 Welcome to Life in the Law. I'm your host, Miho Koito, and with me is my co-host, Melissa Pavliczek, and joining us is our special guest and honorary today, Laura Thielen. For the benefit of our viewers, I want to first introduce Hawaii Women Lawyers, the organization that brings us here today. Hawaii Women Lawyers is a local nonprofit organization and our mission is to improve the lives and careers of attorneys, influence the future of the legal profession, and enhance the status of women and promote equal opportunities for all. Now each year, Hawaii Women Lawyers honor select individuals for their contributions to our profession that are in public service and support of our mission. Typically, we host a reception every year to honor our awardees, but in 2020, due to the pandemic, obviously we could not do that. And so the purpose of the show today is to honor the remarkable achievements of Laura Thielen, who received the 2020 Hawaii Women Lawyers Outstanding Women Lawyer Award, which goes to an individual attorney who has achieved accomplishments of significant merit, which advanced the mission of Hawaii Women Lawyers. And now I'd like to turn it over to my co-host, Melissa, to cover Laura's background, and then we will have the opportunity to hear from our honoree as well. Melissa? Thank you, Mihoko. We all share a love of Hawaii Women Lawyers and the organization itself does a lot to inspire young lawyers as well as more experienced and seasoned lawyers. Laura Thielen has spent a significant amount of her career as a leader in public service. She currently serves in Honolulu Mayor Rick Langiardi's cabinet as the director of the City Department of Parks and Recreation, where she is responsible for overseeing the city's parks, botanical gardens, beach rights of way, and programs including the iconic summer fund youth development program. And in order to that, Laura was a state senator and represented the 25th Senate District of Kailua, Waimanalo, and Hawaii Kai. During her eight years in the Senate, Laura was a strong voice for each of the women and girls in the Hawaii State Legislature and in the broader community. She was a co-convener of the Women's Legislative Caucus and pursued legislation that improved anti-harassment policies in the workplace. She also worked on addressing domestic violence, equal pay, and gender equality. And I can say from experience that she was always welcomed advocates with an open door and a willingness to talk. She grew up in Kailua and holds degrees in public policy and law. She started her career working as an attorney in private practice, later becoming a managing attorney at Legal Aid, the Legal Aid Society of Hawaii. In 2001, she was elected to the State Board of Education, serving several years. She was later appointed as the director of the Office of State Planning and then the chairperson of the Department of Land and Natural Resources before becoming a state senator. All of these accomplishments do not begin to tell you what a wonderful, warm and inspiring leader she is. And I'm so thrilled to have you with us here today. Welcome, Laura. Well, thank you very much. I'm really, I'm embarrassed. Thank you. I appreciate it. And it means a lot to me because back in the early 90s when I came back to Hawaii, I had gone off to the mainland to go to school and law school, but when I returned here and started working in private practice, I was invited to become a member of Hawaii lawyers and worked on their board and later on was the president of that organization. And so it just means a lot to me coming from you folks. So thank you very much. Thank you so much, Laura, and congratulations again on receiving the award and I should mention also that today we actually have a unique group of us assembled because we are all former presidents of Hawaii women's affairs. We're still serving on the board now, but but it does. It is really great to such a great treat to have both of you on the show today. Laura, if I could just ask you a question about your years of and career in public service. It's so remarkable to me that you've had such a diverse range of leadership positions in public service and I just wanted to hear from you if you can share a little bit more about what pushed you to pursue a career in public service coming from the private sector. Well, I think, you know, probably the obvious answer is my, my mother had a lot of influence on a lot of people are familiar with hers. She went back to school she had had quit college to marry my dad and have children. And so when I was in elementary school then she returned to school, got her degree then went on to law school. And so she was a big influence on my life. But my father was also a very big influence. He was a businessman his entire life he ran his own company. And I think he just instilled in all of us kids a sense of you know you go out and you try things and even if you haven't tried them and you haven't been comfortable and you just put your best effort forward. And so I was fortunate to have a number of mentors who helped me along the way. And I guess because I was willing to try I was fortunate where people willing to take a risk on me and put me into leadership positions. And so that's, I think that combination of the two kind of the do good in approach as well as the independence approach and effort. So those personal stories as well as all of the people you've engaged with professionally, you know, just our branches out into the community but I know we mentioned your work at the legal aid society of Hawaii, and I remember visiting there and hearing that Patsy Minks office had been in that building. And so I'm sure you have many other people who've inspired you so for sure, have been connected to amazing parents who influenced you is really great to hear about I wanted to turn for a moment and ask you about your time in the legislature, and specifically in terms of your work with the Hawaii women's legislative caucus. What did you see then as your priorities and are those still your priorities, or what were your most significant accomplishments during your time in the legislature. You know, I, because I've done a lot of work with women's groups, prior to my time getting to the legislature. So I just kind of naturally gravitated towards the women's legislative caucus I actually have been familiar with them from working as an advocate, prior to that time. And I think the other thing about the legislature is it's not really a place where you can get things through independently, if by its nature, you have to have a majority of the Senate majority that house to get things passed and so the women's legislative caucus was a great way for us to be able to highlight women's issues, and to be able to move them through the legislature successfully to the to the end, partly because you had so many members that there usually was going to be somebody who was going to be able to approach a different committee chair and to be able to shepherd, you know, between the groups of us bills to conclusion. And then between the group, you know, somebody who'd be going research and find information that something was stuck, you know, to be able to figure out solutions to it. So it was a really wonderful group to work with. And I just really, really enjoyed that time now. I just before me whole cocos deeper on that I wanted to ask you because I know I often would come to you. One of the biggest challenges for people who don't, who aren't legislators or don't work at the legislature is just getting pointed in the right direction so did you often find yourself as the, the, the master of transparency because I know that you many times pushed me in the right direction or helped me just discover information that was publicly available but not very easy to find. I like that term master of transparency that's much better I think many of my fellow legislators would have just said that I have a really big mouth and I didn't stop talking. But no I really enjoyed being able to work with people I spent a lot of time with student groups who came through there I would work a lot with our legislative session staff to be able to bring on a lot of you know interns and younger people to give them an opportunity to understand the legislative process. I think democracy really only works when people participate. The process has become so specialized and so convoluted that people can't participate, then it just doesn't work as well. So I just felt that that was a big part of the job is to just help me the translator and the bridge and to bring as many people in as I could to make it so that they would have some familiarity with it and it wouldn't be scary. And I, you know, from my perspective, while you were serving in the Senate, I know that there were many bills and resolutions that that Hawaii women lawyers weighed in on during that time. But one in particular caught our eye and our attention which was the reso it was it was a resolution but it was one you introduced that that had to do with gender representation on boards, the commissions and the courts and that was in So hopefully our memories haven't faded too much adds to like what happened last year but but I realized that it was such it was a more recent reso and when we were really in support of the concept of promoting that. Can you talk a little bit about the Genesis behind your introducing of that resolution. I was at a legislative women's legislative event nationally and I bumped into this woman legislator in Iowa, who told me I'm pretty sure it's Iowa that their state had had a law on the books that their state boards and commissions had to have gender parity, and that law had been on the book for decades. And she was trying to expand it to the local boards and commissions and people were fighting them saying oh no we can't find enough qualified women. And she said you know this has been a law at the state level for decades and that's never been a problem so you know why couldn't we expand it. And so that made me wonder what our boards and commissions were like back in Hawaii so when I came back home, we pulled up the data, and we looked at. There was a bill that have been passed a few years back that required members of select state boards and commissions for their financial disclosures to be public. And these were the kind of the big boards and where the board members were making boats on some very expensive contracts and other things so University of Hawaii Board of Regents, Board of Land and Natural Resources, the Land Use Commission, you know things like that so there were about 15 of those boards and commissions. And we did those because obviously people thought they were important enough to find out, you know, what's the membership. And we also went through the judiciary. And we looked at the district court circuit court appellate and Supreme Court. And what was interesting is that for the vast majority of boards and commissions, we were looking at things like, you know, maybe 12% of the members were women. And that was because the cabinet level person was a member of that board so for instance when I was chair of the Department of Land and Natural Resources, I was on the board of Land and Natural Resources I was a chair person, but I was the only one. And that was the case to him in 2020. So, out of the seven or eight members of the public who were appointed to that board 100% women. And that was very common on a lot of boards and commissions. And then we found for the district court of Chief Justice Mark Wroepenwald has been very intentional, because they get a list of six qualified nominees. He was very intentional at looking for gender balance on the court, because he felt of the courts making decisions that are deciding things that are on affecting the public it needs to be representative of the public. So we wanted to make sure that he had a district court judges that were representative. And so thanks to his intentional looking at that about 50% of the district court judges are women. Unfortunately, that philosophy had not carried through the governors. And while we had a parody at the appellate court and the Supreme Court, the circuit court only about a third or fewer of the judges are women. And so we put forward a resolution to encourage all the appointing and the nominating authorities because sometimes the Judicial Selection Commission or other nominating authorities are putting forward only mail names. Make an effort to find gender to achieve gender parity on our boards and commissions. I don't think it passed. I think what happened was the pandemic hit and 2020 a lot of things shut down. So I don't know whether the caucus picked it up. I left 2020 was my last year in the legislature. I want to ask you a little bit more about that because different governors and Supreme Court Chief Justices have had different views about that and I remember asking a panel of all former governors why only one of them had led the way and appointing more women. And a couple of them said that they didn't feel there were enough qualified applicants kind of like what you were talking about. And I know Hawaii women lawyers has had different efforts that trying to attract more women to apply and train more women and just to amplify the openings and make sure that enough attorneys who have experienced women attorneys can apply for these. You know how what are some of the different strategies. Yeah, you know I think a strategy is that the people who are making the nominations and the appointments need to stop blaming women and start appointing women. When the Judicial Selection Commission sends a list of six names on off, and they're all qualified members. If you've got one or two of those names are women and the rest are men, you can achieve gender parity by picking one of those qualified women, you don't need to have a list of six women. I just, you know, and when you're reaching out to people you can keep that in mind. We got a list of, I think, six names for the board of the Hawaii Tourism Authority one year all six for men. And they were appointing authorities all of whom were men and said, how can you possibly in 2020 send us a list of six men and they said, Oh, well, there's a woman on the board already. And so the mentality was now like a tokenism. So I just think these nominees who tend to be male need to stop blaming women and start appointing them Chief Justice Mark Reck and wall has achieved gender parity on the district court, working off of the same kinds of lists, but the governor's Well, I do remember that one of the governors when they answered my question said that Hawaii women lawyers and members of the community had put public pressure on him to appoint more women. So that kind of leads to another question that we wanted to ask you about is, how do you get constituents engaged when you serve as a member of the Senate. One thing I know for sure about you is a very dear friend of mine came to you to ask your for you for your help and adding a clicker to the crosswalk light because he's blind. And that was no easy project and something that many legislators would have. You know, let go of long before it ever happened and you didn't you stuck with it until it happened and he and the community are safer because because of it but how do you get community members engage. You know, I think there's a lot of different leadership styles and a lot of different working styles and some of them work well with some people and and some work don't. And I guess I would just be encouraging to any women or any people of any gender who want to be pushing for equity and parity. Just keep trying and find groups. And if you can work through a group, it's often a very effective way you don't feel quite so isolated between you you have more contacts, and between you you have a lot more power and this is where one of those things where the sum of the parts is, I can't remember that saying you know it's greater, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts or something. I think that would be a very effective way of achieving change. Is that your same advice or strategy for encouraging more women in other leadership positions, whether it outside the legislature I know your work, you know, in the administrative agencies and now at the city, or do you see a lot of women in leadership and how can we encourage more women to pursue those avenues. It's important, again, you know to keep trying, but it's important that we mentor each other, and a lot of the mentors that I've had have been men, and I just am really grateful for the time that they've invested in me and so just take advantage of those opportunities. And I started at a private law firm when I first graduated from law schools back on mainland, and you know, you were so afraid of being overworked and they kept saying, you know, say no, we've got too much say no. But one guy said to us you know what, say yes, whenever you can, because that's when you get the opportunity that's when you get the experience and you get as much experience from failing at something as you do on succeeding. So don't be afraid of, you know, failure, because it's only on a minor thing and you've got a whole life ahead of you and a whole career. So you just keep going and you learn from those types of mistakes and you become better for it. We were seeing a wonderful picture of you with your legislative colleagues at a event where you were encouraging younger women and women in their current careers to consider public service so thank you for always speaking out and encouraging others. Yes, thank you and and I really wanted to ask about your, you know, since we do have the benefit of having three former presidents of Hawaii women lawyers on the set show. I wanted to ask you about the pressing issues that you faced when you were president of Hawaii women lawyers if you can remember that far back. And you know we talked a little bit about how, you know, Hawaii women lawyers as an organization has so many different focuses including professional development, community service advocacy, judicial equity. So I was curious what what were the pressing issues in your day as and your time with the when you served on the Hawaii women lawyers. And what do you think the priority should be in terms of where HWL should focus its efforts. Well, ironically, one of the priorities was getting a woman on to the Hawaii Supreme Court. And so there, there was a lot of pressure may have been on that same governor that you mentioned earlier to appoint a woman to the court. But the other issue that is this part of the genesis of women lawyers was the woman who started the domestic violence hotline, who had been, I think she had died in an auto accident and so one of the partners at the firm she looked at had given an endowment to Hawaii legal foundation I guess it created to support the hotline. And so the issue of domestic violence is one I've worked on a lot of violence against women when I was at the legislature we worked on mandatory testing of the backlog of the rape kits, sex trafficking, domestic violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, gender equity and pay, you know, but so a number of situations where I guess I felt very strongly that being in a position of understanding the system, and what the system has benefited me to really making my best effort to help women where the system doesn't benefit them, and who may not be able to understand the system or may not be able to access it to protect themselves. And so I think that's really, really critical work for women lawyers to do, because we do have a specialty and an expertise in how our system works and can often make changes that can make a huge difference to the people that are just fighting to keep themselves or their children safe. It's really interesting to hear you talk about the domestic violence issue because I know that, you know, when you were at the legislature one of the things I remember most clearly in terms of your leadership role with the as a co convener of the women's legislative caucus was in the area of domestic violence, and I remember there being a big effort to to focus on domestic violence issues in that time so do you, can you talk a little bit about the bill that the bills are the issues that you looked at when you served in the senate. Yeah, one of the things we did is we, we organized a statewide tour as a women's caucus to go to the four major counties and talk with the prosecutors, the police departments. We had the public defender join us and advocacy organizations and survivors of domestic violence. We wanted to make sure that people would come and weren't sure, you know, the women's caucus held it by itself if they would. So we reached out to the judiciary and CJ Mark rectum wealth completely supported it. And he said he'd make sure that the judges from the family court would be there as well which was great. And then we reached out to the attorney general's office and I think at the time it was Claire Connors who's still there, who was very supportive and so they joined us as well. We started each of the meetings with survivors talking to us about what it was like to go through the system, just to get a restraining order. And what it was like to try to then, you know, support the prosecution of their abuser or to just keep themselves safe. It was really eye opening for the judges and everybody there and also for the process as the legislators, because a lot of times we would time the length of time it took from the date filed something to the date it was a, you know, a final just a judicial decision was made. But really for people going through the system, there was a lot of upfront, you know, thinking they would have to do about the impacts of the family, the impacts on the economic status, you know, would they be safe, would they not be safe if something happened. So often it took about a year of work and effort to get to the point of just filing something. And, you know, so that was a really, we ended up with some couple pieces of legislation that came out of that. One was to try and make the restraining order process a little bit simpler. And actually the judiciary took the initiative on that and they did a lot of the changes that the advocates have been wanting to have done just administratively so that was fantastic. The other was we decided to try a pilot project with, I'm going to say kind of lower level domestic violence offenses, not violence but maybe to look at a petty misdemeanor to see if early and swift and certain intervention could change behaviors. And so that's a five year pilot project that didn't pass. And there's going to be data reported and it's going to be important for people to be coming back to say whether it's something that's worked or hasn't worked. Because if it doesn't work, we want to, we want to let that sunset, and we don't want to continue it. But if it's working, you know, we hope that the resources could continue. And so the idea would be to maybe take cases where instead of veering into increasingly aggressive and violent behavior, you know, through this early intervention that, you know, that behavior could change, or if appropriate the relationship can end. People can be safe and go their separate ways. And now we're going to run out of time because you have so much to talk to us about and it's all so personally relevant to me as a first year attorney I attended a Hawaii women lawyers program to disfilm this about domestic violence and I recognize a family member story in those myths and the domestic violence hotline at the time and they helped me get my family member out of a dangerous situation. All the work that you've done has been incredibly inspiring and these are the reasons. Among the many reasons that you are receiving a Hawaii women lawyers award and just want to thank you personally for all that you've done. Thank you both for the nomination award really as I said at the beginning this means a lot to me and I greatly appreciate the honor. Thank you so much and thank you again for being with us today. A special thank you to our guest, Laura Thielen the recipient of the Hawaii women lawyers 2020 outstanding lawyer of the year award, and also to my co host Melissa Pavlocek. This is actually the concludes our five part series on hwls 2020 annual awards and you can find episodes on think text YouTube page. And again this is life in the law and I'm your host mihoko ito. Thank you again for joining us and Aloha.