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A Ropes & Gray (RopesTalk) podcast series from the R&G Insights Lab that is a curiosity-driven hunt for good ideas and better ways to tackle organizational challenges.
Zach Coseglia: Welcome back to the Better Way? podcast, brought to you by R&G Insights Lab. This is a curiosity podcast, where we ask, “There has to be a better way, right?” There just has to be. I’m Zach Coseglia, the co-founder of R&G Insights Lab, and I am joined, as always, by my friend, Hui Chen. Hi, Hui.
Hui Chen: Hi, Zach. Hello, everyone.
Zach Coseglia: How’s it going?
Hui Chen: Pretty good. I am looking forward to the conversation we’re about to have.
Zach Coseglia: Absolutely. We are joined today by Danielle Pelfrey Duryea. Danielle, did I pronounce that right?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: You’re so close: it’s Pelfrey Dur-ee-YAY. But, you know what? I answer to almost any pronunciation of it at this point.
Zach Coseglia: Hui and I can tell you, as people whose names are often mispronounced, that we feel that with you. Danielle, we often start with an existential question, which is: Who are you?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: A writer, a reader, a teacher, a connection-maker, and an adventurer in my professional life. I’ve done a lot of things over the course of the years, following my interests and passions: I’m a grateful double-grad of Georgetown Law, a former English teacher, a #BULawProf, and, last but not least, a proud native of the great Commonwealth of Kentucky.
Zach Coseglia: Amazing—so much to dig into there. Let’s start with the present and “#BULawProf.” Tell folks about your role at the great Boston University School of Law.
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: I’m a full-time member of the experiential faculty here at BU Law. I’m the faculty advisor to the risk management and compliance concentration. And, most importantly, my core role is to direct the Compliance Policy Clinic, which is the only law school clinic in the United States to focus exclusively on compliance.
Zach Coseglia: Let’s talk a little bit more about your career trajectory before we talk specifically about the work that you’re doing at BU. You and I and Hui, we all share something, in that we have all worked for Ropes & Gray at one point in time. So, talk to us a little bit about your career trajectory to #BULawProf.
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: I started out as a PhD student in an English department at the University of Virginia, and that’s where I first fell in love with teaching. When I decided to leave English academia and go to law school, that was a disappointment, that I wasn’t going to teach anymore, but everything else was really exciting, obviously, about becoming a lawyer. Fast-forward a few years: I was fortunate enough to be an associate at Ropes & Gray. I spent five great years there in the government enforcement practice group—about half on the enforcement defense side, and about half in the compliance diagnostic and compliance program development side. Then, I realized, “I think I want to teach again,” and decided to become a clinical teacher. I have taught in a variety of law school clinics, taught in the domestic violence clinic at Georgetown for a couple of years, taught a health law clinic for a number of years, before landing this incredible opportunity to do something brand-new in legal education.
Hui Chen: Danielle, I want to ask you, as someone who went into law after having experienced something else, what drew you to the government law enforcement and compliance practice? And, relatedly, what’s the draw for students to come into this area, in your experience?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: Pure happy accident as far as my career is concerned. My very first assignment at Ropes & Gray, as a first-year associate, was an internal investigation working with Josh Levy. I discovered that I liked reading other people’s emails (I was a good snoop), and really enjoyed, in all seriousness, working with Josh, and just kept working on the kind of work Josh was doing. So, that is how I first came into compliance. What really caught me about compliance was, first, how much of a public policy dimension it always has. When you’re talking about “a highly regulated industry,” there’s a reason for those industries to be highly regulated: It’s because they have important social consequences. And so, it was intellectually interesting to me to think about, “How is this industry regulated? Is that a good way to regulate this particular industry? Could we be doing it better? How does it affect real people when the industry operates on the particular set of incentives and disincentives that it has?” The second piece that really caught me about compliance was, of course, the preventive aspect. After spending a couple of years defending a couple of matters, for the clients, they were stressful—and, of course, they were expensive just for us to be working on them, and then, expensive in settling them. I started to think in terms of, “Let’s help you stay out of these situations, if we can, by thinking forward. Let’s think proactively instead of reactively.” So, that’s my voyage.
For students, it’s been very interesting to me. When I came here to create the compliance clinic, I wasn’t sure what kind of students it would attract. It has attracted, over time, roughly, let’s say, two different kinds of students—all of them wonderful. One set of compliance clinic students are people who, like me, as a law student, go to large law firms, but don’t expect to stay there forever. For whatever reasons, they expect that eventually they will want to go in-house, and so, they are thinking about prospective in-house roles that, almost by definition, are going to have some compliance aspect, even if they’re not full-time focused on compliance. The second large segment that we draw from, I think, in the compliance clinic and in the compliance JD program overall here, is a group of students who, under other conditions, might become public interest lawyers who have strong public interest motivations and justice motivations, but for whatever reason—maybe they’re first-generation professional students and are not able to rely on family financial support to pay for law school—they don’t feel able to take what we know are woefully underpaid public interest jobs, but they really want to make a difference and they want to help be part of making the world a better place from inside of large companies.
Zach Coseglia: My story is actually very much like yours, which is my connection to compliance was largely happenstance. It was a result of the people I was working with at the time that I was there, filling a need that I didn’t even know existed when I was in law school, let alone before. And so, I want to talk more about the clinic and the concentration itself, but to see intentionality among law students toward compliance is just a really interesting thing to me.
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: When we were in law school, there was no compliance education, and I wasn’t even aware of it as a potential path. Part of what I have made it my mission to do here, as the faculty advisor to the program, is to make that route visible to students, so that they don’t have to “luck into it” the way that we did, Zach. But they can make deliberative choices about their career paths that enable them to end up in either compliance-centered roles or hybrid roles that are compliance and legal, or even roles where they may not have a compliance function to their job, but they can bring more value because they are aware of compliance as a function, as a value, and as an important part of any company’s operations.
Zach Coseglia: Let’s take a step back: Tell us about the program. How did it come to be, and what is it today?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: Yes, absolutely. The seed for the program came from an alum who just loved his experience at Boston University School of Law and had had a pioneering career in compliance before retiring. In 2016-2017, he persuaded our previous dean to create a risk management and compliance concentration for JD students, which is still relatively rare—many compliance-oriented law school education programs are LLM-oriented or graduate-oriented, not JD. The response to the program was very strong right off the bat. Then, the idea was hatched to actually have a deep experiential learning opportunity offered as the capstone, so to speak, of the risk management and compliance program. That’s when I came into the picture, happily being able to bring both experience from practice in compliance and about 10 years of clinical teaching experience, at that point, as well. So, I was ready to hit the ground running to help students have a deep professional formation experience in this business-lawyering space.
Hui Chen: What is the experience like for the students?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: We have a seminar component, and, for lack of a better word, a casework component. The seminar component is designed to demystify and practice legal skills—all the basic, core legal skills that you want a practitioner to have. We also use the seminar to step back from the work and talk about some of those public policy questions that I mentioned earlier that intrigued me when I was practicing: How we regulate, why we regulate, and whether the way we regulate is effective or whether it could change and be better. That piece is to prepare students to be able to lead our clinic’s representation of live clients—that is to say, real clients in real cases and real advisory matters. Our clinic, like all of the clinics at Boston University Law, is its own independent law office. I’m the managing partner of the law office, and the students are student advocates in that office. They get to take the lead—like all of our clinics, the students take the lead lawyering role in relationship to our clients. I am with them every step of the way, 100% of the time, but they really get to act as the lawyer, as the counselor, and as the advisor in our client relationships. That’s true across the board in our clinics, and it’s true nationwide in clinics generally that that’s the goal, is to have students be effectively at the level of practice, even though they are still under the supervision of lawyers.
We do all kinds of different things for our clients, and we have a pretty wide variety of different clients. We’re not just focused on health care or pharmaceutical and medical device industries. Right now, we have a client that’s a community bank. We have a client that is a small education not-for-profit that wants to go national. We have a pharmacy client. We always have at least one health-related client or health care client because I direct this clinic, and I want to make sure that we always have that fun going on—also, because BU Law is such a noted health law program, and we have so many students here who are really interested in health law, so that’s an important offering for the clinic. But with our clients, we do a lot of different things. We might conduct a risk assessment and develop a heatmap for a client. We might write policies and procedures, and create a plan for rolling them out, or even conduct training ourselves. For some clients, we have conducted audits and small internal investigations. We also work on compliance-related non-client projects that touch on issues of broad societal concern. We do lots of different things just depending on what our clients need. These are real representations and real counseling that we’re providing, so, obviously, what our clients need is what we do.
Hui Chen: So interesting. How do these clients find you?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: That’s a great question. I might say maybe it’s that we find them, at least for now—although, you’re about to make us super-famous on the podcast. Those prospective clients can find me on the BU Law website. It has been a little bit of a challenge—anytime you’re the first in a space, there’s a little bit of time that’s needed for people to get used to the idea, and people just haven’t been used to the idea that they might get really high-quality, free legal services in the compliance space from a law school clinic. Traditionally, law school clinics are focused on poverty law topics or startups—people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to lawyers. Our clients, sometimes they’re in that kind of situation, like a not-for-profit client where they wouldn’t be able to access legal services certainly of the robustness that we’re able to provide. For some of our clients, we are at an opportunity to extend their capacity. They have capacity to run an effective compliance program, but we can help them with a special project, for example, that they’ve been wanting to do, but were never able to find the time to do. So, there’s been a little bit of a socialization period. I will say, we launched the clinic in spring 2020, so folks were a little busy for the next year-and-a-half or two years managing the unprecedented developments of the pandemic. But we have always had clients for our students, and wonderful clients at that—clients who also care about the development of the next generation of compliance lawyers as well as can use some free legal services.
Hui Chen: Do you collaborate with the Business School in any way?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: Yes. We have been gradually growing that collaboration, especially in terms of organizational behavior. I’ve been working with one of our professors over at the Business School to really make sure that we’re enhancing our education of our students on: How do organizations function? What makes people tick? What makes people comply? What helps people to do the right thing? So, we’ve definitely been extending our work with them. I would love to do more with them over time. I think there are a lot of opportunities there and have had really wonderful conversations with the folks who are teaching business ethics, for example, about how to bring risk management compliance and ethics all together at the same time.
Hui Chen: I’m also thinking about their students, because their students will become your students’ clients going into the future. So, in some ways, you have a great experimental population that’s exactly the people your students will be working with should they come into this field. Any thoughts there on what kind of collaboration you might want to see?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: Yes. I’d love for our students to actually get to work with business school students on professional teams. That might be a little beyond the scope of the clinic, but it could be a great opportunity for coursework and for the concentration more generally. What would you like to see, Hui? Tell me about what you might imagine our students and business students could get out of working together.
Hui Chen: Your students working with business students on designing a corporate risk assessment program together. A key part of that risk assessment involves deep understanding of the business, and when you’re in the field, you want the compliance department to be doing that in conjunction with the business partners and other stakeholders in the company. So, just your existing projects: risk assessment, heat mapping, investigations, or even just governance planning. The other area that I think a lot of business students are interested in: entrepreneurship. I am also mindful of having heard very famous whistleblowers in the startup space talk about how they were never trained. They graduate being a scientist, engineer or whatever; they start working with friends on a groundbreaking technology; next thing you know, they’re seeing problems and they don’t know what to do. I remember thinking at that time, “It would be nice if we can just plant the seed in these new entrepreneurs’ heads about these are things to watch for. It’s great that you have these products, developed your company, grown your marketing, but at some point, should problems arise in your startup, what do you do?” Even just implanting that idea of ethics and compliance as part of people’s entrepreneurial concept, I think that would be something that I would love to explore.
In addition to that, I would want to see compliance clinics working with medical schools, nursing schools or schools of pharmacy, because you have all these ethical questions that all of those students are grappling with—they’re not separate from the ethics and compliance issues that compliance people deal with. Part of the problem, I think, we see in the compliance field, is a lack of understanding—or inadequate, a lot of times—of the business realities, the operational realities, and the substantive knowledge of the organizations. I think this is one of the things that you can start building even when everybody is a student—that’s really the best time, because you’re all in a learning mode right then, as opposed to now you’re a corporate executive, a doctor or an administrator, you don’t want to deal with it because this is a boring concept that feels like it’s something that restrains what you do. But if, as you’re growing in your profession, in your learning phase, you could be exposed to that, I think it would be a huge benefit to everyone.
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: Absolutely. Hui, I’m going to invite you to come down to BU and co-teach with me this class of law students and business students together. I love the idea of moving into the medical school, the pharmacy school, and all of the health professions, as well. I have some experience with that, actually, with interprofessional education in the health professions setting and bringing lawyers onto those teams to work collaboratively with health care providers. In a public interest-oriented setting, law students can be a really helpful adjunct to social workers in supporting, say, low-income or vulnerable populations in the health care setting. But I love this idea of expanding interprofessional education to include the management of the health care institution, and to find it, as you said, in the education phase of people’s careers, before they’re dealing with all of the day-to-day craziness that is just being the professional.
Zach Coseglia: I think all three of us could talk about interdisciplinary professions and multidisciplinary education for many hours on podcasts, but to bring it back to the law education, what skills do you think lawyers naturally bring to compliance?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: I had a mentor at Ropes named Michele Garvin, a health care attorney who was also trained as a sociologist before law school, and she used to say, “Being a lawyer is not rocket science—we’re just really, really good readers.” I do think the ability to read really carefully and to interpret the primary text that is the statute, regulation, sub-regulatory guidance or whatever sources of authority need to come into play to provide effective structure to a particular organization’s compliance program is incredibly important. To then be an effective translator, a good communicator, of those technical texts to a wide variety of audiences is another key skill. Not every lawyer has been cultivating that skill and that is certainly one that we work on in the compliance clinic here at BU, because, I think, it’s essential—if you’re going to be in the multidisciplinary profession that is compliance, you have to be able to talk to non-lawyers effectively and communicate with everyone, so that’s another important skill. The ability to analyze a problem and creatively generate potential solutions, and evaluate those solutions, is another key skill that I think lawyers can bring to the compliance context. Not that we own any of those things exclusively, as lawyers, but they are important in our training as lawyers, and, I think, incredibly useful in the compliance context.
Zach Coseglia: Talk to us a little bit more about the skills that your students walk away with as part of the clinic, that maybe they wouldn’t find elsewhere in a traditional legal education. And, through that, just give us a little bit more about your point of view, when it comes to compliance education of lawyers.
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: My students are going to come away from the clinic with a number of different skills and capacities that they’re not going to be practicing elsewhere in the conventional legal education. One of the aspects of a clinical experience—as opposed to, say, an externship or a classroom experience with compliance—is that students are really engaging in professional formation of their own professional identities: “Who do I want to be as a lawyer? What is my lawyering persona? How do I interact with clients? And how do I prioritize their goals, their needs, and help them get there?” Those are not really skills that we teach in other settings in law school, so, I think, that’s one part that’s really important. Another piece that’s really important is learning to learn in clinic, so that the first time that they encounter something new—anything new: new law, new industry, new whatever in practice—it’s not the first time that they’ve had to start from scratch and learn a new industry, learn a new client organization or learn a new area of law. By practicing that in clinic, with one client in one area of substantive law, and one problem to solve or one set of goals to accomplish, they have tools that they can apply to any novel set of demands that might come to them across their careers, I like to say, “as fully fledged lawyers.”
Some of the other aspects of the compliance clinic that are unique, in addition to our live client work or work with real clients on real matters, is that everyone in the compliance clinic also goes through a two-month, highly detailed simulation exercise in internal investigation that students take from an anonymous hotline report in a fictional pharmaceutical company, all the way to counseling the general counsel of that fictional client. Like I said, it takes about two months, so it’s very detailed. I have recruited family and friends, including Zach, to play various roles in the simulation exercise, so that we can enhance the realism of it—the students really are able to suspend disbelief pretty quickly, which is wonderful. It’s such a key part of compliance lawyering that we would be way remiss if we were not teaching students: What does an internal investigation look like? How do you plan one? How do you think about it? How do you approach witness interviewing? How do you craft an Upjohn warning that you feel comfortable saying, that you feel like is communicating to your witness? How do you take disparate facts and bring them together in a narrative, a story: Here’s what happened, and here’s why. And then, how do you sit down and have a counseling conversation with a client? Not tell them, “This is what you need to do,” but to actually talk with them about, “What are your priorities? How important is it for the company at this stage in its life to be completely transparent with the government about every potential piece of internal wrongdoing?” Or “What’s the risk-tolerance of the client, and how do we go back into an existing program and enhance that program after an internal investigation reveals some fault in what’s going on?” So, that is unique also, to my knowledge, in legal education. And not only are the students enjoying and having fun—I guess they’re snoops, just like me, at heart—but I’m getting great responses from prospective employers and alums of the law school and other practitioners who are delighted that they might have students who can come in as brand-new lawyers. Okay, maybe we’re not going to put them in charge of an internal investigation as first-year lawyers, but they understand the big picture, they know what the goals are, they understand what an internal investigation means, and what the parts and pieces of it are. They’re ready to go at a much, much earlier stage, I think.
Zach Coseglia: Yes, and I can just echo that. Last year, I think I played either the role of the CEO or the general counsel, where basically all I had to do was sit in a room and they presented the findings to me, and they were so good. Two months of intense work, and the quality of the readouts was—as someone who led an investigative function at a Fortune 50 Company—definitely on par with both what you see from some outside counsel and what you see from some of the in-house investigators. They did really wonderful work. It was great fun to do.
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: Thank you. The podcast listeners can’t see it, but I’m both beaming and blushing. That’s wonderful to hear, Zach—I really appreciate that. You’ve really hit on one of the things that I think is such a reward about my job, but also just such an important piece of intensive experiential teaching for law students, which is that they learn so fast and they grow so quickly, from somebody who’s been sitting at a desk in a lecture hall twice a week for two hours taking notes, into emerging practitioners with professional presence and an ability to function in that role, and that is incredibly rewarding to see.
Zach Coseglia: I would imagine. Alright, it’s now time to get to know you a little bit better, Danielle. You are now going to be subject to the Better Way? Questionnaire, which is inspired by the Proust Questionnaire, which is inspired by Inside the Actors Studio. There are nine questions, and I will get us started by asking question number one. This is a choice of two questions—you answer whichever you’d like to. So, you can choose between: a) If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be? Or: b) Is there a quality about yourself that you’re currently working to improve?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: I’m going to answer the first question. If I could wake up tomorrow having gained any one ability, it would be the ability to fly.
Hui Chen: Danielle, before I ask the second question, would you want to fly as a human being, flapping your own wings, or do you want to fly an airplane?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: No, I don’t want to fly an airplane. I want to be able to experience what a bird experiences.
Hui Chen: Got it—sounds great. I get to ask the second question, which is also a choice of two versions. You referenced earlier to a mentor, so this is a mentor-related question. So, you can either answer: Who is your favorite mentor? Or: Who do you wish you could be mentored by?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: I mentioned Josh Levy earlier, and, truly, in private practice, Josh definitely stands out as a great mentor and just a good human. In clinical teaching, my greatest mentor has been my friend and long-term colleague, Deborah Epstein, who directs the Domestic Violence Clinic at Georgetown Law. I worked for her. I actually went to school part-time and worked full-time in law school, so I worked for her all through law school, as well as later as one of her fellows. I learned so much about teaching, and teaching clinic, in particular, from her.
Zach Coseglia: Question number three: What is the best job, paid or unpaid, that you’ve ever had?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: The best job I’ve ever had is teaching law school clinic, so I guess I’ve got the dream job. It really is fun and so rewarding.
Hui Chen: The next question is: What is your favorite thing to do?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: Definitely travel.
Hui Chen: I’m with you.
Zach Coseglia: I think a follow-up question is necessary: What’s either the favorite place that you’ve been, a place that you’re going to soon, or a place that you haven’t been that you really want to go to?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: The last trip that I took before the pandemic was to take my mom to Italy for three weeks. It was a lifetime trip that we had wanted to do for years and years. We visited the ancestral village in the middle of Italy and just had an amazing trip.
Zach Coseglia: Alright, question number five: What is your favorite place?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: My favorite place is a little town called Glen Arbor, in Michigan—an area called Leelanau County, it’s on the northwestern part of the Lower Peninsula. My parents took me there every summer when I was growing up, and we still go each summer. It’s just beautiful, peaceful—definitely my happy place, as they say.
Hui Chen: That’s wonderful. Next question is: What makes you proud?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: Seeing my students grow into practitioners in the course of a semester in the way I was describing earlier, and then, getting to watch their careers unfold. I’ve been teaching long enough now that some of my students are coming into the full flower of mid-career. It’s thrilling to see where they’re ending up, how they’re doing and what they’re doing. And it’s always just a treasure when I get to talk to former students, too, which, happily, happens regularly. I’m also very proud of teaching one of my cats to sit up for treats.
Zach Coseglia: From the deep, to the cat, to the not-so-deep at all, question number seven is: What email signoff do you use most frequently?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: This is very telling, I think, for me. It’s “Thanks” exclamation point—so, “Thanks!”
Zach Coseglia: We’ve had debates before about the use of the exclamation point. I fully endorse it, so I’m with you on that—I like that.
Hui Chen: The next question is: What trend in your field is most overrated?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: I think I might make some enemies on this, but I’m going to go with generative AI. Generative AI has run across the legal education radar in ways that are both terrifying, and then, also just totally overblown. So, lots of law school professors are worried about the impact of generative AI on academic integrity, exams, and all those sorts of things. That doesn’t apply to the way that I teach because I teach experiential learning. We’ve developed a policy together about using generative AI in the clinic. Whenever the students think about using it, they usually end up concluding it’s not worth it—that the time that it takes to go back and check the cites, that generative AI is perhaps hallucinating, or to rewrite the draft, is just not worth it. I think it’s a glorified template generator at this stage.
Zach Coseglia: Fascinating. That is quite the Molotov cocktail to throw at the end of the podcast. The last question is simply: What word would you use to describe your day so far?
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea: “Brilliant” because I’ve gotten to speak with you all. This has been such a pleasure, and I am so appreciative of your letting me provide a little window on what we’re doing with JD students in legal education to prepare them for the world that they’re going to meet, which is a compliance world.
Zach Coseglia: Danielle, thank you so much for joining us, this has been a great chat. We’d love to have you back, there’s clearly a lot more that we could talk about, but this has been just great. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and your Better Ways with our listeners. And thank you all for tuning in to the Better Way? podcast and exploring all of these Better Ways with us. For more information about this or anything else that’s happening with R&G Insights Lab, please visit our website at www.ropesgray.com/rginsightslab. You can also subscribe to this series wherever you regularly listen to podcasts, including on Apple and Spotify. And, if you have thoughts about what we talked about today, the work the Lab does, or just have ideas for Better Ways we should explore, please don’t hesitate to reach out—we’d love to hear from you. Thanks again for listening.