About the Session

On the heels of their popular keynote at the 2025 IWIL Annual Conference, Bernardo Ferdman [Ferdman Consulting] and Denise Robinson [The Still Center] continue the conversation about belonging, inclusion, and how connection contributes to well-being in the law.

Denise and Bernardo share their work in inclusion to dive deeper into the experience of inclusion and exclusion, examining how these experiences impact workplace culture and employee motivation.

We hope you will find this conversation interesting and informative as you head into Well-Being Week in Law (WWIL) 2025, which is centered on the importance of social connection and its impact on wellness.

 

Video Highlights

• • • 0:00 Introduction

• • • 2:40 Well-Being Week in Law (WWIL)

• • • 3:50 Speaker Backgrounds; What does Inclusion and this work mean to you?

• • • 17:30 Core concepts of and misconceptions about DEI; What do these core concepts mean and how can we bring them to our lives?

• • • 26:00 Model: The Practice of Inclusion: A Systemic and Dynamic Process

• • • 30:30 Exercise: Reflect on a time when you felt included

• • • 48:00 Model: Paradoxes of Inclusion

• • • 54:00 Closing Remarks & Actionable Suggestions

 

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About the Authors

Denise A. Robinson (she/her) is a diversity, equity & inclusion (DEI) and well-being consultant to organizations in the legal profession and other industries. After graduating from the University of Chicago Law School, Denise practiced labor & employment law in her home state of Ohio. She later moved to the Washington, DC area to transition her career to promoting DEI in the workplace, including in past roles as Director of Diversity & Inclusion for O’Melveny & Myers LLP, and Diversity Officer for the International Monetary Fund. Her workplace well-being work is grounded in over a decade of experience teaching yoga and other contemplative practices, as well as her experience as a distance runner and certified running coach. Denise serves her community of Montgomery County, Maryland in various ways, including as a member of the Board of Governors for Grace Episcopal Day School, and a volunteer with the Consult Team for the Partnership for Extraordinary Minds, a nonprofit supporting autistic students. Denise is a certified yoga nidra guide and has led presentations about the intersection of sleep and social justice advocacy based on the “Law and Well-Being” blog series she wrote for GWAC, the Black women’s bar association in Washington, DC.

Bernardo Ferdman, Ph.D. (he/him) is an internationally recognized expert and thought leader on inclusion, diversity, and inclusive leadership. With over 39 years of experience in the U.S. and around the world as an organization and leadership development consultant and executive coach, he is passionate about creating a more inclusive world where everyone can be fully themselves and accomplish goals effectively, productively, and authentically. Bernardo works with leaders and employees to develop and implement effective ways of using everyone’s talents and contributions and to build inclusive behavior and multicultural competencies. His firm, Ferdman Consulting, specializes in supporting leaders and organizations in bringing inclusion to life in leadership practices and in organizational cultures and systems. Ferdman is also Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the California School of Professional Psychology, where he taught for almost 25 years. He has written extensively on inclusion and inclusive leadership; his most recent book is Inclusive Leadership: Transforming Diverse Lives, Workplaces, and Societies. He is an Expert Panelist for the Global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Benchmarks, was the 2020 H. Smith Richardson Jr. Visiting Fellow at the Center for Creative Leadership, and served as president of the Diversity Collegium and in various other leadership roles. He created Inclusion@Work®, a digital coaching platform for learning about inclusion, and the Workplace Inclusion Inventory™ a proprietary inclusion assessment. Bernardo immigrated to the U.S. from Argentina as a child; he earned his Ph.D. in Psychology at Yale University and A.B. degree at Princeton University. He is a Fellow of various professional organizations, including the American Psychological Association and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and received the Society of Consulting Psychology’s 2019 Award for Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion Consulting.