Apr 11, 2008  |  By: KATHERINE VOLIN  | COMMENTS     

It was a long road for lawyer Darrin Glymph to reach the level of professional success he now enjoys. Glymph currently works for Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe in the field of public finance law, but he wasn’t even thinking about a legal career when he first entered the workforce.

After growing up in Brooklyn and attending a high school with 6,000 students, he landed at Williams College in Massachusetts to study history.

“It definitely took a good year or two to get acclimated,” he says. Williams College, a small liberal arts school, had only 1,500 students when Glymph attended. “It just exposed me to a different world than, say, Brooklyn.”

At Williams, Glymph studied history, with hopes of one day becoming a history professor, but he never entered the field as he toiled through the post-college corporate landscape.

Starting with a plan to “get his life together” health-wise, Glymph took on a position as a secretary with the College Board the first year after graduating college in 1985.

“I went on this massive diet and health kick and lost like 90 pounds,” he says, adding that he went to the gym twice a day for aerobics classes.

After that, a college contact helped him land a position at Chubb Group of Insurance Companies on Wall Street. There he worked as a senior marine underwriter, assessing the risk for objects transported by land or sea and for construction projections for buildings. In that capacity, he worked on projects including Lincoln Center, when it required an addition, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when it moved paintings across the country.

“I used to insure the Fabergé eggs. It was fabulous, so gay,” Glymph says.

After Glymph and his colleagues assessed the risk for the insured, the contract would be kicked up to the legal team, whose significance to the corporation was difficult to ignore.

“One of the things about insurance is that you deal a lot with contracts and … with the legal department, I used to think, ‘God, I could do this. I’m smarter than they are,’” he says with a laugh. “Even though they had very limited knowledge of the risk, if they said something, it had so much import, and it was like, OK, the hierarchy goes here. I’m going to go to law school.”

GLYMPH HEADED TO New Orleans because Tulane University had one of the top programs in admiralty law, which Glymph thought he wanted to practice, and also offered good internship programs for minority interns.

His interest changed from admiralty law, which he quickly found boring, to employment discrimination to public finance. Public finance appealed to Glymph because it provides financing for projects that ultimately impact local communities.

After graduation, Glymph worked in public finance at McGuire Woods in Richmond, Va., which he left in 1998 after five years.

“I had realized there was kind of a glass ceiling in Richmond for a black gay lawyer. It’s a wonderful city but it’s a very conservative city,” he says. “I had a feeling for the next five years that unless I got married it was going to be limited opportunities for me. It’s funny. It’s less employment [discrimination], and it’s more social. You can have a great job and your employer can say, ‘We welcome all types’. But if you go out into the community and you’re not accepted, you’re not going to succeed professionally.”

Being gay has never been something Glymph has tried to hide.

“I’ve always been involved in the causes I thought were important. I can’t say that I’ve ever had flags on my desk or at my door,” Glymph, 43, says. “When I was in Richmond, even though it was conservative, I was involved in the Richmond AIDS Ministry and involved in other, HIV-related activities. The key thing for me is always being a man of integrity. I’ve never wanted to lie about who and what I am.”

Glymph’s community involvement has continued in D.C., where he has served on the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club and on the board of a non-profit for charter schools. He is also chair of the board of the Small & Local Business Opportunity Commission for the city. Glymph worked at Hunton & Williams for eight years prior to 2006, when he joined Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, which Glymph says is the best public finance firm in ...