Season 3: Episode 5: Helen Winter
Assistant Professor of Law and Practice at Pepperdine University School of Law
Helen Winter
Assistant Professor of Law and Practice at Pepperdine University School of Law
How to become a law professor as an internationally trained lawyer?
Born and raised in Germany, Helen is fluent in German, English, French and Spanish. She has always been passionate about using her knowledge and skills to solve real-world problems. She founded R3SOLUTE, an NGO she started with a colleague she met at her UN internship. To date, her NGO has trained more than 2,000 refugees in conflict management through peer mediation. After completing her fellowship at Harvard, Helen spotted a job posting at alma mater, Pepperdine School of Law. Today as a professor of law and practice, she teaches students at Pepperdine alternative dispute resolution and social entrepreneurship.
What was her strategy to land the professor position at Pepperdine Law?
What are her key insights for resolving conflicts on a daily basis?
What advice does she have for internationally trained lawyers aspiring to build a global legal career?
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Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Bonn, Germany. And that's where I spent my childhood. And then I studied law in Heidelberg, which is also a town in the south of Germany. It's a prestigious law school. I did my LLM at Pepperdine University in the US. I did a PhD at European University in Germany while also doing a fellowship at Harvard Law School.
Why did you choose to study law? And why did you come to the United States to study law?
I'm the first lawyer in my family. And I literally got into law because I thought you could do anything with law. And especially when you're young, and you have to choose a career when you're 18 years old. I wanted to just keep my options open. I always knew I wanted to do something International; something with peace building. Something with human rights and justice. And so that's how I decided to do that to study law.
In law school, I knew that I wanted to do dispute resolution. So that was very clear. I took a class in negotiations. And it was such a fun class you could take just before graduation in Heidelberg. And I fell in love with it. I fell in love with dispute resolution with mediation and negotiation. And I looked for all the programs in the world that are the best programs for dispute resolution. And I found Pepperdine School of Law, and especially the Strauss Institute of Dispute Resolution, which is the number one program in the world to learn dispute resolution. And I was lucky enough to get a scholarship and to get accepted at this wonderful university, where I'm now a professor six years later, and it's been such an incredible journey.
And I must say that law is a very challenging discipline to pursue, especially at that young age. You have to always know why you pursue it. So for me, it was always the idea of helping others, promoting a more just world, and making a small difference in the lives of other human beings who are maybe more marginalized and less fortunate than others.
What languages do you speak? What do you do as a multilingual lawyer?
I’m from Europe. We learn a lot of languages, especially in Germany. It’s not uncommon that people speak a lot of languages. I speak English, German, French and Spanish. And a little Dutch, but that only because German and Dutch are like very similar languages, and I understand it, but I can't speak much anymore.
Regarding my career path, around the time I received my Master of Laws degree in 2016, that was when a lot of refugees arrived in Germany. I think it was 1.2 million people who had to flee their home countries, mostly from Afghanistan, also from Syria and in other places. It was a privilege for me to sit here in California and to think about mediation and peace building. And I wondered, okay, what can I do to actually help?
I focused my research during my master's degree on the so-called refugee crisis, and how you can apply alternative dispute resolution systems to that crisis. And I also looked at other mechanisms like peer mediation mechanisms in schools and even in prisons. There's a Prison for Peace program in California where incarcerated people learn how to mediate.
During my internship at the United Nations Ombudsman Office, I discussed with colleagues about how to apply peer mediation to the context of refugee shelters, and how to empower refugees that they can learn how to resolve conflict and disputes that arise on a daily basis.
And my colleague at the UN told me, that's such a great idea. Why don't you just do it? One of my colleagues said, but I have a degree in business, and I would help you with that. That’s how I started R3SOLUTE, my own NGO in 2018. It wasn't meticulously planned. I saw a need. And I wanted to apply my knowledge to meet the needs.
We went into refugee communities, and refugee shelters. We gave workshops and up to this day, we've trained more than 2,000 participants as peer mediators. And I've dedicated my entire research career and my PhD to that topic. This idea of peer mediation from the participants point of view constitutes self-efficacy and agency. Those who learned about peer mediation were the ones that are out of the shelter, found a job, and returned and still promote peace. And they found meaning through their work as peer mediators.
During my research, when I was a PhD student while running my NGO, I applied to a fellowship at Harvard Law School dedicated to negotiation and mediation. Luckily, I got accepted.
Could you talk about how you secured the position as a professor at Pepperdine Law School?
After I completed my fellowship from Harvard, I started looking for jobs. I always wanted to mix academia with practice; I always wanted to do both. I saw this Professorship of Law Practice here at Pepperdine. I thought, Okay, it's a long shot. It is a unusual path, I would say. But without my masters at Pepperdine, I would have never been introduced to this path, because I would have never even had the idea to apply the knowledge that I obtained here at Pepperdine, to an actual problem in the world, and to then do something with that. So it's not something that I was like, I will apply to this and do XYZ, it's more like I'm just following my instinct.
As of this year, I am an assistant professor here at Pepperdine. I teach mediation, I'm just developing a class on alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and social entrepreneurship. And I'm trying to give the experiences I've had to the students or the students are developing social businesses, and ideas on applying their knowledge of dispute resolution to the world and to challenging situations in the world, how they can promote justice, and how they can create a more peaceful world, especially in such a polarized world that we live in right now. They are effectively founding their own companies. I'm thinking of doing a refugee clinic here at Pepperdine as well, with ADR tools.
My main strategy about securing my position at Pepperdine is to always stay in touch with your school, because you never know what opportunities they might have for you. So that's one thing I did, I always stayed in touch with Straus Institute. And they invited me back as a guest speaker several times; I collaborated with them and with an extern, who was doing their masters in dispute resolution at that time, and she was externing with R3Solute, so there was always a relationship.
Be persistent. Don’t be afraid to reach out to people and follow up with them, and send out your work. It's really important to follow up and to send out your research proposal to ten people, and then maybe you're lucky and one professor will get back to you.
Build your network is how I got my internship at the United Nations, and how I got the fellowship at Harvard. And it's absolutely wonderful to see that people want to help you. And people will be there for you, and they will reach out to you. And try to not have a “take mentality” but a “give mentality”. Because you can collaborate with your mentors on research papers, you can give your time volunteering to meaningful topics. So one of my mentors is Professor David Hoffman at Harvard Law School, whom I've just recently published with, and we wrote an article on bias reduction strategies in the legal profession, especially for mediators. And that has just been an amazing opportunity. If you get the opportunity to work with incredible people, always take it, and then I think things will fall into place.
You are an expert in dispute resolution. If you could give a few quick and practical advice on how to resolve conflicts on a daily basis?
That is a good question. I think what is important is to stay open, and to accept different viewpoints by not accepting them, but by acknowledging them and allowing yourself to listen to people who have a different opinion than yourself, and to really go beyond their position and try to understand what drives them, what they really want, what their interests are, and what they are lacking, such that you can then find maybe a mutual gain or something that is more creative than the conflict. It’s more of a mindset.
What advice do you have for multilingual lawyers, who are still in the beginning of their career trying to build a global legal career like yours?
As you've seen from my story, my career started in law school at Pepperdine during my LLM. With the legal and mediator tools I learned, I began looking for ways to apply them. One tip would be to seek opportunities to apply your knowledge and skills. Don't feel confined to traditional paths like big law firms if you're passionate about something else. If you're driven by passion and follow it, security will follow, so will financial stability. What I learned from working with vulnerable populations is to always maintain a learner's mindset. Understand that you'll make mistakes; humility is key. Empowering others with this attitude, especially marginalized groups. Passion for this work will sustain you.
Would you say that internationally trained lawyers are taking on a more active role in BigLaw, corporations, and academia today than say a decade ago? Has this change become a trend?
It's definitely a trend; our world is becoming more global, especially here in the US. Just looking out of my office, I see many international colleagues. It's crucial to build relationships and collaborate with people from different backgrounds. This trend is especially noticeable in law schools. Even as students graduate, many are opting to stay in the US and secure jobs here, which is a positive development. While it's not easy but don’t give up. Where there's a will, there's a way.
