A Q&A with Trisha Dudlo, managing partner at Dentons Bingham Greenebaum in Evansville
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In 2022, Trisha Dudlo was named managing partner at the Evansville office of Dentons Bingham Greenebaum, the world’s largest global law firm. She succeeded Reed S. Schmitt who had managed the office since 2019.
In addition to practicing family law, Dudlo serves as director of the Southwestern Indiana Pro Bono Protective Order Project and works with Albion Fellows Bacon Center, a not-for-profit that helps domestic- and sexual-abuse survivors get legal advice.
Dudlo was recently honored as one of the state’s most influential and impactful leaders in IBJ Media’s Indiana 250. She spoke with Inside INdiana Business about her first year as managing partner and the type of environment she’s creating at the firm.
You went to high school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, attended college in Macon, Georgia, and completed law school at Indiana University. What brought you to Evansville?
I graduated at the time when the recession was really going. Luckily, my parents lived in Evansville, so I applied for jobs in both Indianapolis and Evansville. I got hired for a clerkship in my second year of law school with a really good firm in Evansville called Bamberger, Foreman, Oswald and Hahn. They’ve since closed or transitioned into Stoll Keenon. But after that, clerkship, they offered me a job.
At that time, with the market the way it was and how things were in Indy, I just decided to move to Evansville. My dad’s company relocated there when I was in college.
You’ve been the managing partner at Dentons’ Evansville office for more than a year. How’s the experience been so far?
It’s been great. I’m really enjoying it. Definitely learning a lot. Any leadership position comes with learning moments, and there have been a lot for me, but I’m really enjoying it.
What are your challenges as Dentons’ managing partner?
We are a big firm in a very small town, and for us to have a great, productive and healthy office, we’ve been very focused on our own mental health and making sure that our office is cohesive and unified. We also have a lot of challenges in a small community of maintaining our local practices while also trying to serve our national and international clients.
What are your successes as Dentons’ managing partner?
We have added attorneys to our office over the last year, which has been great. Joseph Harrison has joined us. Lee Veazey started right before I became managing partner, and he’s been a great asset. We came back from the pandemic and were able to be stronger than ever.
We have spent a significant amount of time making sure that everybody in our office is happy to be there, feeling healthy, happy to be returning to the office situation. We spent a lot of time on mental health and making ourselves as a team stronger and more cohesive. That’s definitely a win, and we’re very focused on making sure our office locally can serve the entire community.
Why is creating a team-focused workplace at Dentons important?
We work better together when each of us is working as a team. It’s been really important to me. I have children. A lot of us in the office have children, young children. It used to not be part of an attorney culture, and I’m hoping to make it a very big part of our culture where we work in teams so each one of us can still have good harmony between our working life and our home life.
Having a career is so important to all of us, especially with being an attorney. It defines who we are, and we are so enmeshed with that. It’s still very important to me that I’m able to take a sick day and have somebody else who’s able to work the case and meet the client’s needs, even if I have to be out. That’s important for all of us to have—harmony, work and life.
What does the future hold for Dentons’ Evansville office?
We’ll continue to grow. I’m really excited to see how we grow and change over the next few years. We have such a great associate, Derrick McDowell, and he has been moving up the ladder over the last few years, and he’s really transitioning into a great litigator and attorney. I’m happy to see his progress.
I’m really excited to see how we grow over the next few years, hopefully increasing the amount of women and diversity that we have. We have been one of the few offices to not have a lot of transition out after the pandemic, and we’re really proud of that. We have a very healthy work environment, and we’re trying to establish a new culture for attorneys.
You’ve said as a woman, a person of color and the first lawyer in your family, you’ve struggled to find acceptance and belonging. Tell me more about that.
My family never had any lawyers in it. I was the first lawyer. I was expected to choose one of three careers: a pharmacist, a doctor or an engineer. And I didn’t fit that mold. It was an uphill battle, convincing my parents, who come from a very conservative culture, and then throughout my whole career, from school onward.
I have frequently been the only person of color, the only Indian person or sometimes even the only woman to be part of organizations. When I first sat on the diversity committee for the Evansville Bar Association, I was the only person of color. I’m happy to be able to come into programs that were already established to increase diversity and inclusion throughout this area.
Why does your work primarily focus on family disputes?
I find that I am the best at that. I get along very well with people, and I hope and I feel like I understand people. I have spent a lot of time learning and understanding mental health issues, especially post-pandemic, that are occurring. I have been able to find a way to represent my clients and take into consideration the challenges they are facing, not just going through a tough time, but also with mental health and having children and life being generally stressful.
I navigate those issues really well, and I have focused my practice a lot on victims and survivors of intimate partner violence. I’m happy to say I’ve been able to help a lot of people come out of those relationships and then engage, hopefully, in a better life, moving forward with those kinds of choices.
What does it mean to you to be named one of IBJ Media’s influential business leaders?
I’m so incredibly honored, I mean, just very humbled by it. I’m really excited about the opportunities it will bring, being part of such an incredible list of people from Indiana. I hope to take advantage of that.