Mother in law, sole practice
High-flier Stacey Shortall is out to change the world, one good deed at a time. By Bess Manson.
You could have heard a pin drop as top legal eagle Stacey Shortall asked a room full of people: ‘‘Who did you help today?’’ The silence was profound. Shortall was standing behind the podium accepting the community and not-for-profit category of the Women of Influence award in 2015.
‘‘I was not expecting to win and had no speech prepared so I asked the audience what I ask my children every night at the dinner table: ‘Who did you help today?’ I didn’t say it to make an impact. It was just a simple question,’’ she says.
Speaking from the lofty Wellington legal chambers of Minter Ellison Rudd Watts, where she is a partner, Shortall says that speech got a reaction. People came up to her afterwards asking how they might help.
That simple question is fast becoming a movement, connecting skilled people with not-for-profit community projects. Using an electronic platform, skilled volunteers are matched with community projects depending on their interest, capability, location and availability. Simple, she says.
Many of those interested in making a change got involved with her Homework Help Club, where Shortall and volunteers from Minter Ellison Rudd Watts work with kids from the Holy Family School in Cannons Creek.
That altruistic brainchild came about as a way of connecting back with the community, says Shortall, who previously spent more than a decade working at a top Wall Street legal firm.
Kids started talking to us about wanting to be a lawyer, about going to university. One kid said to me ‘I don’t want to be a lawyer, I want to be a judge!’ Stacey Shortall
‘‘One of the things that struck me when I came back from New York in 2010 was that there had been silos created here. Less mixing in communities. I believe in a national community – we are all the richer for spending time with each other.’’
It was an utterly grassroots concept, says Shortall – a 43-yearold mother of four. She simply looked up decile-one schools and started with Holy Family.
‘‘I knew it was a community where there were a lot of parents working hard, sometimes doing multiple jobs, which made it difficult for them to be available to their children in the evenings. I was also confronted with the fact that in the large law firms we didn’t have the diversity that I thought we would have when I started out in my career.’’
For the past 21⁄2 years, she and her colleagues – not just lawyers but marketing staff, business development and support staff, even the company chef – have been spending one afternoon a week at the school helping pupils with their homework.
The response from kids has been memorable. They’re dreaming big.
‘‘Kids started talking to us about wanting to be a lawyer, about going to university. One kid said to me ‘I don’t want to be a lawyer, I want to be a judge’.’’
The school has since enveloped the Homework Help Club into a learning hub where parents, grandparents and volunteers from various professions go in to help the children three days a week.
The volunteer programme has now been brought to 10 schools in Auckland, Wellington and the Manawatu and the hope is to provide help to any decile one school that wants it.
Shortall says both law staff and the children have benefited. ‘‘It’s been really enriching, just being reminded of how much talent and potential there is in the children of this country.’’
She’s quick to point out that the kids already have plenty of role models – parents, grandparents and teachers. But the chance to meet people from a wide variety of careers might broaden their ambitions, she says.
Shortall herself is not from a family of lawyers or university educated parents. She was raised on a farm in Colyton, just outside Feilding in the Manawatu, with her two sisters and brother.
Her parents, Margaret and Perry Shortall, were always involved in the community, she says. Always willing to help others but not making a big deal out of it.
She guffaws at the thought she might have been a farmer herself.
When a primary school teacher suggested her love of a good argument might lend itself to a legal career, she paused for thought.
While she honed her sharp mind studying law and accounting at Victoria University, she indulged her other great love – sports. She ran marathons, played and coached tennis, played netball and worked as a gym instructor.
With a Rotary scholarship she did an LLM in indigenous selfgovernance in Alberta, Canada. Stopping in New York on her way back, she found the city’s chaos and energy compelling.
She returned home and worked at Rudd Watts & Stone for a few years before an opportunity arose in the Big Apple.
Shortall scored a job with top Wall Street firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and would spend the next decade at the firm, travelling the world working as a litigator representing firms such as Enron and Lehman Brothers before their collapse. It was high-pace, bet-the-farm type of litigation, she says. She became heavily involved in pro bono work, particularly with the Incarcerated Mothers Project running in the medium security women’s prison in Manhattan.
At the same time she volunteered at the Immigration Court where she worked with African refugee women who had been raped and tortured. On a six-week sabbatical to Ghana she worked with an NGO dealing with issues around violence against women and kids, and for the Ghanaian Police Force prosecuting child rapists.
Living stateside, Shortall adopted three of her four children. Kate and Thomas are seven; Ethan is 31⁄2. They were all adopted as babies.
And next month, Shortall will travel to Mizoram in northeast India to collect 17-month-old Puipui.
She was moved to adopt a girl from India after the horrific story of the young woman brutally gangraped on a bus in Delhi.
Adopting as a single parent did not present any particular difficulties, she says. In fact, she’d encourage other people to consider doing the same.
‘‘I always thought I’d have kids and I had in my mind that if I hadn’t met the right man at 35 who I wanted to have a family with then I wasn’t going to miss out. So I got to 35 and I decided to make my family by myself.’’
When she returned to New Zealand in 2010 Shortall rejoined her old firm and, after flitting between the US and New Zealand for a few years, she and her family settled in Hataitai.
Her work representing the Pike River directors has been highprofile, and she was named 2015 Lawyer of the Year.
Despite the demands of job and family, Shortall has continued with her volunteer work with inmates from Auckland Region Women’s Corrections Facility in Wiri.
Reconnecting families, reuniting communities, Shortall will have no problems answering her own question at the family dinner table tonight. ‘‘Who did you help today?’’
Nominations have opened for this year’s Women of Influence awards. Presented by Westpac and Fairfax Media, the awards acknowledge and celebrate women who are helping to shape the future of the country. Visit womenofinfluence.co.nz for more details.