The New York City Bar Association held its Annual Diversity and Inclusion Celebration Dinner on June 26, honoring the 2019 Diversity and Inclusion Champion Award winners, Juan Arteaga, partner at Crowell & Moring, and Lisa Linsky, partner at McDermott Will & Emery. The award, created in 2006, applauds leaders who have initiated and sustained diversity and inclusion in their organizations.

As his office's hiring partner, Arteaga helped recruit a number of female and diverse associates and counsel. He has also established a strong partnership between Crowell and Legal Outreach, the non-profit legal education program for students from underserved communities in NYC, and has created a successful speaker series that enables the New York office' employees to discuss important workplace topics such as unconscious bias.

Lisa Linsky. Photo by Alycia Kravitz

Linsky was McDermott's first partner-in-charge of firm-wide diversity and inclusion. She created and chaired the firm's LGBT Diversity and Inclusion Committee and currently serves on the board of directors for New York City's LGBT Community Center.

In 2015, she co-led a team of McDermott lawyers that wrote an amicus brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in 'Obergefell v. Hodges,' the landmark civil rights case ruling that state bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional.