Johanna Oliver Rousseaux

From summers in Mexico City as a child to summers in Paris in high school – study abroad was a given for Johanna Oliver Rousseaux. During her junior year in Paris, Johanna sought out opportunities to speak French with locals and fit in. Determined to stay as long as she could, she secured a summer internship after the program finished and was offered a job with the company after graduation. But within months of her moving back to Paris, the company went under and Johanna found a job that would keep her in Paris but didn’t set her up for the international career she sought. Ultimately, Johanna returned to the States to pursue a law degree, convinced she would immediately go back to Paris afterwards. Instead, determined to regain her Spanish fluency, Johanna headed to Costa Rica after law school for an internship at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and then began working at the Arias Foundation. Intending to stay for only a year or two, Johanna’s plans changed drastically when her boss died suddenly and she was asked to take over the project he had led. She remained in Costa Rica for five more years, working closely with Oscar Arias, the former president of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Returning to the United States after six years abroad with no professional network proved difficult, but in the end, it was her language skills and cultural understanding – critical for an international case – that landed her full-time work at the law firm of Jones Day. Today, Johanna serves as Of Counsel in the Global Disputes practice and works on several of the firm’s pro-bono projects, which bridges her unique skill set and background. In our interview, Johanna shares the story behind her journey from nonprofit to litigation and explains how her experiences abroad shaped her path all along the way.

IES Abroad: Why did you decide to study abroad and what drew you to Paris?

Johanna Oliver Rousseaux: There was never any doubt that I would study abroad – and I never even considered a semester – it was always going to be a full year.  I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t drawn to life abroad and all things international. My mom will tell you it is her fault and my dad’s that I have this “international bug” because I was born in Germany while my dad was stationed there in the military – even though we came back home to the States before I was three months old. Then as a kid, we spent our summers at my grandfather’s house in Cuernavaca, outside Mexico City, where he had worked for many years. I was tutored in Spanish during the year so that I would be able to play with kids in the neighborhood and otherwise get by when we were there. Sadly, we stopped going to Mexico probably around the time I was eight or nine, and I was left with my fluent “little girl” Spanish. Then, a few years later, France came into the picture. My parents had divorced, and my dad had met my stepmother, who I consider the quintessential European – she was Austrian, had studied at Cambridge, but lived in Paris, and spoke five languages. I started spending a few weeks to a month each summer at her house in the suburbs of Paris, where I also got to take French at the Alliance Française. Those summers getting to know the city and the surrounding suburbs also opened up an insider’s Paris to me that normal tourists don’t experience. So I had a real connection with the city. That’s a really roundabout way of telling you that I never picked Paris, I think Paris picked me.

IES Abroad: What are a few of your most influential memories from your time studying abroad?

JR: I was there from 1987-88, and back then, without internet or cable and satellite TV, France and the United States were two very different places. As Americans, we really stood out, which I hated. I wanted to be a chameleon and blend. I wanted everyone to think I was French, but that was almost impossible to do, not only because of the language but because of how we dressed and what my French friends teased was my “tête américaine” – literally my American face. I remember that a group of us all went out and bought these suede jackets that everyone was wearing – we each got a different color, but it was the same jacket. I’m not sure that helped us fit in any better though! Now when I go to Paris and see everyone dressed in jeans and tennis shoes and baseball caps – like I would see on any street in any city in the States – I realize how much the cultures have melded. But back then, it was really a question of us trying to fit in and how different the cultures were. The French students our age seemed like such grown-ups compared to us. As part of the IES program, I went to “Sciences Po” because I was a political science major, and there was this guy that used to walk around with these dress shoes, pressed jeans, a buttoned-down shirt, a cardigan on his shoulder, and a pipe in his mouth! (I guess, the pipe would explain the ashtrays built into the desks…) There was just this whole different level of formality that we really weren’t accustomed to as U.S. college kids. I also remember sort of bungling the formalities when I worked that summer. The company was basically the equivalent of a tech start-up, so most people working there were fresh out of school and just a few years older than me. Every morning they would gather in the lounge area for a coffee and when I would walk in I would do this very American generalized wave and “bonjour.” And every morning, the VP of the company would see me do that and yell (kindly) “No!” The he would make me walk around and properly greet every single person, either with a kiss on the cheek or a handshake. I kept on thinking one day the formality would fade and I would get away with my wave, but it never did. That is very French, and it’s still that way today – proper greetings are an essential part of how life works there, and I think it’s pretty neat, even if it seemed so excessive to me at first.

IES Abroad: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced studying abroad, and how did you overcome them and grow as a result?

JR: When I studied abroad, my stepmother was in the States, but she still had her apartment in the Paris suburbs, so I lived there with a couple of girlfriends. It was really fun. We had this huge flat and a lot of freedom, and other students studying around Europe would come and stay with us – we even did a big Thanksgiving weekend gathering. There were people in the building who I had known for years who kind of looked out for us, but we didn’t go home every night to a French family that helped us work on our French during a formal family dinner or that taught us things about the city or life in France. We had to fend for ourselves in terms of opportunities to learn about day-to-day life. Fortunately, I had learned a lot with my stepmother in my previous visits, so we actually lived like French people in a lot of ways. For example, we would go to the fresh market held twice a week and buy food, which became this really great thing because we built relationships with the vendors and could observe so much there. We also had to work hard to find opportunities to speak French. It’s not easy to speak French among yourselves, so we had to engage with the people that we came across during the day and use our French in the street, and Parisians are very tough on you and immediately switch to English if your pronunciation is bad, so we had to be perfect. I think living on our own meant that it was more of a challenge for us to make sure we were getting the most out of the experience, but in a really good way.

IES Abroad: You returned to Paris after finishing undergrad and before going on to law school. In what ways did study abroad influence your career path?

JR: That’s all an IES Abroad connection. I had wanted to stay in Paris so badly that I talked to the director of the program at that time, and he got me a summer internship. He was super excited because the guy that he had gotten me an internship with had a champagne vineyard and he assumed I would be working on something related to that. What could be more French?! But it ended up that the guy also had a tech company out in the suburbs where he wanted me to work. I spent the summer there and made amazing friends that I am still in touch with today. I left (kicking and screaming) in August to go back to Sewanee for my senior year, but I knew I wouldn’t be in the States for long. The company had offered me a full-time job after graduation, and while I was back at Sewanee, they went about getting my working papers. As soon as I graduated, I was back on a plane to Paris with all of my worldly belongings because in my mind I was never coming home. But within a matter of months, the company went bankrupt and I was scurrying to find another job. As luck would have it, a girl who had gone to Sewanee with me and had stayed in France after our junior year told me that she was leaving her job at a French modeling agency and really wanted to put someone she knew and liked in her job, because she loved her boss. So I took the job. I was in charge of billing for photo shoots, fashion shows, and other work and then paying the models. These gorgeous girls and guys would come in, and I would count out huge cash advances for them because they were in Paris for the weekend and needed to go shopping for a party or wanted some mad money. Talk about being in the middle of an amazing world if you are in Paris! While it was fascinating on many levels, that job was never a career choice though. It was survival choice – it was the job I took so I could stay in Paris.

When I started looking for something more in line with what I wanted to do – which then was mostly some vague notion of international business – the problem I had was that the French people interviewing me would ask, “But what are you trained to do?” Our education systems are so different, and at least back then, French students were trained to do something specific. So when I would say, “I have a liberal arts degree, a bachelor of arts,” they would scoff and tell me that was the equivalent of a baccalaureate [high school] plus two years. I felt like I was never going to get credit for my education or my experience up to that point. Law school had always been on my mind, but I hadn’t found a really compelling reason to go. After my disappointing job search, I figured that if they wanted to know what I could do, why not go to law school and then come back with an answer. So, I studied for and took the LSAT and did all my law school applications while still living in Paris and eventually decided to go home to Austin and law school at The University of Texas. It never even occurred to me that, when I finished, I wouldn’t turn around and go straight back to Paris.

IES Abroad: After receiving your J.D. from The University of Texas, you served as a legal intern at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in San Jose, Costa Rica. What led you to Costa Rica, and were there skills learned in Paris that you were able to draw upon?

JR: When I left Paris, I was completely fluent in French and even spoke with a Parisian accent, which still today is one of the accomplishments I’m most proud of. Back then, I still could understand Spanish, but I couldn’t really speak it, and I remember my dad would always say, “When are you going to get your Spanish back?” Over the course of law school, I had become much more focused on working in international law, so the whole “go back to Paris and show them what I can do” thing kind of fell by the wayside. During my last year in law school, I was the Editor-in-Chief of the Texas International Law Journal, and we organized a symposium with a number of panelists, several of whom, coincidentally, had contacts in Costa Rica. At the same time, one of my classmates had studied abroad in Costa Rica and offered to put me in touch with the school he had attended. It all just kind of came together that Costa Rica seemed like a good option. One of the contacts worked for the Organization of American States and, when I followed up with him, he told me he had arranged an internship for me at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. So, I signed up for this school my friend told me about, got on a plane, and flew down to Costa Rica thinking I would go for a year or two to nail down my Spanish. I knew I had to live and work there and be part of the culture – just like I had in France – to get my Spanish to the level I wanted.

When I got to San José, I was the only student in my school, and I was assigned to live not with a local family but with my teacher, which basically meant that I was constantly working on my Spanish with her. After a couple of weeks, with my Spanish flowing pretty well, I went to the Court of Human Rights to check in and discuss the details of my internship, but they had never heard of me. Fortunately, I was received by a really nice American lawyer who was working in the legal department, and he said, “I don’t know what or who you are talking about. I’m not aware of any arrangements, and we already have an intern. But actually, that person no-showed. So, you’re more than welcome to the job if you want it.” That got me working, which helped my Spanish improve exponentially. I also followed up with the other contact I had in Costa Rica who was at the Arias Foundation. He had a project to create an international law institute that would focus on a South-South dialogue among Latin America, Africa and Asia in an attempt to counter the conversation that, at the time, was dominated by the West. That was right up my alley, so once my internship at the Court of Human Rights was over, I agreed to work on another project he was running while he figured out how to launch his international law institute. That is how I ended up at the Arias Foundation.

IES Abroad: You went on to become a program officer at the Arias Foundation, founded by Oscar Arias, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and former president of Costa Rica. What led you to this work, instead of immediately becoming a practicing attorney?

JR: After about six or eight months of working on this project at the Arias Foundation, I started to get restless because there was no forward motion whatsoever on the international law project. The project I was on was primarily academic – a comparative study of the causes of conflict in the third world. Although it was interesting and I was learning a lot about the recently ended civil wars and other unrest in Central America, it really wasn’t a legal project at all. I had planned to stay as long as two years, but I also was aware that I didn’t have much of a window in terms of getting back on track with my legal career, so I started to think about returning to the States. Right about the time I was considering some job offers from law firms back in Texas, the man that had hired me was killed while traveling within Nigeria for a work conference. It was horrible – the plane had crashed in a lagoon, there were even rumors that it was shot down, and everyone on board was killed, including several people from our project, government ministers, and oil industry executives. When that happened, one of the leaders of the Foundation pulled me aside and said, “We don’t know what this comparative study is that you are working on, but it’s with really important international donors, and we need you to see it through.”

I ended up in Costa Rica for another five years, which was never my plan. But that gave me the chance to work closely with Oscar Arias, who is amazing and who I am privileged to count on as a mentor. At the time, he had just finished his first term as President of Costa Rica, during which time he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. He created the Arias Foundation with the Nobel prize money, and it was really active in the region working on peace and development issues and other public policy initiatives as part of the wind down of the various conflicts in the region. It was fascinating work at a critical time in that part of the world. And once I began running the comparative study, I weaved in as much international law as I could, focusing on the role of the UN and the OAS and the many international efforts to end the wars. All in all, it was an amazing experience. I really went off track in terms of how people normally push through a legal career, but I wouldn’t give up that experience for anything.

IES Abroad: How did you make your way back into “mainstream” legal work and eventually make your way to Jones Day?

JR: Through a very humbling, character-building experience! When I moved back to the States, I didn’t have a lot of contacts, and I was struggling anyway with whether I wanted to try to be a “real” lawyer or stay in the non-profit world. I spent two very tough years in Miami and then moved to DC and started working as a contract attorney while I got my bearings and figured out what I wanted to do.  As luck or fate would have it, Jones Day was my third contractor assignment. My first two assignments had been pretty demoralizing – crazy hours stuck in huge workrooms in basements with dozens of other people who for the most part weren’t much better than drones. But walking into Jones Day felt different from the get-go. First of all, they specifically needed Spanish speakers, so I knew I had a real chance to shine. And we were working directly with the legal team, at the firm, not at some satellite or third-party site. For whatever reason, back then it was hard to find litigators with language skills. I think most lawyers with language skills go into transactional work because they think you need the foreign language when you are making the deal.  But they forget that you need it just as badly or even more so when that deal falls apart! 

It ended up I was brought on for one of the biggest international cases of recent times. Within about eight or nine months, Jones Day hired me as a full-time associate. That was 12 years ago. So, like with the modeling agency in Paris, and the Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica, I was in the right place at the right time and just landed on my feet. I worked on pretty much nothing but that one case for over ten years. But I was able to do it – and I think this is what is important – not just because I was able to speak the language, which is critical, but also because I understood the culture. I’ll never forget that in one of my annual reviews, one of the more senior lawyers called me the “case team ambassador,” because I was the one who really was able to bridge that gap between us and the people in Latin America who we were working with, whether they were our co-counsel, witnesses, experts, or just people that we had to interact with to get what we needed for what we were doing. A few years ago, when Jones Day opened an office in Miami, I was asked to move down and help develop the firm’s practice in Latin America, so that knowledge of language and culture is still one of my most valuable skill sets.

IES Abroad: You also lead a pro bono project within Jones Day's Rule of Law initiative that researches civil and human rights issues and prepares training materials for lawyers in Latin America. What inspires you to do this work?

JR: I have always had this tension: I loved the case I was working on and the work that I was doing, but I also am really from a public interest background because of the years I spent at the Arias Foundation. The opportunity came up to do these human rights manuals, and it just so happened that they had to do with a country that I was very familiar with and had visited on numerous occasions, always staying among the locals and seeing their day-to-day struggles first hand, and not ever really doing the tourist thing. I was selected to lead that project because I had this unique connection to the country but also because the project really took advantage of all of my experience at a non-profit where you are focused on facilitating things and creating training materials and spreading your knowledge base to other organizations. It was just a natural fit. Now we also are doing a big project that involves representing the kids that are coming from Central America and crossing the border into the United States without their parents – “unaccompanied minors” as they are called. Again, that is something that I have been able to get very involved in helping design and oversee because people recognize that I have the background that I do. I’m really lucky that my firm’s commitment to pro-bono matches my own philosophy and drive to do that kind of work and that I’ve repeatedly been given a leadership role that takes advantage of my other, non-lawyer skill set.

IES Abroad: What advice would you give to students about studying or interning abroad today?

JR: If you are passionate about an international career or working and living abroad in the future, you have to do a deeper dive during your study abroad experience. Even if you are just there for a semester, you have to do more than just the program. You somehow have to engage in a way that really invests you in the community and that really teaches you the culture. Because speaking the language, or thinking you speak the language, is only a very small part of it. My being able to navigate cultural differences was as important, if not more important, than my language abilities. Nowadays, most foreign professionals are fluent in English. They either studied in the United States or Canada or Europe and they don’t need you to speak their language. But boy does it help! Because generally they would rather speak their own language, and it endears you with them in a lot of ways once you can – you will bond differently with them than the folks who are connecting only in English. But take that further step and know their culture, and you will be really far ahead of the curve, because no matter what language people are speaking, they don’t lose their culture.

Studying abroad will change your life forever, no matter what. It already is such an amazing thing that makes you dig just a little bit deeper inside and shifts your comfort zone. That’s a huge checkmark on the list, but if you want to stand out, you have to do more. It is so hard for Americans to compete, especially in the international organizations because there are so few open positions – most of those organizations have quotas and simply don’t hire that many Americans. But even in the private sector, you really have to get out there and have something that sets you apart. And you have to be willing to do things that are a little bit different, a little bit scary, especially at the very beginning when you are young and resilient. Take those risks early on while you can because they will pay off in the end.