Tag Archives: women in law

Monday Clicks: Law Firm Diversity

Posted on February 18, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Despite a pervasive and stubborn bias against anyone who isn’t a white male,  law firms are slowly becoming more diverse and inclusive. In fact, if you’re in the market for outside counsel, there are several women- and minority-owned firms from which to choose. Also: Mississippi just proved that it’s never too late to get something right—even if it takes 147 years.

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Women in Law: It’s Not About Flextime Anymore

Posted on January 22, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Women have been struggling to succeed in law firms for years. This year is no different. Recently released data indicates that while there was a slight increase in women making partner—32 percent in 2012 versus 35 percent so far this year—the number of women on chief governing committees remains, well, dismal.

The answer? It’s no longer about work-life balance and flextime. According to the Daily Business Review, the conversation has “shifted to money—equal pay, equity partnerships and training to develop that crucial book of business.” In fact, the article says that Mary Carroll, national chair of Akerman Senterfitt’s corporate practice group, advises women to eschew flextime arrangements.

“I think it’s a surefire way for a woman to derail her career,” Carroll is quoted as saying. “You are never going to get great assignments taking Fridays off. My clients need me 24-7.”

Yet women still aren’t being paid the same as men. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that women lawyers earn 86.6 percent that of their male counterparts. And the equality and diversity issues are global.

The U.K.-based Law Society polled more than 1,200 lawyers around the world on diversity issues. The report recommends “making flexible working a choice that does not impede on long-term career progression; a commitment to training to support gender diversity; and a push for law firms and external organizations to share best practices on diversity.” It also recommends moving away from quotas to targets.

A report from Reed Smith echoes that opinion, according to the Law Society Gazette. The report found that 74 percent of respondents think quotas are counterproductive since programs focused solely on women may send the message that women need “help” because they’re less competent.

Instead, firms should focus on talent development. “Diversity programs should focus on future leaders, set incentives for compliance, and communicate successes and failures,” the report says.

“Gender balancing is often seen as a women’s issue of fairness and equality,” Richard Swinburn, a managing partner at Reed Smith’s London office, was quoted as saying. “It is not. It is part and parcel of talent development and the activity of companies to deploy diverse teams of talented people.”

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On Target: A Path to Gender Diversity in Law Firm Partnerships

Posted on October 31, 2012 by | Leave a comment

There has been a spate of news recently regarding the perennially low number of female partners in large law firms.  Two recent surveys paint a rather gloomy picture, but the good news is that some firms are actively trying to promote the progression of women in the profession by setting targets for the number of women partners within their firms.

First, the bad news.  The latest National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL) Survey on the Retention and Promotion of Women in Law Firms reports that women lawyers constitute a mere 15% of the equity partner ranks, and slightly over 26% of non-equity partners in the typical AmLaw 200 firm.  If this sounds all too familiar, you’re right.  There has been essentially no change in the equity partner statistic for the seven-year lifespan of the survey; the non-equity partner statistic has barely budged – it grew one percentage point from last year.

Across the pond, the story is much the same. This year’s The Lawyer UK 200 revealed that female partners make up just 23.5% of all partners and only 9.4% of all equity partners across the UK’s 100 top-grossing firms.  Among the elite Magic Circle firms, female lawyers constituted 14.6% of total partners and about 13.5% of equity partners.

There is good news on the horizon, however.  According to a recent story in Legal Week, some firms are aiming to improve upon the number of female partners within their ranks by stating clear and measurable objectives.  They’ve made a commitment to close the gender gap by setting targeted goals for female partner numbers, typically in the range of 25 to 30% of the partnership.

For example, Hogan Lovells, which currently has 21% women partners, has set a ten-year target for the firm, with the aim of a 30% female partnership by 2022.  The firm plans to achieve this goal through a “global diversity plan, with numerical goals set to measure its progress.” Hogan is also dedicating itself to increasing the number of women in management roles from the current 28% to 30% by 2015.  This approach resembles the “leadership pipeline” we touched on last month in our post on  women in law firm management.

Legal Week reports that other firms have also begun to set targeted numbers.  These include King & Wood Mallesons, which has set a target of 30% women for its Australian partnership. Ashurst is also joining in, and wants to have women in 25% of its management positions by 2014.  Clifford Chance has stated that the firm’s “ambition” is that women should make up at least 30% of its partnership, and Eversheds, according to The Lawyer, aims to have a 25% female partnership by 2016.

In our post last month, we mentioned a study conducted by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), in which it was reported that 90% of executives interviewed saw a link between gender and the success of their company.  Law firms are also beginning to acknowledge this connection.  As Margot King, head of diversity at Eversheds, said in The Lawyer, “The market has stopped seeing this as a women’s issue and started seeing it as a business issue.”

The study also suggested that companies set quantifiable objectives for recruiting, retaining and promoting women into leadership positions, an approach that we are now seeing at a handful of large firms.  Daniel Winterfeld, diversity and inclusion partner at CMS Cameron McKenna, in The Lawyer, sums it up:

 “People realise that they’re wasting money if they have all these women at trainee level who then walk out the door to a competitor or to a client later on. It’s all about merit – how do you value and how do you judge merit? It’s subjective and we need to challenge that. Targets are critical because if you don’t know where you’re going you don’t know how to get there.”

Posted by Marianne Purzycki

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Women in Leadership Positions: Improving the Pipeline

Posted on September 13, 2012 by | 3 Comments

A few weeks ago we wrote about the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions in large law firms, reporting that not much progress has been made in the last five years, according to data from the National Association of Women Lawyers.  In contrast, the number of their counterparts at Fortune 500 companies – female CEOs and GCs – is on the rise.

While we noted that opportunities for advancement appear to be more abundant in the corporate world, a new study by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) suggests that companies can do better, especially with regards to their management of leadership pipelines. 

Globally, only 9 percent of CEO positions are held by women reports BCG, citing data from Grant Thornton International.[1]  Additional BCG analyses found that only 17 percent of their survey participants said their companies had targeted efforts for recruiting more women, yet 90 percent of executives interviewed saw a link between gender and the success of their company. The study suggests that companies take an analytical approach for advancing women into leadership roles, an approach that sets quantifiable objectives for recruiting, retention and promotion.  Current diversity efforts are often highly qualitative in nature and efforts that are more measurable are far less common. 

The study’s authors, Susanne Dyrchs and Rainier Strack (resident in BCG’s offices in Cologne and Düsseldorf, respectively), analyzed 44 multinational companies around the globe. Their findings indicate that the lack of women in leadership positions is not due to lack of awareness of the gender diversity gap.  Companies clearly understand the importance of diversity.  The study found that 90 percent of those interviewed saw a “connection” between diversity and the success of their companies, but very few of them were using quantitative measures such as reporting, monitoring, or setting targets for the number of women in particular roles.

Neither is it an issue of supply and demand.  Women are well-represented in the workplace.  Data cited by the report shows that male dominance in the workplace is declining[2] and that the number of working women has been increasing[3] by 2.2 percent a year.  Women account for 55 percent of college graduates worldwide.[4] 

Major Themes from the Study

BCG’s benchmarking revealed five themes emerging from the study which are noted for their impact on gender diversity in management:

  • A culture of office presence and “face time”
  • A lack of off- and on-ramping procedures for women who leave and then return to work
  • Male-oriented selection criteria or “self-cloning” (i.e., the tendency to hire and promote individuals with similar backgrounds and personalities to the decision-maker)
  • Lack of gender diversity awareness among management
  • Inadequate management of leadership pipelines

While all of these themes are important and are dealt with in the report, the BCG study cites an International Labour Office (ILO) report[5] that says that the management of leadership pipelines is the “one factor that companies can influence the most.”  The pipeline, BCG contends, is broken and it breaks down somewhere between middle management and the C-suite.  BCG’s analysis indicates that the pace and the number of women moving through the pipeline from junior and middle management jobs into executive positions can be greatly increased by employing a fact-based and systematic approach. 

What Can Be Done to Keep the Pipeline Flowing?

The first stage is an in-depth quantitative study of the company’s recruiting, promotion and retention history in order to establish key performance indicators.  The second stage involves qualitative analyses – surveys and interviews – designed to get at the root causes of key problems as well as best practices.  Companies then need to synthesize the data and findings to tailor a solution that fits their identified needs, which may be shaped by their business strategy or global reach.  Companies should also calibrate their findings against broader benchmarks to see how their efforts compare to those of their peers.  At this point, according to BCG, companies should move forward with specific, relevant action items in hand, to be executed within a tight timeframe – “quick wins.”

As an example, the report cites the experience of Telstra, the Australian telecommunications provider, in developing a segmented employment brand for female talent, including a website which featured recruiting messages highlighting the company’s pro-active approach to gender pay equity.  A few months after the website’s launch, Telstra experienced double-digit growth in the number of female job applicants, “resulting in sustained positive impact for female representation overall.”

BCG also recommends that companies develop and use gender diversity dashboards (“cockpits”) to give senior managers an array of at-a-glance metrics by which they can gauge their progress.  This and other types of diversity measures require company resources, and can be difficult to support without a fact-based business case.  Thus, it becomes important for the case to emphasize how well those measures fit with the company’s business strategy or addresses a particular “hot spot” identified through the quantitative and qualitative analyses.

Lessons for Law Firms

Law firms, too, can take away the same advice that is being imparted to companies in this report.  Both law firms and corporations need to recruit and retain top talent in order to put a new generation of women on track for leadership positions. Companies will need to act before they are forced to comply with gender-diversity regulations.  The pressure for mandated quotas is gathering momentum, especially in Europe, and according to BCG, the movement is also gaining traction in Asia and Latin America.  The increasingly globalized nature of corporate legal practices will be impacted by such mandates, even if the U.S. never adopts similar quotes.  Those organizations that have implemented a strategic, fact-based approach to gender diversity will have much to gain on the global playing field.  As Dyrcks and Strack conclude,

Organizations that can harness the untapped intellect and energies of their current and prospective female leaders will establish enormous advantage over their competitors . . .  They’ll be better able to woo new generations of female  leaders.  They will be welcomed into markets where women are the primary economic influencers.  And they will start to see even higher levels of engagement among all their staff, regardless of gender – thereby initiating a self-sustaining cycle of diversity activity from within.

Posted by Marianne Purzycki

[1] International Business Report (Grant Thornton International, 2012) Back

[2] OECD Back

[3] Global Talent Risk – Seven Responses, compiled by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with BCG Back

[4] Shattering the Glass Ceiling: An Analytical Approach to Advancing Women into Leadership Roles (BCG, August, 2012) Back

[5] Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling: Women in Management (ILO, 2010) Back

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More Women Rising Through the Corporate Ranks as Big Law Lags Behind

Posted on August 15, 2012 by | 1 Comment

While the number of women in leadership positions in large law firms has remained relatively static over the past several years, women have been making great strides in the general counsel’s office.  The Wall Street Journal Law Blog reported on Monday that women hold 21% of the general counsel positions at Fortune 500 companies, according to new data from the Minority Corporate Counsel Association (MCCA).  The MCCA survey[1] indicates that the number of female GCs has been accelerating in recent years. There were 108 women serving as GCs in Fortune 500/1000 companies in 2011, an increase of seven from 2010.  Since 2009, 23 women GCs have been added.

Women CEOs in the Fortune 500 are also on the rise.  This year’s ranking, released in May, boasted 18 females at the helm of Fortune 500 companies – a record number.  In 2002 and 2003, only seven Fortune 500 companies had female CEOs; in 2009 the number was 15, the previous record.  The 2012 list has since grown to 20 with the addition of newly appointed CEOs Marissa Mayer at Yahoo! and Kathleen M. Mazzarella at Graybar.  Women now hold 4% of Fortune500 CEO positions and 4.1% of Fortune 1000 CEO positions, according to Catalyst, which updates the list throughout the year.

Women in large firms, on the other hand, while occupying a similar percentage of top leadership positions, have not been moving forward quite as fast as their counterparts in the corporate world.  The National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL) 2011 Survey on the Retention and Promotion of Women in Law Firms reports that women occupy the managing partner role at only 5% of firms.  This percentage has remained unchanged since 2006, the first year of the survey.  In addition, the survey found that:

Women continue to be markedly underrepresented in the leadership ranks of firms. The majority of large firms have, at most, two women members on their highest governing committee. A substantial number have either no women (11% of firms) or only one woman (35% of firms) on their highest governing committee.

NAWL theorizes “that the relatively low percentage of equity partners explains the low representation in law firm leadership and until law firms figure out how to facilitate a greater number of women to equity partners, the leadership ranks will continue to under represent women.” NAWL Foundation President Stephanie Scharf added, “Not only do women represent a decreasing percentage of lawyers in big firms, they are more likely to occupy positions—like staff attorneys, counsel, and fixed-income equity partners—with diminished opportunity for advancement or participation in firm leadership.”

And therein lies another big difference between the legal and corporate worlds.  Opportunities for advancement appear to be more abundant in Fortune 500s and the ranks of women in leadership positions in Fortune 500s could grow even stronger thanks to a strong pipeline of highly qualified women according to the Wall Street Journal.  This pool of future leaders has grown, at least in part, by the urging of investors who want to see more minorities and women on corporate management teams.  “The next wave of women who will command major U.S. corporations likely are senior managers today.”  Adds Ellen Kullman, CEO of DuPont, “Some phenomenally well-qualified women hold top operational jobs.”   

Like investors that clamor for increased participation by women and minorities on corporate management teams, there have been a number of initiatives put forth by GCs urging their outside counsel to increase the number of women and minorities among their ranks or risk losing the company’s business.  Probably one of the most well-known has been the program at Wal-Mart Stores.  Perhaps the increasing number of women in Fortune 500 CEO and GC positions will have the added effect of increasing pressure on the law firms they hire to do better when it comes to not only hiring, but advancing women.

Posted by Marianne Purzycki

[1] The full survey will appear in the September/October 2012 issue of Diversity & the Bar, MCCA’s bi-monthly publication, and will be available on the MCCA website, www.mcca.com.  The MCCA has been tracking women in the general counsel’s office since 1999.

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Single-Tier Partnerships May Offer a Clearer Path to Gender Equality at Law Firms

Posted on July 27, 2012 by | Leave a comment

At law firms, equity partnership is the brass ring.  And for women working in law firms, that brass ring has long remained disproportionately out of reach when compared with male peers.  New data from the National Law Journal shows that this situation has not improved even as women have increased their presence and prestige within the legal community.  According to the most recent NLJ 250 survey (which ranks U.S. firms by lawyer headcount), women represent just 15.1% of equity partners at 221 of the largest firms in the U.S, a number that has remained fairly static for the last two decades.

So what does it take to boost the number of women in the equity ranks?  Last September, in a discussion of Working Mother Magazine’s annual list of the best law firms for women, we highlighted a firm that seems to have figured out one path to greater equality.  Nilan Johnson Lewis, a Minneapolis-based general practice firm, has women comprising 37% of equity partnership ranks.  The key to these impressive numbers, according to the firm, is a flexible, family-friendly work environment and a strong mentorship program.  In other words, culture is key.

The National Lawyer’s research adds several more firms to this list: the immigration law firm of Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy in New York, with 42% female equity partners, and the energy and mining firm of Jackson Kelly in West Virginia with 28.4%.  Ice Miller (Indianapolis), Best Best & Krieger (California) and Ford & Harrison (California) also report that women make up more than 25% of their equity partners.  Once again, culture is a key reason for the promotion of women.  According to Ice Miller partner Brenda Horn, “Women felt accepted here.”

As the National Law Journal points out, all of these firms are either regional firms, like Nilan Johnson Lewis, or focused on a specialized area of law.  Where are the big, general practice firms in the conversation?  As that 15% statistic demonstrates, they are mostly not making much progress when it comes to gender equality in the equity partnership ranks.

However, buried in that bad news is a nugget of hope:

“Women are gaining ground at firms with high profits. Of 18 firms with profits per partner exceeding $2 million, 11 have equity partnerships that include more than 15 percent women…

What many of the high-profit firms share is the single-tier partnership structure. For whatever reason, women seem to fare better in one-tier firms. (According to our research, women make up 17.6 percent of the equity partners in single-tier firms, but only 14.7 percent in those with two tiers.) Women in two-tier systems tend to get pushed into the nonequity ranks, explained Elizabeth Tursi, the chair of Women in Law Empowerment Forum, a group that tracks women’s progress in the legal profession…”

Single-tier partnership is not a panacea, as even 17.6% is not representative of major progress, but it is a step in the right direction.  As Tursi’s comments explain, nonequity partnerships may have a tendency to waylay women on their path to equity.  This is important knowledge for law firms interested in promoting more women into their equity ranks, but are getting stuck on how to do so.

What is clear is that culture matters, but cultural change can be difficult to implement.  Partnership structure, on the other hand, is a concrete factor that firms can isolate and address.

This is not to say all firms should adopt a single-tier structure.  There are a variety of reasons unrelated to gender equality why law firms have chosen to migrate to multiple partnership tiers.   The structure can be beneficial for firm leverage and profitability, as well as provide a means for developing top talent that may not yet be ready for equity partnership.  But as these numbers show, the model is not without its problems.  Knowing that multi-tier structures can have a negative impact on gender diversity may help firms make better informed decisions with respect to gender equality.

Posted by Emily Fisher

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Are Law Firms Squandering Women Lawyers?

Posted on November 11, 2011 by | 2 Comments

New data from the National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL) and the Hildebrandt Institute indicates that law firms may be missing the opportunity to take advantage of the talent and experience of their women lawyers.

According to NAWL’s Sixth Annual National Survey on Retention and Promotion of Women in Law Firms, a study of women lawyers in the AmLaw 200, women continue to be overrepresented in non-partner-track positions:

Women represent 55% of staff attorneys, the highest percentage of women lawyers in any law firm position; significantly, a large percentage of lawyers holding these positions graduated from law school between 10 and 20 years ago.  A similar phenomenon occurs at the counsel level, where women lawyers comprise 34% of these positions in firms.  In many firms, lawyers in the counsel position view it as the stepping stone between associate and promotion to partner.  However, only a minority of firms indicated that most of their counsel are eligible to become partners.

NAWL’s full report can be found here (PDF).

The Hildebrandt Institute has made similar findings in the Large Law Firm Staffing Survey, conducted for the first time in 2011 through collaboration with Georgetown University Law Center and the Professional Development Consortium.  Preliminary analysis of the Staffing Survey reveals that women comprise 55% of staffing attorneys at respondent firms, 40% of counsel, and 67% of career attorneys.  For purposes of the survey, “career attorneys” were defined as attorneys with a specific skill set or specialization that the firm consistently needs but on which the firm does not want partner-track associates to concentrate.

These numbers are troubling for groups like NAWL, which seek to increase the representation of women in law firm leadership positions.  While women appear to be overrepresented in these non-partner-track positions, they continue to be underrepresented in equity partnership ranks – NAWL reports that women account for barely 15% of equity partners.  And progress on that front is slow to nonexistent: “that level of equity partnership has been fixed at the same level for 20 years.”

When addressing statistics like this, focus is often placed on the effect the situation has on women lawyers, but law firms are losing out too.  The women moving into these non-partner-track roles are often high-achieving, well-educated lawyers with years of experience.  That experience has been earned through a combination of their own hard work and their law firm’s training.  But their expertise goes with them to the pink ghettos of staff, career, and counsel attorney ranks, where true professional development and leadership opportunities are uncommon.  In the process, women and their law firms both miss out.

Posted by Emily Fisher

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Women in the Legal Workplace: Working Mother’s Best Law Firms for Women List

Posted on September 28, 2011 by | 1 Comment

According to the Nielsen Company, 10.6 million people watched Julianna Margulies reprise her role as a law firm associate on the season premiere of The Good Wife on September 25th.  Presumably, most viewers were tuning in for the show’s love triangles and political intrigue, and not because they need to find out how Margulies’ character balances a demanding legal career with motherhood.  But for women in the law, that balancing act often has all the drama of the typical nighttime soap, minus the glamour.

But maybe that doesn’t have to be the case.  Earlier this month, Working Mother Magazine released their annual list of the nation’s 50 Best Law Firms for Women, sponsored by the National Association for Female Executives (NAFE) and Flex-Time Lawyers, a consulting firm focused on work life balance and lawyer retention.  The Working Mother Research Institute surveyed eligible firms (those with at least 50 U.S. attorneys) and scored them on their responses to nearly 500 questions regarding leave policies, child care, flex-time, leadership, compensation and advancement of women, professional development, and retention of female lawyers.

The firms chosen for the list reflect a portion of the legal industry that is increasingly welcoming to women.  These firms, on average, employ an attorney workforce that is 35% female.  While only 19% of their equity partners are women (again, on average), this is a 3% increase since 2007, when the list average was 16%.  Among firms that offer a non-equity partnership track, 28% of non-equity partners are women (versus 22% in 2007).  These numbers are encouraging.  However, they show that even among these elite firms, there is room for improvement, particularly in the area of law firm leadership.

In addition to demographics and leadership, the list also examines how well firms accommodate work-life balance.  The firms on the list all offer the option of working reduced hours, and 92% of the firms offer flex-time scheduling options.  Perhaps more importantly, the attorneys at these firms appear to feel more comfortable using these policies than attorneys at other firms.  On average, 10% of lawyers employed by the list’s firms work a reduced schedule, compared to the national average of 6% (Source: NALP).

Geographically, the firms on the list can be found in major cities throughout the continental United States, though some cities seem to produce more women-friendly firms than others.  New York and Chicago led the pack – each city is home to the headquarters of seven firms on the list.  Washington, DC, and Minneapolis were not far behind, with six firms apiece.

Minneapolis is also home to one of the real standouts on the list.  Nilan Johnson Lewis is a general practice law firm  with more than 60 attorneys, 52% of whom are women.  Women also comprise 37% of their equity partnership ranks, and 82% of non-equity partners.  According to Working Mother, the firm has achieved this success in diversity through mentorship programs and flexibility.  Like many firms, Nilan Johnson assigns all new associates a mentor to help guide them through their early years at the firm.  But unusually, 60% of these mentors are women, which means female associates have a chance to see how other women succeed in the firm, and male associates get comfortable with the idea of working with and for women.  Nilan Johnson has also developed a unique intranet page that facilitates flexible work schedules.  Attorneys can easily inform their colleagues if they are working from home or will be arriving late or leaving early, helping to ease face time pressures.  According to Working Mother, “The firm has effectively created a culture where it’s acceptable to have a life while succeeding in a legal career.”

Because while The Good Wife makes the life of an overworked lawyer trying to raise two kids look glamorous, in the real world that balance is often simply stressful.  The efforts of Nilan Johnson and the other firms on the list may help relieve some of that stress, leaving the drama out of the office and on the television screen, where it belongs.

Posted by Emily Fisher

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