Lynn Shapiro Snyder, Senior Member of the Firm in the Health Care & Life Sciences and Litigation practices, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was the featured guest on Inspiring Women, an interview show hosted by Laurie McGraw featuring inspiring women at the pinnacle of their careers. In this episode, Ms. Snyder discusses the 10 best practices for advancing women in business as well as her book on the subject.
Following is an excerpt:
Laurie: Welcome to one of our first episodes of Inspiring Women and I am so excited to today be speaking to Lynn Shapiro Snyder and Lynn is absolutely an inspiring woman and certainly someone who inspires me.
Laurie: Let me tell you a little about Lynn. She’s a senior member and on the board of Epstein Becker Green, which is a prominent national law firm focused on health care and life sciences. Over 40 years working there, Lynn is extremely well recognized. She is one of the 100 Most Powerful People in Healthcare as recognized by Modern Healthcare and that was on their inaugural list of this very prominent publication. Also a Top 25 Women in Healthcare. Many, many other accolades and recognitions. A little bit over 20 years ago Lynn founded an important organization called Women Business Leaders and we’re going to talk about this organization. Over 3,000 female executives and the incredible community that she's established to be supportive for women there. Lynn is very a well written person, she’s a sought after speaker, she's on the Board of Directors of multiple organizations including Trustmark Mutual Holdings and more recently Apria Healthcare. …
Laurie: Lynn, as we get started, I want to just talk about a couple things. I’m very excited to have this conversation. You have had an incredible career, but what are you doing now? What are you focused on today?
Lynn: Well, today I am trying to get ready for the new legislation that's about to be enacted by Congress … to be current in whatever is going to be affecting the healthcare industry. It'll be, I think, our fifth or sixth statute during COVID that is going to affect all types of healthcare clients and I need to be current. And that's one of the beauties of health law is that it's so dynamic that it's not boring, we are not bored.
Laurie: Well, you got a lot of years at it and, you know 40 years, and that is a long tenure for anyone. It's pretty rare these days. If I look at the more recent statistics of tenure at organizations, they continue to go in one direction and that’s less and less years, it’s under five years now for professional white collar workers. So let’s just talk about your current career. Was it accidental? Did you always know that you wanted to go into law? What's the staying power that you’ve had with it at Epstein Becker for so long?
Lynn: Well, I’m one of five daughters, no sons, and my parents had a mom and pop pharmacy when I was growing up. So healthcare was literally the family business. I guess as the middle of the five, my parents thought I would be the lawyer, always talk to me about law although we never had lawyers in the family. And when Medicare was passed my family sold the pharmacy and opened a home medical equipment store. So … in high school I did Medicare claims and in college I wrote a paper on HMOs. This was 1975. And everything was coming out of Washington, DC, and if health economics probably had been more prominent I might've been a PhD in that area but the law degree was more attractive. So I went to GW Law School, came to Washington, DC, and have never left.
Lynn: At the time Steve Epstein had just started a small boutique firm to set up the IPA model HMOs and I went there actually just to do HMOs and not Medicare and Medicaid. And a client had a Medicare question within the first year, and the next thing you know … I thought I'd stay for two years and I can tell you 40 years goes by very quickly. I tell people sometimes the grass can be greener but sometimes you can make your grass green. If you speak up when you see things that aren't quite the way you think they should be, and you want an employer that's either going to fix it or tell you why your criticism isn’t right. And so we've had a very transparent dialogue when I wasn't management and now that I am management I try very hard to keep that open dialogue even though now we're over 300 lawyers nationwide – to just keep that door open because sometimes when you're the boss people don't always want to tell you when there's something that needs to be better.
