60 seconds with grace remington: “creativity connects law, leadership, and global mobility.”

hot take: people – not computers – still say the coolest stuff. this series is dedicated to the soundbites, aha! moments & stories that are undeniably human.   

In 1998, Grace Remington signed my Upper St. Clair High School yearbook: “You are a good person.”

I’m not sure how many 9th grade girls say that about or write that for each other. If anything, it’s just proof that Grace has always been a wise, old soul who sees the world – and people – on a deeper, more interesting level. 

Almost 30 years later, I’m proud to say the same thing back to her: “Grace, you are a good person.” Over lunch recently, we dug into life and work and family and all the things, and I can say she’s still a deeper level of wise and insightful; empowered and kind; the best kind of old soul who I’m happy to call a friend after all these years and seasons of life and growing up.

I’m happy to share her Q&A with you this Women’s History Month.  

– meg 

toth shop (ts): You’ve spent 15+ years working at the intersection of law, leadership, and global mobility. First, how do you define each of those in one sentence each? And from your experience, what’s the middle path that connects all three?

Grace Remington (GR): For me, my work has been in immigration law, but I can’t think of any area of the law, from tax to contracts, from constitutional law to IP, that doesn’t involve detailed reading, precision writing, compliance analysis, strategy, and risk management.

I just hosted a roundtable discussion on what leadership means to people, which looks different across sectors and across cultures, but some overarching themes emerged that good leadership involves empathy, cultivating trust, holding vision, discernment, and execution.

Global mobility encompasses so much, including employee compensation and taxes, business needs and strategy, long- and short-term planning, readiness and resilience, immigration, cultural education, and family support.

For me, the middle path that connects all three – and the reason why I love working in these fields – is creativity.  I adore making creative legal arguments, adapting and developing one’s leadership based on context, and finding a truly exceptional win-win global mobility package.

ts: As a corporate immigration attorney, you have experienced so many different sides and angles of immigration – what’s a conversation about immigration that the world is missing or doesn’t quite understand? 

GR: I think it is pretty clear there is not a lot of balanced messaging out there. I wish more people understood and talked about the historical context of immigration trends. For instance, do people understand the U.S.’s historic foreign policy role that caused economic crises and violence in countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua? 

I don’t see the U.S. acknowledging how it had a hand in creating the reasons for southern border migration. It isn’t about blame but about acknowledging and understanding the context. This would significantly reduce bias and misconceptions concerning many immigrant groups – and not just in the U.S. There’s also the weaponization of immigration for political means, beyond just winning elections. More broadly, if a foreign country can cause a migrant crisis, it may gain leverage or bargaining power over another country and coerce its foreign policy decisions.

ts: It’s Women’s History Month. We’ve known each other since 9th grade. Thinking back to us in 1997, what would you want those 9th grade versions of us to know about what it’s actually like to be a woman three decades later?

GR: There is SO MUCH I would want to impart to her that she would fully not be able to understand, but I definitely would want her to be resourced. I would validate that feeling she had when reading the bible and going to church, tell her she was not imagining things, and that the word she was looking for was “patriarchy.” 

If it had been available then, I'd want her to listen to America Ferrara's character’s speech in the Barbie movie, to read Glennon Doyle’s Untamed and Susan Cain’s Quiet, and to listen to Taylor Swift’s “The Man.” 

I’d also want her to see that all of those resources are from white people and that she also needs to look past her own experience to that of others who don’t look like her, and above all, for the love of all things holy, bring other women up instead of tearing each other down. There are powers that are served by keeping us divided and they force us to compete, but instead, if we worked together, we would solve so many of the world's problems with so much less conflict and war.

ts: You and your family have lived all over the world. What’s a hidden gem place on Earth you wish everyone knew about?

GR: Ayeyayeyaye. I can’t pick just one so I’ll be very specific instead and point to places where I have had perhaps transcendental moments or rushes of intense gratitude and wonder – 

• Stay in an overwater bungalow on Veligandu Island in the Maldives

• Eat at a farm-to-table lunch at Babylonstoren in Cape Town

• Stand in a bamboo forest and listen to the wind in Kyoto

• Watch the mist through the jungle trees in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park in Uganda

• Eat the fresh peaches from the cart outside the Le Meridien hotel in Malta

I wish others to have similar moments in hidden gems of their own.

ts: Every person we interview answers this same question last – Mile 18 is generally considered to be one of the hardest miles in a marathon. You’re hitting a wall. You’re forced to dig deep. What’s mile 18 in your line of work, or at a point in your career, what do you tell yourself when you find yourself in the middle of a mile 18?

GR: In actual running and more importantly, in life, you have to draw close to wherever you find your support – friends, family, or peers who have been through it before. I feel like I have hit the wall several times in my career because I move around a lot which requires constantly reinventing myself to remain relevant, to build deeper layers of resilience, and to redefine and embrace new identities. What this looks like for me in practice is visualizing what I want over and over before I hit the wall so that the muscle memory is built in for when I need it. 

I have a mantra that I repeat to myself to keep me going, and it is most powerfully said while doing a small repetitive movement because it helps with muscle memory and brain rewiring. I check my ego and my limiting beliefs. And I read Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” (for which I would change the last line) and Marianne Williamson’s "Our Deepest Fear" passage.  Rinse. Repeat.