Womxn in Business: Linda Fang

1/12/2021

An Interview with Linda Fang

What got you started in law?

There are no lawyers in my family. We have a lot of doctors, engineers, scientists, and tech people. My dad was a chemist, and I thought I would go into the sciences. I went to UC Berkeley for college, and was in the pre-med / engineering track. I don't know that I particularly enjoyed it, or didn't enjoy it, until I took this First Amendment class taught by one of the Berkeley law professors and I loved it!

Going to Berkeley changed a lot of things for me, but this one class changed everything. From there, it still took me a while to switch over to law. It was a slow process of learning about myself, learning about the world, and figuring out that helping people is what I wanted to do, just not in the medical field.

I went to law school after graduating from college and working at a big law firm for two years. I knew [Big Law] was not what I wanted to do. I went to law school wanting to work in nonprofits. I actually thought about getting a JD/MSW (Juris Doctor / Master of Social Work), until people told me that I shouldn't do that because it's a very expensive way to be a social worker. I decided not to do the dual degree, but upon graduation from law school, I did in fact work for a legal nonprofit back in Los Angeles.

I think the nonprofit job really informed a lot of what I do today, even though I'm no longer doing that kind of work. I have kept that social justice perspective to my work, and that's why my firm focuses on women and minority business owners.

And “minority” - I don't like that word, but it's a simple, relatively well-understood way to capture women, racial and ethnic minorities, and other traditionally underrepresented individuals. It also includes members of the LGBTQ community, disabled individuals, and pretty much everyone who's not a white man.

In my firm, we take a social justice view to everything that we do. Whether it's educating our clients, or helping clients who may not be able to afford our services now but might in the future, to the pro bono work that we do, to really breaking down the advice that we give in ways that are actually understandable by our clients. I think that's something that is oftentimes overlooked in the legal profession. A lot of lawyers just do their thing and spit out good work, but maybe don't think as deeply about how it's received by their clients.

That's a long way long way of explaining how I got here.

Personally, I was excited for our initial consultation. I didn't know that this existed in the world. I am a small business owner. It's just me. So to know that your services exist and that there is someone out there focused on helping women and small businesses was really exciting. How did you make this shift into a women centered, minority focused firm?

Well, it was a bit circuitous for me.

Growing up in a largely all-white town with few people who looked like me, I had a strong sense of wanting to fit in, and in some ways, rejecting my culture. Assimilation, belonging, and acceptance were always topics in the forefront of my mind growing up. At some point, little by little, I started to realize, wait a minute, why am I rejecting this big part of myself?

I think my parents also had a strong sense of that. Being immigrants, they place a lot of importance on having really good English, and it was all about education, and maybe not embracing some of our heritage. When I went to Berkeley, I wasn't even aware of many aspects of Chinese culture because my parents, rather than imparting those things to me, had focused more on school, school, school.

Berkeley itself changed a lot for me. I'd grown up in this predominantly white, very conservative, small-ish town in California, that continues to turn out some of the most conservative representatives in Congress. It’s like the last bastion of conservatism in California.

Somewhere along the line I started to realize that I don't need to be a part of the “mainstream” culture, which is kind of weird. I realize that I am able to say that from a privileged perspective.

The firm where I worked for the longest period of time in Los Angeles, after I left the nonprofit and before I moved to Seattle, was made up of almost all white male attorneys. When I joined, every partner except one other non-minority woman, was a white man. I was told, ‘Oh, you’re one of the guys,’ all the time. I got to straddle those worlds in a way. I was able to choose to embrace my Chinese culture, or I could sort of fit in. I realize that's a very privileged perspective that not everyone has. Somewhere along this journey, I've chosen not to “fit in”. I don't care about that aspect of it anymore, and I actually want to help people who can't fit in or have chosen to focus on what makes them unique.

How do you market your business? What tactics seem to work or resonate the most with your clientele?

Some male lawyers that I know have told me that it's crazy that we're doing this [marketing our firm as focusing on women- and minority-owned businesses]. ‘You're giving up on all of these big clients, or you could get so much more business if you just marketed yourself much more neutrally.’ But I have no interest in being “neutral”.

The way we approach marketing in our firm is we want to focus on smaller businesses, and in some cases they are not even small. Sometimes they are larger businesses that have been in existence for years and have almost never consulted with a lawyer because maybe they tried it and it was a bad experience. Or maybe they tried it and they felt like the attorney talked down to them. Or maybe they tried it and they didn't understand anything they got from it. It's really important to me to not be like the typical law firm.

We're just a consultant like any other business consultant. We don't have to be elevated on this pedestal just because we’re lawyers. We don't have to make every legal issue seem really complex in order to justify really high fees. We can be approachable, down to earth, and make it seem easy. That's one of the highest compliments that we get, when clients tell us, ‘Whoa, that was actually really easy, you made it really easy for us.’ I love that. If I can help a client figure out a legal problem without feeling like they're dealing with a lawyer, that's a win for me.

For me, it’s about thinking differently. The law is so much about following what's been done before, following tradition and legal precedent. But looking at the consumer market right now, consumers are telling us that how things have always been done is not working anymore.

I have a more personal approach to the law. I think of our clients as people first and I don't necessarily think about the consumer market as a whole. I've managed to find my way to the same place as the industry analysts through a different one-on-one approach, which is what I prefer.

I think intimacy is missing from the legal field. It is very staunch, it is very white male, at least in my limited exposure and experience with it. What have been some of your experiences as a woman in the law field, particularly having worked at different types of law firms?

My personal experience has been fine, I would say. I have war stories like other women lawyers do, but as I mentioned, I have been pretty well accepted, or told I was one of the guys. I don't have really horrific experiences like some of the women lawyers that I've spoken to. But I have seen what other women have gone through.

One time, when I was still a new attorney, I was in court for a motion hearing. After the other attorney and I finished arguing our sides, the judge commended us on the good job we had both done advocating for our clients and let us know that he would be ruling in my client’s favor. The opposing attorney sighed dramatically and said, ‘Well, what can I say? She’s a feisty one.’ To my shock, the judge agreed with the attorney and made some comments about how he used to be married to a Chinese woman and knows good and well how feisty they [Asian women] can be. I heard laughter from about a dozen men sitting in the courtroom gallery behind me and I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just stood there in silence with my face burning until the judge and opposing counsel finished their commentary and the hearing ended. I didn’t tell anyone what happened for years because I felt so much shame. Being made to feel like I didn’t belong in the profession I had chosen stayed with for a long time.

In 2013, I moved to Seattle to be with my now husband, and I actually took more than a year off to think about whether I really wanted to be a lawyer. In 2015, after I had been back in law practice for about a year, I reached out to a former colleague of mine from LA, who had since moved to the Bay Area. We decided to start our own law firm, and do it the way we wanted to do it - supporting women, working mothers, and the kinds of clients that we wanted to work with. We wanted to have a workplace that is supportive of other women and their personal and professional interests. In 2016, I wrote an article for NWLawyer magazine in Washington. I talked about how women should define for themselves what success means to them and create their own path to success. As women, why do we have to follow the traditional track that has been set out for us by men who often have wives at home taking care of the kids for them so they can do what they want? That's my experience as a woman in law.

How did you carry these experiences into your working environment and create your company culture?

I have so many more horror stories to share, but suffice it to say, I saw a lot and wanted to change that, and wanted to think about how things could work differently.

The way I hire employees is that I really want to hire people who have ideas and want to contribute. I don't want the firm to be just my idea. I want it to be all of our ideas. My paralegal, who has been with me for two and a half years, is a young mother and incredibly brilliant. She hasn't yet finished her bachelor's degree. I didn't care about that. What I cared about was when she came into my office to interview, she was glowing with love and excitement for what I was trying to do with the firm. She said,’ When I saw your job ad. I could not believe it. I've always wanted to be a lawyer and work in law.’

She thinks deeply about how this information is going to be received by the client, and wants to serve our clients in the best way possible. Is this going to be confusing to them? How can we break it down? And you know, she outthinks almost every lawyer I've ever hired or worked with. This is missing in what we do. It's easy to do the same things over and over again, or get stuck in particular patterns. I find myself doing this all the time when we’re exhausted. She is always asking, ‘Is there a better way we could do this? Is there a different way we can think about this?' She keeps me on my feet. I want to hire people like that.

Where do you see the legal field going?

I see clients having a lot more say in the legal services that they're buying, and what they're willing to pay for those services. If we're talking about business owners specifically, owners will retain a lot more agency in deciding what they want for their business, rather than allowing an attorney to dictate to them.

If lawyers want to stay relevant, they need to provide what people want, in a way that they understand, and at a price they can afford. They need to be able to see the value in what they're getting. That's something that we focus on a lot in our firm.

We are in the middle of a pandemic. Has your business model had to change? How are you adapting?

With the onset of the pandemic and the continuation of it, our firm hasn't changed that much. We got rid of our physical office space, so everyone's working from home now. But, because my business partner and I had started the firm while living in different states, it was natural for us to work remotely. So in that sense, it's been super easy and very smooth because we were set up that way.

As far as the legal questions we have been confronted with, it's pushed us exponentially to think creatively about things. The pandemic has brought up so many questions that I could not have imagined a year ago. We work mostly in the employment law realm, where employment and business intersect, and we're in a changing field already. Employment law changes all the time, but I can't tell you how much things have changed since last March. It's been staggering.

We've had to expand our knowledge to include public health, health and safety, workers’ compensation, and all sorts of things we have never dealt with directly before. It also involves working with non-lawyers, and we actually someone who is in public health and nursing, to help us understand some of the public health guidance related to COVID-19 so that we could break it down for our clients. That was a new thing for us, why would a business law firm hire a nurse? We don’t have the background for a lot of this stuff related to COVID, and as a caregiver, she has a lot of experience working with legal regulations in the health care industry. So we hired her to explain it to us so we could explain it to our clients.

That's been the biggest challenge, needing to expand our scope of understanding and to deal with constant change.

Ok, so here you are dealing with client needs, changing regulations, and the general sense of urgency in the business world. Do you still have business goals?

Yeah, a lot of our goals went out the window last year. When the shutdown order came in March, there was a flurry of activity with businesses needing to figure out how to shut down, how to furlough, and how to get employees on unemployment. There was a lot of activity that I didn't feel right charging clients for because their businesses were shutting down and they weren’t paying themselves. I ended up cutting our rates or writing off fees proactively because I didn’t want our clients to feel like they had to ask for it.

One thing that I'm so thankful for is that our clients continue to pay us. They continue even in the midst of their own shutdowns. They're reaching out to me asking why they haven't received an invoice, and in some cases I told them that I just wrote it off and they were like, 'Why would you ever do that?’

Then, in the month of September, we actually had our highest revenue ever since we started the firm in 2015. So, last year we had one of our lowest revenue months as well as one of our highest revenue months.

One thing that I did for my employees was to give them a full year’s bonus, as if it wasn’t a year of COVID. My employees have worked harder than ever this year. I get that things are unpredictable, but we have done better than I ever could have imagined, better than I thought we were going to do back in April. We have done extremely well.

Our main goal for the firm, even during COVID, is remembering who we are, remembering our values and sticking with those, being consistent in who we are, and continuing to show our clients who we are. I'm hoping that this year we will be able to have more goals and get back to some of the projects that you and I had talked about so many months ago. Right now we don't yet have the bandwidth for most of those things, but we can always remember who we are.

What advice do you have for other women who would be interested in starting their own business?

My advice is to have a firm, laser-focused goal that you're going after.

What worked for me was having a very strong vision of what I wanted. Sometimes, if you're not sure about taking the leap, and you're not totally clear on what exactly you want to do, that can be really difficult. I see that happen sometimes with very well-meaning women who are incredibly intelligent. When they're uncertain, they're not sure exactly what it is they're going after, that's when I see them giving up relatively easily.

I had a very firm concept of the clients I wanted to work with, and I knew I wanted to do it in a way that rewards my employees for having families and lives outside of work. I feel like having families and lives and interests other than law makes them even better people to work with. Those two things I was very firm about, and then how I got there was to be figured out later.

My advice is to take the time to hone exactly what you want to do. You don't need to know exactly how you're going to go about it, but have a laser focus on what it is that you want to do. I've been accused of having a laser focus, and I would agree with that. I may not always know exactly how I'm going to do something, or how I'm going to get there, or even what the end result is going to look like. But, I know what I want to do.

What role has mentorship played in your career?

There have been so many people who have helped me, whether it was being a referral source, or having a conversation with me at 10 PM about how I switched all of my books over to this one bookkeeping service, it's not working out, and how do I get them out!

I have come across a number of young women starting out in their careers. I thought they were brilliant and I offered to be a resource for them, the same way I've offered to be a resource for men who were starting out.

I will say, it’s always the men who reach out and ask for help. They're almost brazen in the way they reach out and ask for help, like, ‘Hey, can I have a copy of your contract for this and that? I'm starting my own firm. I need templates. Can I have this, this, this and this?’ I'm like, what? Do you know how long we spent on those things?

Women don't do that nearly as much. I think they're afraid to bother me, or other people, or want to feel like they're doing it on their own. In my experience, women are willing to help other women. I am much more willing to help than I've been asked to help, so I have stores of extra help. Women just have to ask for it. Don’t be afraid to reach out.

What are you looking forward to?

I'm looking forward to a new presidential administration. It feels like I've almost forgotten what it was like to have a sane person in office. Obama seems like a lifetime ago. I'm really looking forward to seeing what that will look like. There have been a lot of predictions already in the legal world about what Biden might do with the Department of Labor and some other appointments that we're waiting for.

We've been in such chaos for the last four years, and I know it's bad to say, but at some point in time, I've had to put my head in the sand because it's just too crazy. I have to shut everything off and do some knitting and puzzles, but it's not good to feel like you need to hide from what's happening. I look forward to reengaging again and talking about things that have been unspeakable for so long.

Original interview 12/1/20. Edited for clarity and length.

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