Shearman & Sterling’s Gina Love, a New York-based counsel in the Real Estate Group, was featured as a "Voice of Experience" on The Glass Hammer, an online community designed for women executives in financial services, law and business. Love was featured as part of The Glass Hammer’s interviews with notable African-American women for Black History Month.

In the article, Love describes how her modest effort to foster diversity in the real estate industry took on a life of its own. Struck by the lack of minorities at an International Council of Shopping Centers annual convention, she helped organize a small networking event for people with diverse backgrounds. Today, between 600-850 people attend. Although Love organized the event for 11 years, the ICSC eventually took it over after she realized it needed to be self-sustaining. “It was really wonderful to see that my decade of work to increase diversity in the real estate industry was honored and appreciated by the leadership of ICSC,” she says, “and I am delighted the legacy will go on.”

Love, who has extensive experience in all areas of commercial real estate law, focuses on commercial space leasing, ground leasing, acquisitions and dispositions and joint venture formation. The ability to show the creative results of her work makes this area of the law particularly appealing to her. “Real estate attorneys in New York can walk around this city and see visible, tangible signs of what he or she has accomplished,” she notes. “We aren’t the architects or the developers, but as lawyers, we do a lot of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ work to make it happen.”

Read Gina Love's "Voice of Experience" profile on The Glass Hammer.