Exceptional Female Role Models - Fatima Hussain

Fatima Hussain is a Senior Legal Counsel at Trade Republic.

She took her state exam at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany and completed her LL.M. International Commercial Law at the University of Nottingham. She trained with Clifford Chance and Freshfields in Frankfurt before spending 4 years with Audi working in global litigation and product liability law. She then joined Tesla as a corporate counsel.

As a woman born to Iraqi & Lebanese parents who grew up in a central German town, Fatima has a well-developed sense of the importance of cultural diversity.

She is passionate about Legal Innovation and is an adviser to various legal departments on how to digitize their processes and structures. She is fascinated to explore how digitization can help us to be more effective, and more connected across companies, industries and regions.

She authors an Instagram account that posts about the importance of legal innovation and also female empowerment. She is a regular speaker on podcasts, and has also spoken at conferences around the topic of empowering women in law in Germany.

Can we start by understanding more about your childhood background?

I was born in Giessen – a town close to Frankfurt. My dad is from Iraq and my mum is from Lebanon.

My dad arrived in Giessen to study for his PhD in Agriculture and met my mum whilst he was here. They got married and decided to settle here.

We had a fantastic cultural diversity growing up – Germany is my home and where I belong, German is my mother tongue, but we also travelled to Lebanon every year and so I grew up bilingual, also becoming fluent in Arabic.

I grew up as a Muslim woman. Obviously as teenagers life feels pretty crazy anyway and we are all trying to discover ourselves and our place in life. I realised that I looked different to most of my fellow students and so it was more difficult for me to fit in – especially with the cool kids!

I was very lucky because I studied politics in school and I had a teacher who was great at explaining exactly how the law worked, I enjoyed these lessons and they really inspired me.

I went to a civil law lecture at Giessen University and it was amazing, I was hooked. I knew immediately that this was my passion and the career I wanted to follow, so I studied my law degree with a focus on European and International Law – because I decided I wanted to work for the United Nations.

However, it turns out that the United Nations doesn’t pay you anything during internships and it’s very expensive to live in Switzerland! So instead, I started working for Linklaters, I earned some money and then went to England to study my Master’s in International Commercial Law at the University of Nottingham.

I loved England, although it did take me some time to stop waiting for the bus on the wrong side of the street! It was a great learning experience - not just in UK and US law - but I was alone in a foreign country and for the first time having to deal with adult problems like opening a bank account, figuring out how you visit a doctor, meeting all kinds of diverse people and developing my social skills.

This experience also taught me the power we all have inside us to be able to deal with the challenges that life throws at us. It built in me a belief that if I just throw myself fully into a task, things will usually turn out fine.

When I returned to Germany, I completed 2 years of legal traineeship working with Clifford Chance and then Freshfields. Then I went on to spend 4 years with Audi as a Legal Counsel working in Global Litigation and Product Liability Law, before joining Tesla, and now I am a Senior Legal Counsel with Trade Republic.

What do you wish you had learned earlier in life?

I wish I had learned earlier that it will be impossible to make everybody happy. It is impossible to meet everybody’s expectations.

I think a lot of people struggle with this - they have all their own hopes and dreams, but then they also have the expectations of their family, of community, of society, and nowadays the expectations of absolute strangers on social media!

That feeling that there is importance in strangers liking a picture you have posted or a desire that they make a comment that gives you some form of approval. This craving that social media recognises you as pretty or funny or smart.

What I have now realised is that even if you are nicest person on earth, there will always be at least 1 person who doesn’t like you!

Ironically, I recently saw something on Instagram that really spoke to me! It said ‘Why do you want everybody to like you, when you don’t even like everybody?!’

When I freed myself of the burden to make everybody else happy and the pressure to live up to all of life’s expectations, I suddenly felt like I could prioritise what is really important to me. I had the headspace to identify what my own passions are and what is going to make me happy.

What are the best pieces of advice you have ever been given?

Don’t take to heart criticism from people who you would never approach to give you advice.

Often their criticism is more about their own insecurities or missed opportunities and goals.

I was previously in the position where, as I made the decision to become more visible and use my voice to speak out about things that are important to me, many people started to criticise me. I immediately started to doubt myself and wonder if I was doing the right thing - if I even had the ability to convey my message effectively.

To paraphrase something I read in a book around this point ‘It’s much easier to sit in the arena than it is to fight in the ring’. We can all criticise from a distance the people who are showing enough courage to do things, to try. Sure we will make mistakes, but we are trying – and most importantly we are learning and growing from our experience of doing.

This point is not about being resistant to feedback – this can be really valuable. But learn the difference between supportive constructive feedback and people who are making themselves feel better by projecting their negative thoughts or fears onto you.

What is the biggest life lesson you have learned so far?

Everybody is going through something, but everybody is worthy of being loved and supported.

It’s really easy to assume that people do things we don’t like because they are evil! But the truth is you just don’t know what personal challenge or even crisis they might be dealing with in their personal life.

So my life lesson is to treat people with kindness, but also balance this of course with being careful not to be naïve. Ultimately not everybody has your best intentions at the front of their mind, and so learn to develop and trust your intuition as you build up your experiences with people.

How important have role models been in your journey?

To be honest I didn’t think very much about role models until 2-3 years ago. For me personally, I was always determined to go my own way and plan around what I wanted to do. I had always assumed that role models are people you aspire to copy.

As a hijab wearing Muslim woman it was difficult to find CEOs who looked just like me that I wanted to aspire to become. Also I realised that for a lot of my white friends, things like everyday racism they will just never experience.

I always had a small group of very high quality friends (like Anne Graue) who have always been there to support and advise me; but I also feel that a lot of these lessons in life I just had to figure out on my own.

Then I realised that actually everybody can act as your role model, and there is something to learn from everyone. It doesn’t have anything to do with age or job title.

Within most people we can find one specific part of their work or their personality or their life that can be inspiring. When I work with my mentees, it is not because I am perfect as a whole, it is because in one very specific area I can share experiences and add value to them.

I couldn’t name you 3 specific individuals who are my role models, but I would say that every single woman who stands her ground in every situation where she is being judged with inequality simply because she is female is a role model to me.

Every lone woman who sits on an otherwise exclusively male board of directors; every woman involved in the fight for female empowerment; everybody who is challenging the status quo in the mission to push women forward – these people are role models to me.

Challenging the status quo is hard – it’s exhausting, it’s unpopular. But I want to contribute to the mission, so I will sit and write an article to draw attention to an aspect of female empowerment in my free time and on vacation. Or I will find the time to prepare a presentation, or sometimes even just meet with somebody for a discussion which I know will increase my knowledge and widen my understanding of a specific issue.

I am passionate about female representation – the more diverse the better – but I don’t limit my goals around specific sub-groups. I want to see en masse more women achieving promotion into leadership and into strategic decision-making positions within organisations.

When you face challenges in life, what is your process to help you overcome?

I think the most important thing to understand early in your career, is that nobody enjoys being in a situation where they have to admit they made a mistake or that a given situation wasn’t their best performance.

But realise that every set-back, every mistake is an opportunity for you to learn and grow. It is a chance for you to reflect and think deeply about how you will perform better next time you are faced with a similar challenge.

Learn how to pick yourself back up, how to admit when things didn’t go well, and how to extract the learning points from the challenges you face.

Everybody makes mistakes, nobody is perfect. But in my opinion, if you aren’t making mistakes you simply aren’t stepping outside of your comfort zone enough, and you are missing out on opportunities to grow.

Not taking risks is probably the biggest mistake you can make in life. We all have so much potential to do so much, that we should never be so fearful of mistakes and challenges that we end up stuck and only being prepared to do the things we already know we can do.

What does success mean to you now?

Success for me is developing an even deeper understanding of what has real value and impact within the female empowerment mission.

For myself, I want to work with inspiring people and learn from them. I approach life with the humility that I will learn from everybody – sometimes I learn what I do want to be more like, sometimes I learn what I don’t want to be more like! But I want to keep learning from everybody.

I would like to understand better what makes me happy, whilst helping others. I would like to surround myself with positive energy and positive people, who push themselves to achieve more and who will push me to achieve more.