move, every intricate detail, all the technique, all the choreography, all the formations, when you are a litigator and you’re before a jury or before a judge and you have to remember your entire case, all the intricacies, all of the details, if you see what I’m saying, I’m making the parallels. That certainly aided my ability to be a litigator. So performance, which is very much part of what we do as disputes lawyers, was something I grew up with in dance. And so the two correlated.
Eefan David: Absolutely fascinating. I was thinking also adaptation probably is a key part of choreography too. If something goes wrong, you may have to adapt.
Meriam Nazih Al: Quickly.
Eefan David: Yeah. No, fascinating. Well, one more stop on your creative journey before we go back into discussing the legal profession. Your work as a creative on the film side, can you speak a little bit about that and the film company that you founded and about the company and your vision for that?
Meriam Nazih Al: Yes, thank you for asking that question. Dance was my creative outlet. At the age of 23, moving into 24, I stopped teaching. It became less creative for me and felt more like a job because I was teaching. And I think being in law school and then going straight into a law firm, it didn’t give me that creative outlet anymore for whatever reason, which is sad, but I continue to take classes now and then. So there was a pause between 2004 to 2009, 10 where I would take dance classes but didn’t feel that I was really exerting that creativity that I like, that artistic side of myself that feeds my soul. So I’ve always loved film, but the parts I’ve loved about film is I can watch a film 12 times over And the reason for that, the same film I can watch over and over again, is because I like the detail in watching whether from one scene to another the individual in a production of a film who’s supposed to have the continuity— so the person who handles continuity from scene to scene— if they’ve picked up on whether someone’s hand was used, they were using their right hand or their left hand, or something. Was the mug filled with something that we can see or wasn’t it? Those tiny intricate details I constantly paid attention to in films. And then I’d watch it over and over again because the dialogue always meant something different to me each time I’d watch a movie. So I became very interested in the production of filmmaking. And the acting, of course, of just the creative side of it was very interesting to me. But I liked the whole concept of how does this all get put together? Because dance, again, you move from one 8-count to another 8-count to another 8-count to another formation. Again, it’s all about this whole thing about moving things together and creating a formation, and all of it comes out into this beautiful product. That’s the whole thing. So film interested me in that way. In 2010, I went to the Cannes Film Festival. I was living in London at the time. My friend had a film that was going and premiering there, beautiful film, the title I now forget, and went to the Cannes Film Festival and something just reignited the love of film. And I thought, well, why can’t I do this? I’m a lawyer. Okay, lots of lawyers go into film production. Fine. I don’t want to be just a tell-all like any other lawyer that goes into production. I want to really make something of it. But something was always stopping me. When I went to the Cannes Film Festival and saw this, just sort of, I don’t know, it just invigorated my senses, my creative senses in particular. And so I kid you not, Aoifinn, I traveled back from France, went to London, called my business partner who’s in Los Angeles, whom I grew up with and who is an actor. And I said, listen, you’ve been talking to me about doing film production for some time. Let’s do it. He had always been doing it, and I tried to write a film script probably 3 or 4 years prior to that, and it was the worst piece of written product I’ve ever written in my life. I mean, the worst. So I knew I couldn’t write scripts, so I knew that was something I couldn’t do in film, but I didn’t know whether I could or could not produce films, which is different from writing a script. So when I went to him and back from the Cannes Film Festival, his response was sort of shocked. He said, but we don’t have any money, we don’t have any projects, we don’t have anything to start us off. I said, no one starts with everything. If they do, they’re lucky, but doesn’t everyone start from nothing? So what’s to stop us from starting from nothing? We did just that. And today we have a series of films for Illusionist Pictures, one of which we started with a short called Skin with Jamie Bell, and it’s based on a true story on discrimination in America between the Ku Klux Klan and Black Americans. And it’s based again on a true story. So The short was made out of it. It won an Oscar in 2019, the short, but we had already started production in 2018 on the actual feature full-length film. And of course, it came out in 2019, the feature full-length film as well. But that’s not the only film, of course. We have many. And it feeds my creative side. It’s a lot of work, but it keeps me sane. That’s where I go for my creative outlet.
Eefan David: Well, I completely identify with that as well, creativity keeping one sane. Let’s move back to your career in law. So you’ve taken the road less traveled and have forged your own path. Why do you think that law firms tend to prefer more traditional roadmaps? And how would you recommend tackling a career in law with a less traditional path as you have?
Meriam Nazih Al: It’s such an interesting question, because recently I have been receiving a lot of questions from young lawyers finishing their LLMs mainly, coming from a different country to New York to do their LLM so that they could start practicing in the international law space in the United States or in the United Kingdom. And they’re always perceived by law firms, including my own, as the less normal path into law firm and private practice. And oftentimes I hear from not just my firm, other firms and other lawyers, well, this is just a very unique road they’ve traveled here. It’s just not very typical. I think we should look more at the summer associate programs that we do and those associates coming out of there that we can hire for full-time first-year positions. I have a visceral response to people who tell me, this is how we do it or have done it, so this is how we will continue to do it. I do not hold back. My firm has heard this from me a million times because my bio, as you said, demonstrates that I have not taken a road most traveled. I have taken the road less and least traveled, a very unique one. I don’t think that it is logical to say, when you look at the world just in general, the world in geopolitics, in history, that it is logical in any way, shape, or fashion to say the phrase, well, this is how we do it, or this is how we’ve always done it, so we’re going to continue to do it that way. Well, if that were the case, I don’t know where we’d be today. We’re not in a great place in the world, that’s for sure, but we would be in a much worse place. And I won’t go into details of all all the very unfortunate historical facts that we have throughout the globe, but we would be in a far worse place if that was the logic that we all used. So, I always went to that in my mind. But see, again, I always went back to my parents. Neither of my parents went through their careers and their life, our personal life as a family, their personal life as a married couple in their day and age at being Arab, my mother being older than my father, he didn’t know her age until even the day they were married. He never asked the question. And she was married at a late age, at age 37, had me when she was 40. At that time, she was considered old, drab, and not to be thought of. So her personal life was unique. My father’s personal life was unique where he came from. He worked for years before he decided to do his master’s and PhD. So I had an example around me, as did my sister, of an entire world where you could create success and a happy life that is meaningful and a career that’s meaningful that does not have to follow parameters or rules set by external forces, people or otherwise. So that is how I always constructed my life and I continue to do it that way. I continue to renew myself. I continue to grow different practices and niches because I see a vision for it. And when people tell me that’s not going to go anywhere, I tell them, yes, it will. So, I don’t like that approach. Now, why do firms do that? Because lawyers are lawyers. We are risk-averse, and being part of risk-averse is looking at our business approach to a law firm and our business plans. And part of that is to continue to do what— if you look at COVID, if you look at what’s happening with the salaries of associates, firms follow other people. It’s a sheep sort of mentality. We’re going to go follow the construct, what everybody else is doing, because that’s the safest approach. It’s the risk-averse approach. The problem with that is you do not capture the best talent. The best talent are those who have had to struggle and find creative ways to get to a place of success. I certainly know, and I had many adversities. I don’t know if we’ll get to this question. I think you might want to— want, you know, the low and the high points of my career. I had many adversities. No one would ever have thought I’d make partner at the age that I did if you looked at the adversity I had and the road less traveled that I took to get here. So, no one would ever have guessed that, but I am an example and I say this to everyone who asks me who’s doing LMs and struggling the exact same way that I did. No one believed that I could get in this space. I tell them, never believe that. There’s 20 different ways to get to the same place. You just have to decide the one that’s the best for you and that is authentic to yourself and your personality. And firms unfortunately just need to get out of the headspace of, we’ve always done it this way, we’re risk averse, other firms do it do it this way, so we’re going to stay within the safe space. Safe space does not always lead to the greatest success.
Eefan David: Well, that’s so insightful. And I also— that’s the importance of role models too, because it’s one— all very well to hear maybe that it can be done, particularly in the area of diversity, where I’d say there the lip service is being paid to trying to do things differently, but you still need to see those role models of examples of how they’ve succeeded and the path they’ve drawn. And I just want to take the conversation now to that aspect because maybe as a contrary to an area where people want to do things as they’ve always done them, with diversity, there is a concerted effort to change the face of the legal profession, make it more diverse, both ethnically and by gender. How would you score it in terms of what you’re seeing, and has it improved throughout your career, the diversity and inclusion within the profession?
Meriam Nazih Al: It’s improved by performative standards, and when I say improved, let me be very frank, I say improved in a relative term, right? So, I’m not saying improved as in, oh, we’ve done better in that we’re doing well. We’ve improved just merely by the relative statistics. So, unfortunately, I think if I had to score the legal profession on diversity, equity, inclusion, and where we are today, I would say we are a D. Not a B as in baby, a D as in David. We are a D as a legal profession as a whole. And here’s one example, I’ll tell you why. If any legal institution, whether it be an arbitral institution, a court, a law firm, you name it, an NGO that is based around law, the Mansfield Rule really troubles me, right? So, the idea of that we have to meet the lowest common denominator percentage troubles me. Why? Go on merit. Merit alone will get you well above the lowest common percentage or lowest common denominator. And an example of what I can give you directly that I took a pretty hard line on an arbitral institution and said I only wanted arbitrators, gender diverse arbitrators, racially diverse arbitrators tend to happen in our, in our field, in my space, but ethnically and racially diverse arbitrators, but the gender component was not, it was always 3 females and 7 male, typically white, older men, and the 3 mainly sort of commonly named female arbitrators. And a list of 10. And I continued to reject that list and said, until you give me a 50/50 gender, 50/50 list, we will not be picking an arbitrator and doing the selection process. And this was an arbitral institution, and there are several of them that continue to boast and say, we have gotten to the 30% or the 33% in female diversity. That is our goal. That is a very meager, sad number. It should be 50%, and there’s absolutely no reason in the world. There are plenty of very qualified women in the space of law, not just in international. I’m speaking broadly of legal profession, very talented, very capable, simply not given a platform and 5 steps behind. And so there needs to be a push forward, there needs to be a fast forward, and there needs to be a requirement of 50/50, a requirement of 50/50 equal opportunity to be seen and heard such that we can see the gender gap, the pay gap, the inequities, all the issues surrounding DEI actually come to fruition. Until then, we will remain at a D and not move forward.
Eefan David: Very interesting. I think you’re absolutely right. Force the issue. And we can find the candidates. There’s usually not an issue. It’s that kind of relaxing and settling for less in terms of standards I want to just quickly go back to, before we return to personal reflections, go back to your area of practice, international arbitration. I’d love to hear what excites you most about this area now. I’m sure many of the listeners, it’s certainly one of the highly desirable areas to focus on, I would imagine, for new entrants.
Meriam Nazih Al: Yes, absolutely. It’s the go-to, everyone wants to get into it. And I remember those days where I was writing for 2 years, endless emails and letters asking for just a chance, just a foot in the door. What excites me most about the space of international law, and within international law you have international arbitration, which is sort of private practice, and within international arbitration you can break that down. Well, you could, and now it’s growing. That’s the exciting part, which I’ll get to. You break down this private practice into public international law investment arbitration. So investor-state disputes, matters that are involving sovereign states or sovereign-owned and controlled state entities and them being sued. And you’re either representing the claimant investor who has sued the country, the sovereign state, or the state agency, or you’re defending the sovereign state against the investor’s claims for violations of international law, customary international law, and treaty law. So within treaty law, it could be bilateral investment treaties, multilateral investment treaties, and it’s growing. And then under this umbrella of international arbitration, as I said, that’s the private element. You have this investment arbitration. Also under the private international law space, under international arbitration, you have the commercial arbitration work, which is contractual. So business to business, a contractual breach. But even then you can have a state sovereign in the contract. So you’ll still have a sovereign state involved in a commercial dispute, commercial arbitration, rather than in what they call the investor-state arbitration, which I just defined here, which has more of the public international law public policy components to it and customary international law. The exciting part about this space is that international arbitration is now, I don’t want to say it’s merging, but rather let’s say there’s a convergence between international arbitration and international human rights. So business and human rights, the supply chain, countries being more committed to the concept of human rights. The very fact that right to a healthy, clean environment and clean air is now considered a human right. Just goes to show you how close we’re getting into the human rights space, the real public international law, the stuff that matters about the right to self-determination. An example of that is even choices of your citizenship, for instance, that play part in investor-state disputes that I described. That’s a human rights issue. That’s the right to self-determination. There’s other treaties entirely separate from investor-state treaties that are now converging together. So you’re seeing all these very interesting public international law, environmental law issues, the right to a healthy, clean environment, the right to self-determination, the right to statehood, all these things coming in, maritime boundary disputes, border disputes, all converging with this private international law space of international arbitration.. And the two are coming together and forming this business and human rights umbrella underneath it as well. So you have international law and then business and human rights is coming into effect. So we are not sitting in a world where we’re just trying to make money anymore, as much as everyone wants to believe, and that’s what we are doing. There is a component of, you really do have to step back and say, do I want to represent this party, whether it be a state sovereign or company? Or two companies in what they’re doing in X country or in this X business that’s causing some particular damage to people, to a society, to a community, to the globe, to climate change? We’re all being forced in this world of international law to ask those questions of ourselves. We don’t always come up with the right answer, or an answer for that matter, but that’s what’s exciting to me. Now we have to become people, not just the lawyer. We have to be people, not just robots as lawyers and just defending. Or representing.
Eefan David: It’s absolutely fascinating because I see a real parallel between what you’re saying and the world of investing, where ESG integration has now almost become the norm. It’s a hygiene factor. The focus on sustainability is seen as commensurate with a focus on something that will make a good investment return. And equally, if we look at, say, the focus on emerging markets and ask whether they are investible, often it becomes down to a moral judgment. As to whether an area is investible or not. It’s not simply about the money. So really interesting how that’s happening in parallel in the legal profession. I want to move now to some personal reflections because I think you, I’m sure you have many. And the first one, just to touch on something you raised earlier about setbacks and challenges, you mentioned that you had them over the course of your career. You persisted nonetheless. Were there any in particular that you learned lessons from or that you can share?
Meriam Nazih Al: Getting into the space of international law was a really big struggle for me personally and professionally. Obviously, as I said, I was doing my master’s degree, finishing my thesis while I was working at a law firm in antitrust litigation, which was not the space I wanted to work in. Great space, but it was not my passion. But while I was networking to try to find a job in international arbitration, international law, and I was teaching two master’s courses. Preparing a curriculum is not an easy thing for a master’s program and two courses a week. During that time, while I was networking to get into international law, Wow, did I get told how I was not equipped for this. I remember a recruiter saying to me, “I don’t think you’re smart enough to be in this space, if I’m being very honest, Maryam.” Those were the words that were used. And I couldn’t believe that a recruiter would ever say that to me. And they went off of my grades in law school because I wasn’t in the top 10 percentile. And in the top 10 percentile, what international arbitration practitioners back in the early 2000s, one of the phrases that was used with me, I shall not name the person who stated this. Said, we are the neurosurgeons of law. And that was to say, you have to be at the top of your game, as though neurosurgeons are the only, you know, the smartest and the brightest doctors. I mean, that’s not the only, right? There are other very high-level thinkers in the medical space. But that was the comment that was made to me. And somehow that kind of trickled down to, you’re not smart enough because you weren’t in the 10th percentile. So if you weren’t in the top 10 percentile, you couldn’t possibly be as smart as the top neurosurgeons of law in international law. So that was setback. Again, resilience. It goes right back to resilience. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to quit, move back to California. I was in Washington, DC at the time and go straight back to the law firm that had the open door for me. My prior firm where I first worked, loved them. They still today, I still speak to my old boss, my very first boss. And he always said, you have an open door here any day. But I just kept saying, no, who is this person or that person or these people to tell me who I am and what I’m capable of? So that was one very large setback. Another was when I actually entered and finally got my foot in the door at Crowe Mooring, I had some really rough experiences. There were people, again, no need to be naming people, but there were people who used the word, “You’re not cut out for this.” And it was always testing. There was always a mental game in the process, a mental test in the process. “Oh, maybe you’re not cut out for this.” No matter how hard I worked, I remember one time a book was thrown at my head. Because the person didn’t like the way that something was written. It was it actually— was me and another associate in the room, actually. It’s not just me. So we both ducked in opposite directions. I picked the book back up, threw it back at the person, and said, next time I won’t miss. And of course, my legs were shaking. I thought, oh man, I’m gonna get fired. But of course, that was a setback, and it was all based on, you’re just too stupid to figure this out. Now, the brief was filed as it was drafted with minor edits. It was just merely the personalities in this space. So I’ve learned a lot of difficult personalities in the space of international law because it comes with a lot of ego. And I started at a time— a lot has changed from the early 2000s or mid-2000s to date. I came into it at a time where it’s changed so drastically. At that time, you could get away with way too much as a partner at the top of your game, especially if you were a privileged white male. You could get away with so much. And so I had those setbacks and I had to cry it out. I had to fall to the ground, but I never crumbled. I got myself up and I just pushed on. And I remember one phrase, if there was something I could give to someone to say from a personal reflection. My father said to me, when I said every week, I said, I’m quitting, I’m quitting, I’m quitting, I’m quitting. And I, and I was there for a good 7 years, loved it. I would, and I loved the firm. It had nothing to do with the firm. It was just the industry. It felt like I was constantly being battled against or, or punched or pummeled. And my father said to me, you seem to think that they, whomever they were, they being the difficulties, the strife that I was facing, they and that will outlast you. What makes you think you can’t outlast them? And when I just stopped and reflected on that, it was hilarious to me. I thought, wait, wait, yeah, I’m thinking like this is going to go on forever. I said, well, what do you mean? He says, nothing ever stays the same. So just sit down, wait, have patience. You will outlast what is wrong. And the moment he said you’ll outlast what was wrong, I knew I was in the right, that was the wrong, and I just hung in there. I mean, I could go on and on about that, but those were the main two events and my father’s words to me that really stood out and made a difference for my resilience and how I overcame a lot of the setbacks.
Eefan David: It’s really interesting because we talk a lot about imposter syndrome, and that’s the sense of that comes from within of not being good enough. I can’t imagine the stress of having that even coming from the external force that one wasn’t good enough. And I’ve also heard that sometimes a focus on perfectionism within the legal profession, particularly, can be a source of great psychological stress and physical stress. So, it’s good that you share your experiences there and how how how you, you, you were resilient throughout. My last question is around any key piece of advice that you received throughout your career or any creed or motto that you live by. Is there anything you can share there?
Meriam Nazih Al: Yes. Never let external anything define how you are going to forge your path. Decide it for yourself. I had to. You will be lucky if you have a sponsor or someone who speaks and is the vocal cords for you and lifts you up and pushes you forward. And I did not have that. That to me was a blessing. To some it’s not, but for me it taught me the following: define your career, define what you want, and the most important thing in doing that, when you decide what it is you want and go after it without any voices just wash out those voices, all the naysayers, is choose the purpose. Define your purpose, and then it will define how you wish to proceed in your career. And let all the excess noise drown out, especially the negatives.
Eefan David: Well, thank you so much, Maryam. This has been a wonderfully rich discussion. I think the term Renaissance woman doesn’t even come close to doing you justice. The way you fuse your creativity your passion for law within law, the way you blend different disciplines and your advocacy and overall message of resilience and mission is just such a great collection of takeaways. Thank you for coming here and sharing your insights with us.
Meriam Nazih Al: Thank you so much for having me. I’ve enjoyed it so much. I really appreciate your time and it’s been an honour. Thank you, Aoifinnan.
Eefan David: I’m Aoifinnan Devitt. Thank you for listening to our 50 Faces Focus Series. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring lawyers and their stories, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for information only and should not be construed as investment or legal advice. All views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations of the host or any guest.
