Missouri native Erin Webber tapped to lead Littler

A Missouri native and former managing shareholder of Littler’s Kansas City office has been appointed to lead the firm as its next managing director and president.

On Aug. 13, the firm’s board of directors selected Erin Webber to succeed Co-Managing Directors and Co-Presidents Tom Bender and Jeremy Roth. When her eight-year term begins in January, she will join the ranks of the relatively small group of women who lead large U.S. law firms.

Webber is a native of Memphis in northeast Missouri, a small town she said “you only know if you’re a trucker or a hunter.”

She is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Law. She’s not the only lawyer in her family: her father is Senior U.S. District Judge E. Richard Webber of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri.

After law school, Webber practiced with Watkins, Boulware, Lucas, Miner, Murphy & Taylor in St. Joseph for four years. She later worked at Shugart Thomson & Kilroy, now Polsinelli, for a year before joining Littler. She’s been based in Denver since 2000.

When Webber joined Littler in 2001, the firm did not have any offices in Missouri. In 2006, she opened the firm’s Kansas City office and remained its office managing shareholder until 2010. She also previously served as office managing shareholder in the firm’s Denver office.

Webber has held a number of other leadership roles within the firm. She’s spent 10 years on the firm’s board of directors and its associates committee, and she also has chaired the firm’s shareholder candidate committee since 2013.

When discussing her priorities, Webber said she anticipates that the COVID-19 pandemic will have a large impact on her work from the start.

“Everything that we plan to do has this specter of the pandemic over it,” she said. “There’s no getting away from that. There’s no looking at what you want to do without considering it.”

Webber praised her predecessors for their work in executing the firm’s strategic plans. Notably, they’ve worked to further the firm’s focus on creating a diverse and inclusive workplace, expand the firm’s global footprint and establish the firm’s Global Services Center in Kansas City in 2015, she said.

Webber said a priority under her leadership will be the firm’s continued investment in technology and innovation.

She pointed to the firm’s Littler onDemand platform, which enables companies to submit labor and employment questions to the firm’s attorneys. In establishing the platform, Littler also created a new category of attorneys who worked from home prior to the pandemic. In 2019, Missouri Lawyers Media awarded Littler a Top Legal Innovation Award for the platform.

“We were able to quickly form a COVID task force that was really responsible for answering thousands of client questions that were specific to COVID,” she said. “Because we had that platform set up, we were able to monitor what those questions were and we weren’t reinventing the wheel.”

Webber is not the first woman to lead the firm. When she joined it in 2001, Wendy Tice-Wallner was its managing director and president.

“As a young female lawyer, it certainly wasn’t lost on me that the leader of the firm was a woman,” she said.

When she formally steps into the role, she also won’t be the only woman in a top leadership position at Littler. She noted that Kate Mrkonich Wilson holds the firm’s second-highest leadership position as board chairwoman.

“It’s kind of unique in the industry but not for us,” she said, of Littler. “We’ve always made that a priority, and we’ve always focused on it.”

Webber said she’s been lucky in her career to have encountered numerous opportunities to grow and advance.

“I think that’s maybe the exception,” she said. “I think that women just have to be encouraged to continue asking for opportunities and taking and excelling at the opportunities when they’re given them.”

She said she believes the firm is moving in the right direction in terms of continuing to advance women and diverse lawyers in the legal profession, and she said she stands to add to the efforts of early trailblazers.

“I recognize the responsibility is on me, as I think other female leaders do, to create those opportunities for all diverse candidates coming behind us,” she said. “We’re very intentional here at this law firm, and always have been, in our diversity and inclusion efforts.”