Vivian Duker, Corporate Attorney
Hi, Vivian! So the first question is always, what do you do? And it doesn’t have to just be your nine to five. Obviously, you have other things going on. So, in whatever way you understand it, please share what you do.
My day job is as a corporate attorney. I currently work for a mid-sized law firm that has about 260 attorneys. I do mostly mergers and acquisitions, advising companies on sales and purchases of other companies. I mostly do it on the buy side, so my client is usually buying another company. I also do general corporate, which is pretty much advising companies on random things that come up day to day for any business that they might have. This spans the universe from, “We really want to terminate somebody, but we need to assess the implications around it,” to “We want to understand the process for adding people to our board of directors.” So, that’s what I do from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Some days I come home and I still have energy, and I will work on my budding fashion business that I’ve been trying to build on and off for ten years now.
Wow. That’s a lot going on!
Yes, girl. Especially being a lawyer, and because I picked one of the hardest possible legal paths. Nobody in their right mind does mergers and acquisitions and also tries to have other passions. You do this kind of work because you love it. And I don’t. Truthfully, I don’t really love it. I just love the process of doing something really hard. I love feeling like, there’s no way I can get that done, and then somehow I figure it out. So, balancing that has been challenging. But, a blessing has been that during COVID, it’s just created – weirdly – space to focus on other things.
Can you share more on those other things ?
The fashion business is called TLDR. My target market is specifically Black women, who work a lot and don’t want to have to think so hard about what they’re wearing. So, it’s no-nonsense pieces that integrate really easily into anyone’s closet. That’s my one baby. My other, new baby is Verified Black. The idea of Verified Black is to push social media platforms to implement a special verification process for Black businesses. And for the check mark, instead of it being blue, to be black so that you know you’re buying a Black-owned product. The verified accounts would have been vetted and confirmed as having a majority Black shareholding. Hopefully, that will drive traffic to Black businesses. It was born out of the sense that Black businesses need revenue, need exposure, need support. A lot of the existing frameworks around how you market yourself are disadvantageous to Black businesses because one, you need a lot of money to be able to put on an effective marketing campaign. Two, if you’re on social media, you have to be able to get verified to get more visibility. The metrics work against you because you almost have to have existing visibility and exposure in order to get verified, and a lot of Black businesses aren’t in that position. I think it’s only 2% of Black businesses in the U.S. now that have more than just one employee. Which is an indicator of, can you even afford to market yourself? So right now, Verified Black is a whole movement around amplifying Black businesses, which we hope will grow into something that actually makes Instagram address the issue.
That is so amazing, and much needed. Can you just share a little bit more about your background, and how you decided to get into corporate law. And then we’ll step a little bit more into some of your other endeavors.
Okay. So I was born in Ghana, and I lived there until I was in high school. And then, my parents sent me to the U.S. to get a better education, along with my brother. Anyone who has immigrant parents, especially African immigrant parents, will tell you that really, they’re like “OK, this costs a lot of money to do. So, you’re going to go be a doctor, or an engineer, or a lawyer.” They’re not trying to hear about your little fashion dream, or your cute painting hobby. They feel like you can just do that on the weekends. So, I said, all right – law sounds kind of cool. I like to argue and at the time, I really, really liked reading, which I still do but now I’m mostly reading stuff for work and not for fun. At the time, though, it felt like the natural path for me.
I went to high school in New Jersey, then I went to UNC-Chapel Hill, where I met you and all the wonderful people. I majored in economics, and I unofficially minored in African American studies. And, when it was time to do the thing I was supposed to do, I took the LSAT. I didn’t score as high as I wanted to because, even then, I knew it was something that I wasn’t passionate about. I was just checking the box. Then I got to law school. And the image in my mind of the attorney that I wanted to be, was very much centered around New York City, and a really cute suit, click-clacking down the street. And I was like, OK, corporate attorneys do that so that’s what I’ll do. In law school, I did make a point to explore all the other stuff just to make sure. So, I threw myself into litigation activities to see if I wanted to be in a courtroom. Or if I wanted to be in front of people speaking all the time. And it was just a solid no for me. So, afterwards I just focused my attention on getting into corporate law.
After law school, I worked for a judge for two years. Then I went back to Ghana, got barred there. And then, that was actually my first exposure to corporate practice. Because I worked for an all-women, woman-owned firm in Ghana, that does cross-border acquisitions. And, I got the coolest mentor. She’s fantastic. But she taught me pretty much everything that formed the foundation of my corporate law practice. And then, I just came back to Baltimore and continued down this path.
I love that it was an all-women firm. That’s so cool.
Yep. A team of twenty-six and all the lawyers were women. She always joked that we had to get better about recruiting men, but I loved it.
Wow. Oh my goodness – what an amazing experience that must have been. So at this point, you’ve checked all the boxes. When did you realize that is what you were doing – just checking boxes?
Ooh – freshman year of college. I have never been super interested in the education process. It’s weird, because once I learn a thing, I’m really glad that I learned it. But the process of learning, it always felt so constrained and artificial to me. And I could tell from the beginning, that I was doing a thing that I didn’t care so much about. I was going to my philosophy class and doing all of these requirements at UNC, because this institution needs to make money so you have to do all of these things. And, I had to pick a major that made me sound serious for law schools. But what I really would have loved to major in is art, or fashion, or something that I was actually interested in. And so, I think from college, I very clearly knew that I was checking a box, and it reflected in my work. It always felt like work, and it has felt like that pretty consistently since then. The moments in which it doesn’t feel that way is when I’m actually impacting people with things that matter. Verify Black doesn’t feel like work. Working with Black-owned businesses doesn’t feel like work. Making clothes that Black women will wear, and that will make them feel beautiful, doesn’t feel like work. Creating feels good.
Tell me more about what your schedule looks like overall, including your nine-to-five, and all of these creative endeavors? That’s a lot to manage plus the mental shift that is required.
So, unfortunately, I don’t really have a schedule that’s consistent. Mergers and acquisitions is mostly deals. So, if you have a deal that’s ongoing, and deals usually span anywhere from six weeks to maybe six months, you’ll be really busy. At any given point, I’m on at least three, and at most I’ve been on eight at once. So it’s insane, and then a deal will wrap up and there’s a little more free time to do other things.
When I first got this job at my current firm, I felt the burden to really prove myself and establish that, as a Black woman, I can do this. Because Black women don’t go into M&A practice. Generally, the numbers of Black people in law are low. And then, when we do go into the law, understandably, we’re more oriented towards justice-based areas of practice. Or at least, developing skills that lend themselves to that. So, we are more likely to litigate. And then, if we’re going to do transactional work, we’re going to do labor and employment. Because that feels more people oriented, and we can actually make a difference with people who are being treated unfairly. So, at the bottom of the list is M&A. And then, of course, for Black women, all of the cards are stacked against us. So, by the time I got to do M&A, it was like, oh, I’m really here now. And I threw all of my time and energy into work. I would get in at seven in the morning. I’d be there until midnight, one o’clock. I was living there. I had an air mattress in my office just in case.
So this past year, I’ve really had to learn to say no. First, for my own mental and physical health. But then, also, being disciplined about pursuing the things that really mattered to me. There are times where I would usually say, “Yeah, I could totally take on that deal,” on top of the four that I was already doing. Now I say, “No, I’m maxed out.” Then I still have to deal with my own imposter syndrome, and feeling like this decision will probably make them feel I don’t work hard, or I’m not good enough. I remind myself, OK, there has to be a limit to how much you’re willing to sacrifice the things that you care about, and your body, and your mind, just to continue to send a message about you belonging in a particular space. So that’s a long winded way of saying, it used to be really crazy. But now, I try to make sure that I set aside an hour or two every day to sketch or paint or work on the fashion thing. Or I’m just reading something that fits in with all of this stuff that I care about. I like to write a lot. So, I’ll set aside an hour to read scripts of movies that I’ve seen before. It’s so fun. It’s so nerdy, but it’s a lot of fun. It’s a cute little hobby that helps my brain.
So, I’m interested to just hear the origin story of TLDR, and how that came about. And you said you’ve been working on it for 10 years. So, what’s that process been like?
I actually don’t get to talk about this a lot. So, I’ve always been interested in fashion. Ever since I was little, I figured out that you could do two, or three, cuts to your socks, and then turn it into a little off-the-shoulder tube dress for your Barbie dolls. And I was doing that to all my socks when I was little, and my mom was mortified. I would be sketching clothes all over my notebooks.
A friend of mine, who I knew in Ghana, reached out with an idea to set up this online marketplace for African designers. It was the first time that somebody had actually presented me with this tangible opportunity to do this thing I’ve always been obsessed with, and it would also create opportunities for people. So, we started working on this idea together. And then, for reasons why startups fall apart, it just didn’t work out. But, it was part of the reason why I moved back to Ghana. Because, I really wanted to look into it, and figure out if it was feasible. I was reaching out to a lot of designers, gathering a lot of information and realized the biggest barrier to the thing that we were trying to build was that Ghana and most African countries really do not have reliable garment production. Or supply chain mechanics for their fashion lines. So, you have people producing these capsule collections, of just a few pieces per style, because that’s all they can afford to do. Or they’re selling it in a bespoke way — so you place an order, then they make the product. That was not a sustainable model for the thing that I was trying to do. So, my big dream is to be able to create African-based production facilities, which actually benefit these designers. But that’s an expensive dream. TLDR was my idea to fund this bigger dream. Because, I’ve always been able to design easily. I’ve been in an accelerator for fashion businesses. So, my hope is to just translate those skills into a smaller thing, that can slowly start to build some revenue to do the work that I really, really want to do in Ghana. And, eventually all of Africa. That’s the big goal. It’s been a long-ass journey, but it’s also half the reason I keep my job. Because I have to fund this dream.
That is really compelling and I love that it involves all of these skills you’ve acquired and are acquiring, and has this incredible equity orientation. It all connects. That’s really dope. So, as you think ahead five years, or whatever feels right to you – what’s next? What are you excited about for the future?
So, I’ve been grappling with this question, in all of the quiet time during COVID. So, my goal is to transition from practice to fashion or some kind of creative-adjacent work eventually. I don’t know that I can work at this pace, at this level of intensity, and in these stressful conditions, for much longer. But then, there are other things about what I’m doing… there are student loans. Lots of them. And I also feel a responsibility as a Black woman to make partner. Not so much for me, but because when I entered this space I had no Black women mentors who are in corporate. And there are so few Black women who are partners at a top 200 firm. I recognize the whole concept of, ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’. And being in this space, I understand the importance of having the voice of a Black woman in the room. When I go speak at law schools, or I meet people at the Black Law Student Association, and they say “You do corporate? For real?” I’m like, “Yes and you can, too. You’re going to work a lot, but you’re smarter than everybody who’s doing it. I promise you. You can totally do it.” So at least if I make partner, I will be able to say, I did it, and I really did it for real. And then maybe I can put this part of my life to bed, and go do things that I love.
Is there anything I haven’t asked? Is there something that you think is super critical, particularly for Black women who are professionals or aspiring lawyers, that we haven’t discussed?
I do want to echo something that you said before the interview, about community, and having a community of Black women. And how impactful that has been. Because a lot of times when you take on these really daunting things, it can feel really insular. I was the only Black woman in my group, for a really long time. But, every time I would get around other Black women, who are all basically living parallel experiences, or dealing with the same kind of imposter syndrome, or the micro-aggressions – just all the craziness that just comes with working in corporate America. Those moments for me, were so affirming. I don’t even have to say much, they just get it. Because, we’re dealing with the same things and there’s this tacit understanding of support, and constantly being pushed by these people. People don’t understand just how nourishing that is, to have that. And so, I think that’s something that I want to echo. That’s been a really, really key part of my growth process. You just need those friends that are dope, who really get it. Build that community.
Yes, yes, yes. And on that note, it’s a wrap! Thank you, Vivian.
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