Cathy Lamboley
“Still Making Change”
Cathy Lamboley
Not long after she retired as general counsel from Shell Oil Company last July, Cathy Lamboley’s days became far busier than she had anticipated. “It’s funny,” she recalls, “I thought I’d spend my first six months of retirement reading worthless books and catching up on movies, but it didn’t happen that way.”
During her first month into retirement, Lamboley was appointed to the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession. “For years, my passion has centered on the retention and advancement of women and men of color in law firms and in-house corporate legal departments,” she says. “I knew that I wanted to continue working around that issue when I retired, so when the opportunity came up to join the commission, I took it.”
Already Lamboley has been integral in launching the commission’s Chicago summit, which took place in May. Designed specifically for women in-house counsel, the meeting challenged participants to use their economic power to increase retention and advancement for women in law firms. “Success in a law firm is about opportunity—opportunity to do challenging work, to meet critical clients, to meet power partners within the law firm,” explains the first woman ever to be named general counsel of a large oil company. “In-house lawyers can do a lot to make sure that things happen for women in firms.”
“Success in a law firm is about opportunity—opportunity to do challenging work, to meet critical clients, to meet power partners within the law firm. In-house lawyers can do a lot to make sure that things happen for women in firms.”
— Cathy Lamboley
Currently, Lamboley is joining 30 other women, primarily University of Texas Law School alumnae, in committing money, time, knowledge, and experience to create a Center for Women in Law where students and women practitioners can foster professional development through training and mentoring, academic research, and networking.
The same year Lamboley graduated from law school (1979), she joined Shell Oil’s legal department at the company’s U.S. operations headquarters in Houston. In 2000, Lamboley became the company’s senior vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary. “At some point during my career I represented almost all of Shell’s businesses and enjoyed it all—legal work and business clients,” she says. “There were challenges: In a meeting when a woman expresses an idea, it’s sometimes ignored. Ten minutes later, a man offers the same idea and it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. I experienced a lot of that. But as my confidence grew and I began to speak with more authority, that happened less and less.”
Lamboley describes her 28-year career at Shell Oil as consisting of two phases. “The first part was about wanting job security, and fitting in,” she explains. “In hindsight, I’d say that I compromised myself in pursuit of security. Typically I was the only woman at the table, so I spent a lot of time putting the men at ease in spite of the fact that I was very hardworking and maintained good relationships with business clients.
“The second part of my career began with an epiphany. Triggered by Shell’s decision in the mid-1990s to look into diversity as a strategic initiative, I realized it was time for me to stop being afraid of losing my job, of speaking up, of not being liked,” she remembers. “And for the first time professionally I was comfortable being me, and the irony is that I then became even more successful.”
Today, Lamboley, who grew up in a small Wisconsin town and earned a degree in education before attending law school, gives talks for women lawyers in which “getting past one’s fears” figures prominently. In addition, she remains involved with several community nonprofits that center on women helping women, and more recently has begun consulting. Rather than retiring, it seems Lamboley is instead moving on to the next phase of an inspiring career marked by hard work and a desire for change. DB
Patrick Folliard is a freelance writer based in Silver Spring, Md.
From the July/August 2008 issue of Diversity & The Bar®