Matthew Coward was only a year out of law school and working as a new associate at Locke Lord when he heard then-Shell Oil General Counsel Cathy Lamboley speak at a conference about the importance of diversity.
“Pursuing and demanding diversity is not just a good and moral objective, it is good for business,” Lamboley preached over and over. “Corporate legal departments must do better, and we must require the law firms that work for us to do better.”
Lamboley’s message resonated with Coward.
“Cathy really left an impression on me that Shell really valued diversity and inclusion,” he told The Texas Lawbook in a recent interview.
Thirteen years later, Coward is vice president of legal for Jiffy Lube International, a subsidiary of Shell. He also co-chairs the 220-lawyer Shell legal department’s diversity and inclusion council with Belinda Senneway, who is legal counsel for the company’s upstream unconventionals unit.
“The great thing about Shell is that the legal department is always looking for new and different ways to have an impact on diversity and inclusion,” Coward said. “I’m proud that Shell’s leadership doesn’t just talk diversity and inclusion, they put the resources and time and money behind us to support our initiatives.”
Lamboley retired in 2010, but Shell has not lessened its focus on the need for a more diverse legal profession.
Houston lawyers at the oil giant aggressively seek and implement new programs, techniques and partnerships designed to increase the pipeline with diverse candidates, improve mentoring initiatives and push outside law firms and other vendors to make diversity a higher priority.
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook are pleased to recognize Shell Oil Company and Senneway and Coward with its 2019 Houston Corporate Counsel’s Diversity of the Year Award.
“Shell Oil was one of the first great companies to make diversity and inclusion a priority, and we are extremely pleased that they continue to be a corporate leader on such an important and needed effort,” wrote the judges who reviewed the nominations. “Shell Oil has been aggressively pushing diversity and inclusion long before D&I was cool.”
“For Shell Legal, people are a key resource and diversity & inclusion is of great importance,” Senneway said. “We both feel very proud and fortunate to be working for a company like that.”
Coward agrees.
“If the overall numbers in the legal profession aren’t showing significant progress, then we think that sends a message that there is always more that can be done and should be done,” he said. “We also recognize that diversity and inclusion is a business imperative and a tremendous amount of work has been done by Shell, including leaders in Shell Legal, on this topic.
Senneway was raised in Houston and her father practiced real estate law. She went to college at the University of Texas Red McCombs School of Business and then received her law degree from the University of Houston Law Center in 2007.
For five years, Senneway worked as a real estate lawyer at Shannon, Martin, Finkelstein & Alvarado in Houston. In 2012, she moved in-house at Shell, where she has practiced in the real estate, midstream and upstream divisions.
Coward grew up outside Toronto and moved to the U.S. to attend college. He received his bachelor’s degree in economics from Southern University at Baton Rouge in 1997. He worked for four years as a financial analyst at ConocoPhillips before going to law school at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, where he graduated in 2005.
Coward practiced law for three years at Locke Lord and then two years at Fulbright & Jaworski. In 2010, he joined the legal department at TransCanada.
Shell Oil came calling in 2013. He served as legal counsel for six years, and he became the Jiffy Lube unit vice president for legal last December.
“The great thing about our D&I council is that all members of the legal department are encouraged to be involved and we don’t limit our meetings to a handful of people,” Senneway said. “All lawyers can be involved and attend and participate.”
Senneway said that she and Coward wanted to build on Shell’s past efforts when they became co-chairs of the council last year.
“Matt and I wanted to focus on some new initiatives, including improved internal mentoring, coffee meetings and simply trying to connect people in our department more with each other,” she said.
The goal, they said, was to get lawyers from different backgrounds and experiences to meet and talk more one-on-one or in small groups about themselves and their ideas.
“Diversity of thought stems from having a diverse group of lawyers and teams in Shell Legal,” Coward said. “Personally, we enjoy having colleagues with such a variety of backgrounds and experiences, both as friends and as resources when we reach out to them to work through commercial or legal issues. We believe we reach better outcomes when we have the viewpoints from a diverse team of talent.”
Coward and Senneway agree that addressing the lack of diversity in the legal profession always means focusing more on the pipeline.
Shell U.S. Legal, for example, co-sponsors two programs with the Houston Young Lawyers Association that require lawyers to visit high school students from communities that are generally underrepresented in the legal profession.
The Texas Attorney Pipeline Program, known as TAPP, allows lawyers to talk with high school students about what it’s like to be a lawyer and the path students can take to get there.
“Those students later go on a field trip to the Harris County courthouses with lawyers from Shell and other companies and law firms to see live court proceedings, talk with judges and participate in an interactive debate facilitated by the lawyers,” Senneway said. “By reaching these high school students at a pivotal time in their educational journey, they’ll have more awareness of the legal profession and can consider it as a realistic career path.”
Coward and Senneway said that Shell Legal utilizes a panel of preferred Minority or Women-owned Business Enterprise (“MWBE”) firms within the U.S. The Shell legal department, through its competitive bidding process, includes at least one diverse firm to be considered in each request for proposal when the opportunity exists.
“The expectation of diversity is a standard we hold all of our external counsel to, by evaluating the diversity of each legal team proposed for a matter, encouraging them to consider the inclusion of diverse resources on Shell matters and by inviting them to partner with Shell on diversity efforts we support,” Senneway said.
“This has helped establish a diverse talent pipeline at all levels of expertise, leading to several of our panel law firms naming relationship contacts who are of diverse backgrounds and resulting in our matters being sourced by a more diverse group of timekeepers,” she said.