The Real Lawyer: Shruti Rana (Part 3)

In the final episode, Shruti Rana reflects on academia’s challenges, including gender disparities, the pandemic’s impact on caregivers, and her research on Asian American lawyers. She shares insights on mentorship, public universities, and finding balance, encouraging young lawyers to embrace non-linear career paths.

Transcript

Joyce Sophia Xu (00:03.266)

Welcome back to the Real Lawyer podcast. I'm Joyce Sophia Hsu, and you're listening to part three of my conversation with Shudi Rana, legal scholar, law school leader, and human rights advocate. In this episode, you will hear Shudi talking about some of the research projects she's been involved in, and we will also learn more about Shudi's life outside of work. I hope you enjoy.

Joyce Sophia Xu (00:34.168)

So Shruti, in our last episode, we talked about your path to legal academia, and now you're a senior administrator at the University of Missouri School of Law. And that sounds like a great platform, given everything we talked about, for you to continue to do the work that's meaningful and impactful. And on top of that, I understand that you've also been an active human rights advocate and a civil servant. You've served on a city council.

and also volunteered with various human rights organizations. So I'd love to hear more about all of that. So I can talk a little bit about where I am in my career and then some of the research projects that I've been a part of and are ongoing. I told you all the reasons that I ended up becoming a law professor and what I liked about it. And I think I had a similar journey to that transition from private practice to the UN and then legal academia.

I have spent my career now at large public universities. And I mentioned that culture shock, right? Going from being an undergrad at the University of California to a fancy Ivy League private law school, right? And in my academic career, I've ended up working at entirely at public flagship universities. So I started at the University of Maryland. I spent a year at the University of California. I was at Indiana University.

University of Missouri and those are very different states and regions but what I love about public universities, what they all have in common as these flagship universities, is that they are there to serve the people of the state.

to students who might be from all over the country and all over the world, but to train students, send them out into their future careers and their aspirations, and also to contribute to these communities and state around them through research, through projects, through educational impact. And I think those are really important missions. And I also think that public universities are a very important

Joyce Sophia Xu (02:43.136)

engine of opportunity and transformation for students because they're much lower cost, right, than other universities are affordable to a wider range of students. And you get students from every different background who come to these universities and this is their opportunity, right? This might be their first time that there's so many first generation students or there are people who encounter something for the first time that they didn't know about. And that's what they decide they want to do in their careers. And it's such an important way

to build the future of the state and in the country. Just that overall purpose and mission of working at a public university has always deeply resonated with me. And you see it. I see students coming in from every background imaginable. as I was talking about, they encounter something really exciting. You see them learn and grow. You see them mature as people. And then you see them going out there and they're going to make on the world.

And so I think that's a very special mission and I wanted to contribute to it. And I wanted to think about, you know, those amazing moments in the classroom. How can you make that happen for more people? Right? How can you help the university just serve students in the community and faculty and, you know, all the people who work there better? And so that's how I got involved in university administration. Right? It was again, thinking about

it's interesting to find out how the institutions are run and then again, how can you make things better? So I started this administrative path. I was director of an international law program. Then I became an assistant dean, the dean for curricular affairs. And then from there, I became their assistant vice chancellor at the University of Missouri. And then now I am assistant provost for strategic faculty initiatives.

which means I focus on faculty development and success, right? So for me, what that means is I'm focusing on how can we recruit, retain and support amazing faculty members and support them in their research and teaching so that they're the best versions of themselves. So they're producing the best research that is really impacting the world, that they are.

Joyce Sophia Xu (04:56.568)

having an impact in the classroom. And so I think about, again, like how to create the environment, what kind of support do people need, what kind of mentoring and training and development do they need, because there's a huge range in the way institutions approach training and development, starting from nothing, right? There's lots of places where it's just sink or swim. Here you are, go out there. And then places where there are resources and support and processes and the opportunity for people to.

get the training and mentoring they need. And it's always, it's hard to predict, you don't, like you're trying to create those moments where somebody is connected to the resource or person they need at the moment they need it. So I love that portion of my job, like getting to be a part of the leadership team at the University where we think about how are we gonna approach the current challenges? Where are we going in the future? How are we trying to make this a better place for everybody? How are we trying to improve? How are we trying to do better? How are we trying to keep costs down? How are we trying to make more programs and more opportunities?

for students and faculty. So that's how I ended up in academic leadership and why I love it. Well, it's great that you're in an important and impactful position. And I love that you're just so passionate and thoughtful about how to be of service and how to make a positive impact. So, Shruti, tell me more about all the important research you've done over the years and maybe particularly spend some time on

the one that you did on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis and how it's impacted the legal profession. What's interesting is that I have a chance to apply and think about the intersections with the legal scholarship and research that I do also. So you mentioned the COVID-19 crisis. And as I have mentioned a number of times, I've been working on international human rights issues, but in particular,

gender related, like international women's rights issues throughout my career in various ways. And I've always been really interested in women in the legal profession and what their experiences are. How are they entering the profession? Why are their retention rates so much lower? Why are their career paths different? What can we do to create an environment where we're addressing the issues that people are facing? Yeah.

Joyce Sophia Xu (07:18.038)

And that's just, that's not just legal academia, it's the legal profession in general. Right, the legal profession in general. And yes, and so I've done lots of research projects on the legal profession in general. And in particular, I recently wrote an article on the experience of Asian Americans in the law, because most people don't realize that Asian Americans have some of the highest leakage rates out of the profession.

highest rates of mental distress in the legal profession. And I was interested in looking at some of the reasons why, and again, how to address that. You mentioned the COVID care crisis project, and what happened there was, just like everyone else, I was just experiencing the pandemic as this unprecedented event that was like nothing I'd experienced before. And in the academic environment, we had to rapidly shift to online teaching.

And we had to change everything that we were doing, much like many other professions. And we also had to navigate the changes ourselves, but also help our students and faculty and staff around us navigate those changes, right? Because everyone's going through these changes. And so, and then we're like experiencing itself. So I was suddenly at home with a young child and no childcare. Preschool was closed indefinitely. And...

Like many people, it was very hard to manage, right? I still had to do my full-time job. My husband had to do his full-time job. We had no childcare. Like what were we going to do? And I started seeing, like others in the initial, the initial impact of the pandemic when the first sort of switched to kind of, you know, moving work into the home for a lot of professions, that there was a huge impact on women and caregivers, especially. So in the initial stages of the pandemic, people started raising the alarm about

how the number of publications that women were sending out to journals was dropping precipitously. And at the same time, the number of submissions by men was increasing. It went up. Yeah, it went up. And then the gap expanded, right? Because you have one group submitting a lot less, one group submitting a lot more. And everyone had a different experience with the pandemic, but we all, like there were a lot of people who,

Joyce Sophia Xu (09:39.182)

We're saying things like, well, now that I don't have a one hour commute to work back and forth, I have a lot more time to watch Netflix and read books and do my hobbies and write a lot of articles and do research. And so for some people, it was like the gift of time, right? With fewer obligations. And then for other people, was the exact opposite. With two colleagues, Mira Thao at Southwestern and Saira Choudhury at FIU.

we got together and started talking about these issues because we were just really alarmed about what was happening. And in particular, we were thinking about the legal profession is one where women have only entered in large numbers for a matter of decades. few decades. Yeah, basically the past 20 or 30 years is when we've seen more than a critical mass of women entering the legal profession.

And if we are seeing a situation where there's a sudden drastic drop in the ability of women lawyers to do their jobs, who are dropping out of the workforce, right? And law professors and people in all aspects of the legal field not being able to do their work and produce their work, we thought these voices would be lost, right? And what does that mean for a profession that has just recently even gotten used to the presence of women?

for those voices to just drop out, right? Or just be lost or go unheard. And so we were like, we wanna do something about this and we wanna raise the alarm and let people know what's happening and start coming up with some solutions. And we focused on caregivers, specifically not women, although the majority of lawyers who are also caregivers are women. And all sorts of caregiving, it could be for yourself. There are a lot of people who had a lot of healthcare related issues that were severely affected by the pandemic.

There are people who are taking care of elderly parents or family members and people taking care of children. And so we just started a research project and a series of symposia to bring attention to what was happening and start talking about things that could be done to address this. And it grew into thinking about the challenges that caregivers face in the legal profession and academia in general, right? Because those are professions that were

Joyce Sophia Xu (11:58.658)

designed around a model that assumes somebody else is taking care of family and caregiving needs. And that the person who is the lawyer or the professor is not the person doing those things. And that is not true for many people. You're juggling all sorts of responsibilities. And when you think about schools and health aid services, all of those things disappearing overnight and somebody having to continue doing their full-time job and do all these things,

and do it in the middle of a global health crisis. You could see why people were burning out and dropping out of the professions or just giving up or just saying, I don't want to be a part of a profession that doesn't accommodate these or doesn't view me as a whole person and doesn't make allowances for things. So some things are really easy to address, like increased flexibility, like telling people, you know, you need to do eight hours a day, for example, but do it on your own time or get the work done as opposed to you have to be here in the

when your child has an emergency or has to have a doctor's appointment or something like that. Yeah, you would think it would be a no brainer, yeah, yeah. Change always comes slowly, slower than one would hope, unfortunately. Yeah, and some of it is that the people who are making the policies haven't experienced those things, so they never thought about them. So even just raising awareness often makes a difference. But also these are the type of things where it creates like a negative spiral.

Right? If you start losing people, then you like lose the people who are doing the care work in a department or at an office. there's, there's care work that goes into maintaining relationships and making sure that people are happy and supporting, you know, professional development and mentorship. What happens when the people who are doing that are gone? You create this negative spiral where like everything starts getting worse and then more people want to leave. And so we, we were just thinking about ways, like, how do we stop that spiral? First of all, and.

what can we do to make these professions more accommodating to caregivers? Because someone who's a caregiver has so many interesting perspectives and ideas on the law and how it works or whatever it is that they're doing that are really valuable to every profession. And also we need caregivers for our world to succeed. If no one's doing this work and it's not valued.

Joyce Sophia Xu (14:21.21)

And that's a huge issue, The value in caregiving work is a big issue that many people have spent decades thinking about. But what we were doing is thinking about how can we take a slice of a profession, the legal profession and academia and think about how we can make changes and improve things there. Yeah. And it's really interesting to me because you were able to collect concrete data from an extreme situation.

You didn't have to think in the vacuum and extrapolate. We had that extreme event. We had a pandemic. Yeah. And I think it was just so thoughtful of you and your colleagues to do that research and collect all this data. It's great data. And like you said, you're sounding the alarm on such an important issue about the potential devastating impact. If we were to lose that diversity of voice and insight,

And also to lose all that energy and heart and passion from women in terms of their engagement in the legal community. I really can't imagine that. So I'm just so grateful for you for doing this important work. Thank you. It's been my privilege again to be involved in that, right? Because I could see how hard it is to break barriers and make changes and to see that people have done those things and they're in these

fields and how easy it is to like turn the clock back and erase those gains, right? That's where you want to think about, well, what can we do to keep people in these fields? Yeah. wow. There's so much to talk about. And I'm just thinking about how you really have built a career for yourself that it's just perfectly tailored for you. It allows you to derive so much fulfillment out of it and also meaning and purpose.

So it's not just a job, whatever you're doing, it's really your life's work. And it also seems to really feed your heart and soul. So that's just amazing. Shruti, we talked a lot about work and I love to shift gears a bit and spend some time talking about your daily routine. Could you tell us...

Joyce Sophia Xu (16:46.41)

What are the things outside of work that also bring you joy and help you find fulfillment? What my daily routine is, is an interesting question because I'm the mom of a young child and I live in an intergenerational household. Each day starts off with chaos, trying to get everybody to school or work. I'm really lucky to have flexibility in my career and position so I can accommodate things like doctor's appointments.

I have the flexibility to kind of think about like my needs and my family's needs. So I don't have a set routine every day. And I, in fact, I can't because also my job involves responding to whatever issue comes up, right? And again, you can't predict what, what's going to be an emergency or an issue that, a problem that needs to be addressed. sometimes you can, but on Monday, you may not know what's going to happen on Thursday. And, know, so I always have to maintain that flexibility.

So I think one thing that's been really important to all of this and balancing and juggling things is to be as organized as possible. So I enter everything into my calendar. I'm always making lists and making sure that I don't overlook anything. I have an endless list of things to do and then I try to fit them in in slots where it'll work. And I try to create slots that work with how I work, which is that if I need to have meetings, I try to put my meetings together so I can...

an 11 a.m. meeting, noon meeting, a 1 p.m. meeting. If I need to spend time thinking about something and writing something, then I need a block of time. Like I can't, it's harder to do it in like half an hour here or there in between meetings. It's better to have like a two or three hour block of time reserved for something. And then I've had to think about what feeds and nourishes me.

And, I've been talking about seeing burnout and I've had like those moments in my career too, or, you know, times like the pandemic where you're just like, there's literally so much to do and there's 24 hours in a day and you're supposed to sleep and eat too at some point, right? Yeah. And so what I think about is like, it's sort of like this bucket, like I spend a lot of the energy that I have and I have to think of ways to replenish the energy in that bucket. So how do I do that? Right. And like, one of the ways is trying to make sure I get like,

Joyce Sophia Xu (18:58.062)

adequate rest, trying to eat healthy and things like that. And I don't always do that. But what I've learned about myself is what gives me energy is connecting with people and ideas. And so that's what I do in my free time too. I just try to do different people and different ideas. you know, so I'm lucky that in my job, my day to day job, I have the opportunity to connect with people and try to figure out how to address what issues they're facing. And then

both research and thinking about what's the larger issues that the university is facing, that's a chance to connect with ideas, right? To think about, to just engage with them. And so in my spare time, I realized that those are the things that really are exciting to me. So I love being involved in my community. That's how I ended up running for office too, and thinking like I want it. For city council? Yeah, yeah. was seeing the problems people were facing and I was like, okay, I want to talk to them about it and what we can do.

And then, so I love being involved in just community activities. Like I try to volunteer for different, usually educational organizations or volunteer organizations. And that's where I connect with people and see what they're doing and be a part of whatever project they're interested in. And then the ideas part is that I just love to read. And so I just read like every genre, but mostly romance novels and historical novels and...

especially combinations of those and science fiction. those are books where you're like thinking about really interesting ideas or scenarios and you know, and then that's how I relax. Cause I start thinking about that instead of whatever problem I'm working on, you know, at work or in my research. That's a really wide range of interests. that's pretty cool. Yeah. I also love that you're someone who really knows who you are at your core and what

really nourishes your heart and your mind and you live and work according to that knowledge of yourself. So I love that. Shuri, given you're so wise, I'd love to hear your take on what you would tell law students and young lawyers about the important things to keep in mind as they navigate law school and a career in law.

Joyce Sophia Xu (21:22.552)

You know, what's been most important to me and what I see as helpful for law students to think about is to be open to the opportunities that come your way and to understand that most careers are not linear. And there are moments when life gets in the way or your field might change or a new field might come up or a new area of law or a new opportunity you haven't thought about. And if you think it's a good fit to just go for it. And also, I think

When you're in law school, you think that there's like a certain specific path to whatever. And there are some pathways, like you can do this and this and you become a professor or you can become a law firm partner or different things. But actually, most people's lives take a somewhat wandering path, right? You go right sometimes, you go left, you might go sideways. And all of that is part of the process of ending up where you should be, right? And all of those experiences are learning opportunities that you can use.

And I just firmly, like anytime I hear people say things like, well, you have to do this if you want to do this type of career. That's not true. You that so often, right? We heard that a lot in law school, for sure. Right. And I just think that's not true at all. If you are determined to get into a field, you can find your path into it or into a particular area of the law. You can find your path into it. And you can also, whatever area you're in, you can take literally any subject in the law.

and figure out a way of interacting with it that you like, right? If you're more people oriented, you can have a more client focused career. If you're more writing oriented, you can have a different type of career, problem solving or whatever it is. You can take that subject and figure out a work style and a part of that field that you enjoy and that plays to your strengths and that where you want to come to work every day or most days. Yeah.

Yeah, you never, and you can never predict how the world is gonna change and how the legal profession is gonna change. So you just keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities. And I think it's important to talk to as many people as you can about their careers and what they're doing and what they like and don't like. And then whatever ideas resonate with you, know, utilize them and.

Joyce Sophia Xu (23:37.486)

And if you, that's how you're going to hear about interesting jobs that you didn't know exist and things that you can't find on like a career counseling website or something. Just again, because the world is so complicated and there's so many things changing all the time. Yeah. Really important advice and great advice. Thank you so much, Shruti, for your time. thank you so much. This was a great conversation.

Joyce Sophia Xu (24:03.448)

Thanks so much for listening. I had such a great time talking to Shudi about work and life and also just learning about her journey. I hope you enjoyed it too. If any part of our conversation resonated with you, please do share your thoughts with us in the comment section or find us on LinkedIn or Instagram and join our community. We would love to hear from you. And please do subscribe to our show and tune in for more conversations with real lawyers.

Until next time, be well and be happy.