Inspirational legal women: a conversation with Faiza Alleg Dolivet

Sara Carnegie (SC): Welcome Faiza Dolivet, a French lawyer who I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know recently.

Hi Faiza, it’s great to speak with you today and I’m delighted you’re taking part in our Inspirational Legal Women podcast series, where we’re looking to celebrate some of our incredible members and their achievements and career in the legal profession.

By way of introduction, you’re a French qualified lawyer and you’ve worked in a number of countries during your career, working in corporate law, including as general counsel. And I’m excited to hear about your experiences in those places. I know you’re a member of our Anti-Corruption Committee and you’re very busy in that space. So, thank you for being part of that really important area of our international work.

We’re here today to talk about what you’ve done, some of the challenges and experiences that you’ve had and any advice you may have for those entering or navigating their own career in law. So welcome, it’s great to see you, Faiza.

Faiza Dolivet (FD): Thank you so much.

SC: Well, perhaps we can just start at the beginning and what motivated you to pursue a career in law, and did you always know that you wanted to practise corporate law?

FD: I always wanted to become a lawyer. I did not have a field defined so clearly in the first place, but I wanted to work as an international lawyer. I guess, step by step, my areas of interest have expanded from law and commercial law to geopolitics and compliance. So, the anti-bribery field became quite obvious for me, as well as business human rights and ESG issues. So, I feel like now my spectrum is a little broader than it initially was, and after that I also became a professional mediator. Since I was working in conflict resolution in commercial law, I figured that the pure legal angle was sometimes a little bit too narrow, and I started paying interest to ADR and mediation work just because I felt like, you know, it was interesting to bring other perspectives into dispute resolution and this has become very much of a passion today.

SC: Obviously it’s a busy career and you’ve done a lot in that time, but I’m just interested to understand how you manage those demands of that kind of high-pressure career with a personal life and family responsibilities and how you’ve developed any strategies to help you navigate that real set of different pressures and responsibilities.

FD: It’s a balance to find, I guess it’s not so obvious at first. I am a mother of three children and so I have now moved to private practice and I’m working as an independent lawyer and independent mediator. So, that gives me a little bit more bandwidth to manage my schedule and my family, but I guess if I travel time and I remember my first child’s arrival, it was very much an earthshaking event full of intensity and energy and emotions. And, you know, it just gave me the perspective that becoming a parent is a real learning process.

Sometimes, you know, we want to take everything for granted. I think it’s important to take the necessary time to experience this motherhood moment and to give yourself sufficient patience and time to become a parent. And I feel like workplaces have a responsibility as well to help people become parents and to give a young parent, or parent for the second or third time, the necessary time to adapt and adjust to this new moment of your life. I would say patience and self-care and understanding for that moment and trying to balance things in a way which makes sense for you at different points of your life.

SC: I think workplaces are generally getting much better at that. It is improving but still very challenging in big corporate law environments where the pressures are there to compete, be present, succeed, you know, show willingness and how that really fits with a compatible balanced life of being a carer, whether it’s children or elderly parents or whatever it might be. What’s the biggest challenge that you’ve faced during your career?

FD: Well, you know, there’s a moment where we have been told that we should probably separate our professional life and our personal life. I very much disagree with this statement, and I feel like sometimes it’s very difficult. For me, I’ve learned this the very hard way because I figured when my first daughter was two years old that she had throat cancer. So, we discovered this situation while, let’s say two weeks later, I also discovered that I was pregnant with my second child. At the same time, I had just been promoted as regional general counsel for the EMEA region for Boart Longyear, which was the company where I was working for at that time. So frankly, the question of separating professional and personal life at that moment was completely out of the way.

So, it was a big crisis moment, a very big challenge which obviously questioned everything, you know, facing a child cancer and reshuffling your entire schedule. You don’t have any vision of what tomorrow will look like and how things can work. I guess for me, it’s been a chance to be surrounded at that moment by an organisation that supported me all the way, at every step of this personal challenge and I was able to continue to work. At the time I started working remotely, which was way before Covid but there’s been a lot of organisation around my schedule to allow me to stay connected with work and frankly, it sounds unbelievable in that situation but I really felt like I had to hang on to work because it became my stable balance at that particular moment. My boss did everything he could to make things work for me. Today my daughter is fine. She’s been through this; she’s 11 years old.

SC: I’m so pleased to hear that she made a full recovery and that your family is through that incredibly difficult experience. I think what struck me about the immense amount of support that you got from the workplace, which is what we’d hoped to see, obviously, that they put that humanity before business need or anything else, but that you also found it helpful to be in a working environment, to be able to have that switch between focusing on your daughter’s condition and illness and treatment and then how work still gave you a sense of something else that kept you energised. But I remember we also spoke previously about you moving to another country around this time and I’m really keen just to hear a little bit about that and how that then has influenced your next career choice.

FD: So, when the treatments were over, we came back to kind of normal. But of course, things had changed dramatically in our life and so after two years, we felt like we needed to maybe take a little moment for ourselves to reflect on this situation. And we decided to move to Tahiti for a few days. What was originally planned as a family trip? Well, guess what, Covid happened and we were stuck in Tahiti for about three years. You know, that really gave a different orientation to my career at that moment since I quit the position, but I continued to work as an international consultant for that time and also did a lot of mediation work in Tahiti where the environment is very much versed into culture; I’ve worked with a lot of women promoting Polynesian culture. The experience was tremendous and it was also a moment of distance and resetting the button and coming back much stronger than we were before.

SC: It didn’t cause an end in your career; it’s just caused a refresh and a reset into things that you now know you want to do, which is fantastic. I’d like to ask, was it quite a male-dominated workplace?

FD: I’ve always worked in industrial environment and companies, so pretty heavy industry, and many of my clients today are still clients in the industry, in the construction field, so very much male-dominated most of the time. For me, it worked pretty well in the sense that I’ve always had a good team, which was quite balanced between male and female leaders. And I think particularly at Boart Longyear at the time, you know, we had a pretty positive working environment.

Now I really feel like, you know, there’s obviously a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ MeToo. And I think it questioned us as professional women individually on how we interact with this working environment and where does our education come in the way of, you know, how we position ourselves as well and give ourselves the right to be eligible to certain position or certain projects or work in a particular setting. How much have we limited ourselves in a way, again, probably by education, but other factors as well, you know, to, to allow ourselves to stand up and take those positions in international corporation? For example, I think the MeToo movement really came and provoked some thoughts about the place of women, the rule for male-dominated environments and the level of acceptance in a way.

SC: Yeah, it does and I think it’s certainly made both men and women recalibrate behaviours, expectations, and also assumptions. I think that’s something that we’ve certainly seen, and I’m hoping our gender project that we’re doing at the IBA, the 50:50 by 2030, will in itself look at issues around bullying and sexual harassment and see how that is now evolving in the legal workplace. It’s now being better understood, tackled and indeed followed up on. People aren’t just hiding it and feeling a lack of confidence if they report or if they experience it, which is a really important part of a journey in order to feel balanced.

Just going back to your global experience in the Congo and I wonder how you managed that. Obviously, you were qualified, educated and mainly practising initially in France and then you’re in the Congo. What was that like and how did you manage it?

FD: Well, actually, I was just coming home from Australia where I finished my bar school with an exchange that was in place at the time. So, I had a great time in Australia. I was working for an international law firm there and came home and I was looking for my first job in a law firm and things did not really turn out as planned as I was offered this position as in-house counsel for Saipem in the Congo. At that time I knew nothing about the African continent, so I took the challenge and I went there, spent a year in the Congo, which was a real eye opening on the African continent, that window that I really did not know about and I was completely captivated, I’d say, by the energy and the environment, also struck by the hardship for the population locally and some of the difficulties. So, I guess this place was actually very intense and everything seemed like it was kind of happening at the same time, all the time. So, you know, for a year it’s been a real exposure to a place that really had a positive impact throughout my career.

And after the Congo, I continued to travel all over Africa - Ghana, Burkina Faso, South Africa. I had a lot of major projects in my career that were happening there. And I think it’s one of the starting points of my mediation approach and conflict management, and I think it kind of all started with the exposure to international projects with a lot of stakeholders and parties where you constantly have to build bridges between you know, different cultures, different frameworks and work with people and teams on possible outcomes. So for me, major experience.

SC: You’ve really had the full range of the world from Europe to Australia to Africa, Latin America, and you’ve really seen and experienced so much in terms of cultural diversity

and work styles, no doubt. I’m sure it really enriches you as a person as well as as a lawyer in getting the absolute sense of the world.

And my last question is, what’s the best piece of advice that you might give to someone aspiring to succeed in law, particularly as a woman? message that I

FD: The message that I would like to share is really about authenticity and empowerment. And authenticity, I think, is critical for any maybe young student willing to engage a career in law, but also any professional woman who’s willing to maybe take a new direction in her career. Think about what you actually want to achieve. What are your goals? And those goals really look like nobody else’s; it’s really, you know, about questioning your own purpose and trying to create that little music that may sound perfect to you. It takes a while to find this first. I mean, we should not say that this is an easy search. It can take a little while, but then, you know, with that authenticity, if you’re really close to your purpose, you can feel that empowerment that it gives you and you know, you don’t necessarily see things as challenges but as new steps that you can take in your career and if there’s something you really want to do then just go for it. No one else is going to give you permission. So, you can really feel empowered and strong to give it a try and you know give yourself an opportunity, create them.

SC: Well, you’re certainly evidence of that and it’s fantastic to hear what you’ve done. Thank you so much for your time today. It’s been really lovely to speak with you.

FD: Thank you so much