Life at Stoel: Serving Communities

Transcript

Maren Norton
Partner, Litigation

I'm a Seattle kid. I was raised in Seattle. It's the city I love. It's the city I chose to move home to. This is the firm I was a summer associate at and I came back to. I'm a big believer that this, we are as a firm, Stoel Rives, committed to when we practice what we preach when we say we are part of a broader community. And that takes a variety of forms. And I hope that our community commitment shows in a variety of venues.

Community commitment can take the form of our pro bono work. We have an incredible pro bono program, serving communities, serving, we just had a really big asylum victory. We have had some clemency work. We have housing justice. We have all sorts of things. So we are serving that pocket of our community.

Then there's the community boards that so many of our lawyers serve on. Everything from, I mentioned Westside Baby and others, where people serve on them. They are active in them. They're part of their local community and then they bring them into our community. We go out, we have every, I think it's twice a year now, we've started doing these community service days where we go out to one of those nonprofits where one of our lawyers serves on the board, and we have an opportunity to take staff and lawyers alike in a team effort and we wear these stories hats and they're kind of fun, and we're able to serve the community, get to know the community, and give back to the broader community that gives so much to us.

And then there's Bar service. We have a lot of lawyers who serve on Bar communities and on Bar foundations and things like that and we really take seriously our obligation as members of the Bar.

And then I like to say that we're all people at our core. So fundamentally to our core, we are the group of people that then come together on a Saturday, or I think it's a Sunday in June the last few years, to march en masse in the Pride Parade. And first year we did that was magical. And it's our lawyers and our staff with their kids and their family and their community and their friends, and they're waving to friends and nodding to friends on the streets as well. So we try in every way to be part of our community, both with our legal skills and as who we are.