The Real Lawyer: Daren Stanaway (Part 3)

In the final part of her interview, Daren Stanaway discusses the profound influence her mother had on her confidence, resilience, and success. She reflects on lessons in leadership and team-building, drawing on her experiences as a lawyer, mentor, and manager. Daren shares her passion for music, fitness, and creative pursuits, emphasizing the importance of maintaining a balance between personal interests and professional responsibilities. She also offers thoughtful advice for aspiring lawyers, highlighting the value of leading by example, treating others with respect, and building strong, cohesive teams.

Transcript

Joyce Sophia Xu (00:04.504)
Welcome back to the Real Lawyer podcast. I am your host, Joyce Sophia Hsu, and you're listening to part three of my conversation with the amazing Darren Stanaway. In this episode, we get to really know Darren, not just as a brilliant accomplished lawyer, but also as a multi-talented creative and a truly empathetic and loving human. I hope you enjoy.

Joyce Sophia Xu (00:38.936)
Darren, you're definitely one of the most confident people I've come across. So I wonder if that's just something that you were born with or is there someone in your family who's had a particularly strong influence on you?

Absolutely. I was very fortunate to have the most amazing mom in the entire world. I grew up, I'm an only child, I grew up with just mom. It was just the two of us. And she demonstrated to me very early on that she had to build a life for us. And when she was...

starting to come up in the professional world, it was a very different time. It was the middle of the 1980s when there weren't women in the workforce, certainly not like there are now, but very few. And she's a professional in the financial field as well, although not in the legal field. And at the time, she was one of a very small handful of women who were pursuing professional opportunities. And I can remember

As a child, she was really fighting hard to make a great life for us so that I could have every opportunity. And I saw how hard she worked. But at the same time, she never missed a single thing that I had going on. She was at every dance recital. She took me to every single rehearsal, every practice, wanted to give me every opportunity to pursue what I wanted to do. Voice lessons, dance lessons, playing piano, all kinds of things.

because she wanted me to have those opportunities. So I don't think until I got much older, I had a full sense of what was going on behind the scenes and how challenging that must have been for her as a single parent in those times as a single woman raising a daughter. But to be able to demonstrate that to me, I remember one time when I was not feeling well and I would lay on the floor of her office because

Joyce Sophia Xu (02:53.262)
At the time, there was no other option. And one time I said to her, you know, mom, you work so hard at your job. What's my job? I was a little kid, probably six or seven. And you know, she just said your job is to work hard and do well and flourish in life. And I really took that to heart. And I saw how hard she worked. And I said,

I am going to do everything I can to make her job raising me as easy and seamless as possible. I don't want to create problems for her. I want to take the opportunities that she's giving me and run with them because she's giving them to me. She wants me to succeed. so having a role model like that was so unbelievably important because I saw what she did and that was huge.

And when people were naysayers, she would be my advocate and say, no, you can do this. And I can remember when one of the people, staff members in my high school said, you can apply to Harvard, but people from around here never get in. So if I were you, I wouldn't bother. And I said, well, I don't think that's great advice because the surefire way to not get in is not applying. So I'm going to apply.

I did, and it worked out. And she was supportive of that and said, if you want to apply to Harvard, apply to Harvard. And so having that, I think, was huge. And I was also very close with my grandparents. And they were at every show I had during high school growing up as well. And having them as role models as well was super valuable. So I consider myself very fortunate. Yeah. That's just beautiful.

What a blessing. Absolutely. I'm speechless. Thanks so much for sharing. It's just so beautiful. And I'm still basking in this glow from all the warmth in what I've just heard. So Darren, you mentioned that your mom was always supportive of all of your interests and making sure that you got every opportunity. And I know that

Joyce Sophia Xu (05:19.374)
You always had this love for singing from a very early age and so did I. I was part of a city youth choir when I was growing up in Shanghai. And you had mentioned that during law school you were part of an archipelago group. And I think you've continued with singing, right? You never let that go. I have, yes.

Yes, it was dormant for a while. It went mostly when I was at the big law firm. But I grew up singing. Mom was actually a professional singer. wow. A professional singer. Yes, she sang professionally. She was a musketeer at Disney. So very exciting. So I grew up with music. My first musical, I was a reddl in The Sound of Music when I was six.

and mom was Maria. So shared love of music and musical theater. So grew up doing that, did acapella in college, Fallen Angels at Harvard. That's what the group was called. Pitch Perfect came out later, but I feel like it's pretty emblematic of a lot of police did acapella. And then law school, but yes, now I currently sing with a band. We're all lawyers and I never sung with a band before. So it's been a tremendous experience.

I'd never sung with rock instruments, guitars, electric guitars, drums, electric piano, but it's so much fun. It's a wonderful time. And just to meet other lawyers who are super talented in all of these musical instruments is really exciting. You'd be surprised how many lawyers have hidden musical talents, but yes, we're called the precedents. We do a couple of big shows every year.

It's a lot of fun. Well, that sounds like a great group to be part of. How did that all come about? I love this story because it's one of those just stroke of luck anecdotes that just happened. during that pandemic, this was sort of as the pandemic was winding down, I went to a virtual conference because it wasn't held in person because of the pandemic. So was a legal conference. It was an American Bar Association.

Joyce Sophia Xu (07:41.784)
Futures and Derivatives Lawyers Conference. So a very unlikely place, you might say, to come across bandmates. But the organizers of the conference were really trying to make it as close as they could to an in-person type conference when it couldn't be. And so they had scheduled these virtual social happy hour events at the end of each day of the conference.

It's, it's, virtual happy hours are very interesting because you can't organically circulate table to table. So they tried to simulate that by creating what they call breakout rooms where everyone who attended the virtual happy hour would have, would be randomly placed into a virtual breakout room for, I forget, eight minutes or something with six other people, something like that. And there was a prompt.

at the beginning of each virtual breakout session for discussion that had nothing to do with law. It was just very much get to know your colleagues virtually to the extent you can. And so the very first breakout room of this happy hour, I get put into a breakout room with Mike Spafford, who we talked about earlier, the partner that I worked with. This was while after I left Paul Hastings and with our drummer in my current band, Paul Pantano.

And the prompt question was, if you were not a lawyer, what was your childhood dream job? What would you have pursued instead of being a lawyer? So Paul goes first, and he said that he would have been a drummer in the Rolling Stones. And I remember hearing that he had a band and was a drummer, but I didn't really know much beyond that. So then it comes around to me, and I said,

I would have been a professional singer and I still actually sing today and would love to do that today because I still love singing. And Paul says to me, you know, I think we need you to join our band. And Mike says, yeah, she's really great. You should have her join the band. And Paul had no idea I sang until that very moment. And a week later I get an email from him inviting me to come to one of their practices and check it out.

Joyce Sophia Xu (10:02.358)
We just took it from there. was a wonderful experience. I loved meeting everybody in the band. They're all great. And I am thrilled to have the opportunity to sing again. So it very much happened by happenstance. Who would have thought a virtual ABA conference would have led to you joining a band? Absolutely. It's so random, but pretty awesome. Exactly.

led to my rock stardom in the band. So how often do you guys meet? How often do you practice together? It depends on whether we have an upcoming show. If we have an upcoming show, we meet every week or every two weeks. When we're off season, it's less frequently, maybe once a month, once every couple months. But we do a couple of big shows each year. We did Law Rocks at the 930 Club this year.

We did banding together for the homeless at the Black Cat this year. I've done it for three years now. Those are some of our bigger shows. And then we've done holiday parties and other smaller things. But like I said, it's really, really tremendous to get to sing again and get to sing this type of rock music, which is not something that I had done a lot of before this time. I tend to gravitate more towards

the power ballads, I love Celine Dion. I'm trying to get the band to play it, but I don't know if I can get them on board. that would be really fun actually. You should keep trying. I'll see what I can do. Great. Looking forward to these performances. Darren, it's so awesome that you make time for music because, you know, creative things like that really helps to balance us out. Because practicing law is...

for the most part, very logical, very left brained, very rigid. So it's so important for all of us, whether you've been in this profession for a few decades or just a few weeks to remember to do that. So I really admire that about you, that you're making sure that you carve out time for music, for your passions and interests.

Joyce Sophia Xu (12:23.894)
So other than music, is there anything else you do with your free time that makes you really happy? Absolutely. I think the other thing that's really been a core part of my life for probably a decade now, I do cardio yoga workouts. Cardio yoga. My friends who actually do yoga tell me that it's not real yoga, that it's far more intense and that yoga is supposed to be relaxing. And I can assure you these workouts are not.

There, strength training plus cardio, some of them also involve weights. So it's strength and flexibility, but also with weights. And I do that on a regular basis. It's really great for staying in shape and staying flexible and especially after working for long days, sitting for a long period of time or standing or whatever it is. But to be able to have that, and it was really valuable too when...

gyms were closed and there was nowhere to go. I still use DVDs. I'm very old school. They're still pop them in the DVD player. But you can do them anytime, anywhere. They're super, super effective. And that certainly keeps me grounded. I also really have started to prioritize sleep. It's really valuable. And I think just in terms of thinking clearly, having peace of mind,

being able to focus and drill down when you need to. Being well rested is super important. Obviously as a lawyer, that's not always in the cards, but I really do try to focus on that from a health perspective. And beyond that, also do, as you mentioned, music. I do my own recordings as well, not just singing with the band. That's a big part of my life outside of work. And I also do portraiture. So I do...

drawings from time to time and photography. love doing photo walks, especially this time of year when it's beautiful outside. Yeah, especially with the fall foliage in Maryland or Virginia. It's just gorgeous. Okay, so definitely plenty of different interests and hobbies to keep you occupied and keep you balanced. And it sounds like you have no trouble falling asleep either, to the extent your schedule allows.

Joyce Sophia Xu (14:46.686)
That's true. No, once the head's on the pillow, I'm out. It's been a busy day. yeah. Awesome. So Darren, thanks so much for sharing all of these great ideas for things that we could do and try out outside of work that could bring us some more balance in life. I also wanted to ask you,

particularly if there was any additional advice that you may want to share with young lawyers and law students. So many things that I could give advice on. So I think for young lawyers in particular, I think I already touched on it earlier. But to the extent that you know that this is the path that you want and you want to be a lawyer,

You have to be willing to put in the time and the effort and put your job as a priority. And it doesn't have to be your only priority, certainly, but you have to put into it what you want to get out of it. The world is not going to come out and meet you. It just doesn't work that way. And so I think it's really important that young lawyers understand that

FaceTime is important, being there, showing up, meeting deadlines, being communicative, that's all really important. And I think also, and this kind of gets underrated, but being a positive and nice person is really valuable and will get you a long way. I think a lot of lawyer stereotypes are to the contrary, but I think that...

Being a positive person who people like to work with, who does good work, carries a really long way. And I would absolutely encourage young lawyers to have that positive attitude and make sure that they build the reputation for themselves that they want. It doesn't just happen. And I think also for people thinking about law school, if you

Joyce Sophia Xu (17:09.012)
want to go to law school, think really hard about if you want to be a lawyer, because it's a very big time and expense commitment. And yes, you learn a lot. But if you're not ultimately planning to practice law, maybe going to law school isn't necessarily something that you wanted to the time and expense to, because it really does open the door for you to become a lawyer. But

if you only want it for the experience, maybe there are other programs that may be better suited for that. This is very thoughtful and practical advice. It's definitely better to take time to think it through. As you said, it's a big investment, know, three years of your life and a lot of money to pay for law school tuition just to get the degree. Right. And a career in law is demanding. There is no sugar coating that.

It demands an enormous amount of commitment, time and energy and dedication and perseverance. So if someone's just looking at a JD as a resume builder, they probably would want to rethink that before they dive in. Right. Absolutely. And I think the other thing I would just say is lead by example, lead by example and treat people as you want.

them to treat you. I think that's something that as I became more senior and became a manager, I didn't lose sight of what it was like to be a junior associate and to know what it's like to be in that position. So I really tried to show them I'm working really hard too, but it goes both ways. I'm not just trying to do well for those above me, but also I really want to develop a strong team below me, right? Right.

for junior associates, I want them to have their path. I think, sort hearkening back to high school, I was on drill team, which was a baton twirling team. had 52 girls. It was very, very old fashioned. And our coaches were a married couple at the time in their late seventies, who actually just recently passed away. But they really drove home the point that

Joyce Sophia Xu (19:32.0)
the team is what's strong and everyone on the team needs to be a part of it. And when I was a captain or leader my senior year, we went to the national championships and we had to make sure that everyone was as committed and devoted to doing well. And I think even though was a very different time and circumstance, certainly, the Nesbets really demonstrated that that was what was necessary and

we did extremely well. And I've carried that with me throughout even my legal career is really remembering what it's like to be the youngest person on a team and to not really know what to look to or what to do or what to happen. And so having that perspective and being able to provide that guidance, I think, has been really valuable. Yeah, I mean, it makes so much sense to focus on the importance of

having a cohesive team because the law business is a people business, right? You're always only as strong as the weakest link on the team. That's right. Well, I love your perspective on leading by example and remembering your own learning curve. You know, when you were a junior associate, that tells me that you are also a great leader. So your company, Interactive Brokers, is so lucky to have you.

Well, Darren, I really, really appreciate your making time to talk and for being so real with me and for all of the beautiful memories that you've shared with us. I really appreciate that and thank you for your time. Absolutely. Really appreciate the opportunity, Joyce. I'm thrilled for you to have the podcast now and all that you've been able to accomplish with this launch is really exciting.

Joyce Sophia Xu (21:38.434)
I am still glowing from this wonderful conversation I just had with Darren. I hope you enjoyed it too. If you want to find out more information about Darren, check us out on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook. All of the links to these pages are in the show notes. And please do join us again for our next conversation with another real lawyer. Until then,

I wish you all a wonderful weekend and as always, be well and be happy.