Women Lawyers--Back on Track

What Everyone Else Is Saying

It's time for a round up of what everyone else around the blogosphere has been saying about women and the law and women lawyers:

The good

• Rock the Cradle on the study that concluded that single women lawyers were the most "productive" while women lawyers with kids were the least:  It's our fault, installment #5,726

• Feminist Law Professors on a recent article regarding women lawyers: What Women Lawyers Want Is For You To Stop Asking What We Want (and Do Your Own Laundry)

• Ms. JD posts about the issue of whether long hair is unprofessional (Not at all, in my opinion, says this long-haired woman lawyer)

• The ABA Journal on maternity leave  for lawyers: More Law Firms Boost Maternity Leave to 18 Weeks

The bad

• The Legal Pad reports that women lawyers' salaries are decreasing.

The ugly

• Volokh Conspiracy readers can't help themselves.  When a women lawyer is as successful at what she does as Dahlia Lithwick, they simply have to characterize her as:  lacking objectivity, emotional, unqualified, unfit, laughable, illogical, snarky, bitter, mean-spirited, lacking common sense, dishonest, a useless hack, unimportant, unintelligent, "you're out, honey", ineffective, unpersuasive, screeching, squealing, giggling schoolgirl, clueless, "gossip columnist tool", a bad lawyer, :  Lithwick on Heller and Oh Those Hypocritical Conservative Justices.

Blogrolling

Thanks to the following blogs for recently mentioning or adding a permanent link to Women Lawyers--Back on Track to their blogroll:

• My Shingle
• Ms. JD
• Real Lawyers Have Blogs
• Inter Alia
• CrimLaw
• PhiLAWdelphia
• SImple Justice
• Legal Blog Watch
• The Lawyer Coach Blog
• The Sienko Law Office Blog
• NYSBA General Practice Section Blog
• The Legal Ease Blog
• Deliberations

Forget the Recession, Now Is Time to Go Solo

The New York Law Journal recently highlighted Carolyn Elefant, blogger (My Shingle and Legal Blog Watch), writer and lawyer extraordinaire, in an article whcih focused, in part, on her new book, Solo By Choice, which is listed as a resource in the lefthand sidebar of this blog.

The article, and the excellent book, which I recently finished reading and highly recommend, focuses on the benefits of going solo, such as being in control of your own practice, schedule and destiny.  This how-to guide provides the attorney considering going solo with factors to consider when making  and implementing the deicision to go solo.

If you're a lawyer and are thinking about making a change in your career, or even if you're simply unhappy with your current job situation,  you simply can't afford to pass this book by.  It provides a wealth of useful information, trend analysis and advice from the perspective of someone on the cutting edge of the legal profession.

From the article:

Ms. Elefant, whose practice is focused on energy regulatory and enforcement law, suggested in an interview that this is a favorable time for solo practice - not merely for independent-minded attorneys but for law firms and clients as well.

"In the past 10 years or so, more and more large-firm lawyers are thinking seriously about leaving and taking a piece of their practice with them - not poaching or stealing clients, but maybe taking those not able to afford large-firm rates, or else clients conflicted out due to firm mergers," said the "Solo by Choice" author. "There have always been lawyers who've done that, but now because of technology it's easier for younger associates to do it."

Ms. Elefant's said her notion is buttressed by data in a recently released study of 4,000 law school graduates conducted by the American Bar Foundation and Harvard Law School's Program on the Legal Profession that show apparent dissatisfaction among young lawyers at commercial firms.

The study found that large firms lose up to half their associates within as few as four years, though not because of dismissals or layoffs; nearly two-thirds of the defections are the result of associate choice.

What Women Lawyers Can Learn From Hillary Clinton

From Texas Lawyer comes an interesting article:  What Women Lawyers Can Learn From Hillary Clinton.  I'm not sure that I agree with all of the "lessons", but the article includes some useful information:

Never underestimate an opponent...if women lawyers find themselves up against their own version of a junior senator from Illinois -- one they think has neither the skills nor the preparation to stand up to their brilliance -- they shouldn't underestimate him -- or her.

Stereotypes are tough to shake, and they can help and hurt women lawyers... Women lawyers should follow suit. They don't have to be likeable or warm or nurturing to get the job done. In fact, for most of them, that would work against them -- and their clients' -- interests. But, when the timing's right, a bit of femininity doesn't hurt. In fact, it can work greatly to women lawyers' advantage.

Being thick-skinned is invaluable...

Appearance matters...(I)t's true. By most accounts, Clinton excels in this area. She's always pulled together. She's attractive but not so much so that she risks being objectified. Clearly, a lot of thought goes into everything she wears. The good news for women is that although being attractive helps, it's not really about having a pretty face. It's about looking polished and professional: nice clothes, good hair and all those other things that go into looking well-groomed.

Fear not the "B" word... Women often go to extreme lengths to be conciliatory and diplomatic, all to avoid being called a bitch. If there's one lesson learned from the Clinton campaign, it's that being dubbed a bitch is not an instant death sentence (in fact, a recent "Saturday Night Live" skit almost made it seem like a prerequisite for the job). Clinton is usually quite composed, but she's also shown some fire now and then and has come at her opponents with both barrels. It hasn't always made her friends, but at least nobody can claim she's a pushover.

Women Lawyers Bill More/Less Than Men--Depending On How You Spin It

Over at Legal Blog Watch, Carolyn Elefant posted about very interesting British study with intriguing--and somewhat controversial--findings: that childless women lawyers are the most "productive" workers, while women lawyers with young children are the least "productive".  And, fathers were more "productive" than their childless male counterparts.

As Carolyn aptly noted, the way that "productivity" was measured--the amount of hours billed--was a questionable methodology, since:

(A)s we all know, hours billed don't necessarily correlate to efficiency; indeed, longer hours may signal less productivity, not more.

Another interesting point from the summary of the study:

Further analysis showed that female lawyers with children usually had to juggle professional and domestic responsibilities because they tended to be married to a partner who also worked. On the other hand, male lawyers with children were likely to have a partner who did not work, and who was therefore able to take responsibility for domestic duties.

Wallace and Young said another unexpected finding was that family-friendly organisational work practices had a negative effect on the productivity of male staff but not female staff. Moreover, the sexes used the benefit of flexible hours differently - professional fathers spent the time pursuing leisure activities, whereas for professional mothers this time was spent largely on domestic duties. It seems the old adage 'a woman's work is never done' still rings true in the twenty-first century.

Mark Cohen at the Minnesota Lawyer Blog had this to say about the discrepancies in the "productivity" of lawyer dads vs. lawyer moms: 

One wonders if this "productivity" isn't a means of dodging out on domestic chores. Billing an additional hour may not look so bad when the alternative is to go home and change a diaper ...

He raises a great point that brought to mind something that occurred early on my legal career.  A male lawyer with kids and a stay-at-home wife was one of the only lawyers to make it into the office during one of the worst snowstorms that we'd ever had in Upstate NY and made a telling comment that I'll get to in a moment. 

But first, the storm.  I grew up here and was used to driving in snow, snow and more snow, and for the first time in my life, after nearly sliding off the road three times and passing 6 ditched cars, I had to turn my car around and head home after driving only 1/2 mile.  It was the only time that I've ever found myself unable to navigate safely in the snow.

I eventually made it into the office around 10 a.m. and there were only 4 (out of 20) lawyers there.  This particular lawyer was one of them and he told me that he'd been the first to arrive at 8 a.m.  I asked him how he even made it in, and he replied, "Are you kidding?!? The alternative was being stuck in the house with my wife and three kids on a snow day.  Hell.on.earth."

I've never forgotten that comment. 

And, after hearing it, I noticed that the male lawyers with kids were always the first into the office--and upon arrival, sat around in their offices drinking coffee, feet on the desk, reading the newspaper for the first 45 minutes or so.  One wonders what justification was offered to  their stay-at-home wives as they "rushed" out the door before the kids awoke.

But, alas, I digress.

More on this study can be found at the following blogs (and of course, the comments following some of posts are full the seemingly obligatory tidbits about women lawyers taking up the space of a more worthwhile and more qualified guy):

• Bag and Baggage
• Wall Street Journal Law Blog
• Above the Law

Where Women Lawyers Get Ahead?

Via GoFaxer blog I learned of an interesting article from BusinessWeek regarding a law firm that is described as "flexible". 

The article described the practices of a law firm that "only" required 1800 billable hours per year.  The good news was that that firm allowed lawyers to work from home and it appeared that face time wasn't of paramount importance. 

While I applaud the firm for its relatively high female partnership rate and its attempt to change with the times, I'm not entirely convinced that billing requirements at this firm allow for time to do anything else but work.  It's a step in the right direction--but a baby step.

Legal employers need to recognize that their employees will have long careers--spanning 30-40 years--and will have varying abilities to devote themselves to work at different stages throughout their  careers.  Illness, an ailing parent or child, an ailing spouse, or family demands may prevent them from giving their all at certain stages of their career.  But, these same employees will more than make up for the "lapse" down the road.

Another annoying aspect of this article is the assumption that the only place for those "with ambition" is BigLaw.  How ridiculous.

Finally, the "incentive" offered by this firm--a percentage of business brought in--sounds better on paper than it is in practice.  It's not all it's cut out to be.

From the article

Law is a notoriously demanding profession for those with ambition. To become a partner, associates typically have to charge clients for at least 2,000 hours of work a year, though that minimum can rise to 2,400 hours at top-tier outfits—or 46 billable hours each and every week of the year. The burden falls especially hard on mothers who have got kids to tend to and households to manage. Little wonder that while half of all law school grads are women, only 17.2% of partners are, according to the Project for Attorney Retention at the University of California Hastings College of Law in San Francisco.

Beermann Swerdlove lies on the outer slope of this bell curve. Fully half of the Chicago firm's 30 attorneys are women, including eight of its 19 partners...To put its philosophy into practice the firm requires associates to bill a relatively modest minimum of 1,800 hours a year. Attorneys may work on a flexible schedule or from home as long as the work gets done and the client is happy. There is a tradeoff: Starting salaries for associates are about half of the big firms' $150,000 or so, and partners rarely make the $1 million or more that a partner might earn at a much larger firm...To make up for some of that pay gap, the firm, now based in the Loop, gives associates a percentage of new business they bring in, an arrangement unheard of at many partnerships.

Is Clinton's Corporate Law Background Hurting Her Candidacy?

Last week there was a really interesting article from American Lawyer about Hillary Clinton.  The article discussed how her background as a corporate lawyer may have a lot to do with her affect and speaking style, both of which are regularly criticized by the media. 

As we all know, the law changes you.  And for women, many of the changes that you make so as to be taken seriously by your male peers and that allow you to be a better lawyer are contrary to the social expectations that our culture has for women.

It's quite the dilemma, ain't it?

From the article:

Stiff, bloodless, sexless, excessively concerned with the appearance of impropriety, lawyers are not much fun at parties. This is particularly true of corporate lawyers...

An inarguable fact -- and lawyers love inarguable facts! -- is that Hillary Clinton spent the longest stretch of her professional life working in a corporate law firm...(

F)or Clinton, the first woman ever to practice at Rose, the pressure and intensity of corporate existence had to have been of an entirely different order. She was, from the start, under constant scrutiny. Several of the firm's partners opposed the idea of hiring a woman lawyer in the first place and raised questions about possible conflicts. "How will we introduce her to clients?" an associate asked Webster Hubbell and Vince Foster Jr., the partners who had recruited Hillary and became close Clinton associates. And "What if she gets pregnant?...

I'm not sure when the Little Rock Courthouse was built or what its acoustics are like. But I know that courthouses often have high, sometimes vaulted ceilings, which create acoustical problems for women, whose voices tend not to project in the booming way that those of male lawyers can. To be heard, women lawyers have to raise their voices in ways that make them sound strident and shrill, an accusation that is frequently leveled at powerful women in careers in the law and beyond it. In any case, despite a successful track record with juries, Hillary Clinton stayed out of the courtroom, and even today seems deliberately to keep her voice low and well-modulated...

Neither Hillary Clinton nor the average corporate law partner is likely to make anyone's blood jump or heart sing. When you are in trouble, however -- real trouble -- it may be that the person you want to see isn't the guy who wows you with his wit and charisma, but someone who has really done her homework, pored over all the boring details, and then gone back over them again, just for fun. It's pretty clear that the country is in real trouble. Bridges are falling down; the stock market is all over the place; and let's not even bring up Iraq or Sudan. This might or might not be the right time to look past Hillary Clinton's cool, corporate, bill-by-the-hour sensibility, her lawyerly inclination to avoid risk and run everything past the pollsters, to smile and keep a stiff upper lip because appearance and propriety matter more than most things -- and certainly more than impropriety."

What Everyone Else Is Saying

Here's what everyone else around the blogosphere is saying about women lawyers, women and the law:

The good:

• I love Quizlaw.  Not just because it's damn funny blog, but they also have posts like this one regarding Eliot Spitzer's wife, Silda.
• The Legal Ease Blog has a great post: Women's History Month: Great Women in the Legal Profession
• Law and Letters discusses a depressing Canadian study which concludes that: The four mechanisms suppressing the advancement of female attorneys that possibly explain the persistence of stratification and subordination are: 1) self-elimination, 2) over-selection, 3) relegation, and 4) direct exclusion.

The bad:

• It's always depressing when the comments disintegrate following a post about an important issue like the lack of female partners is discussed, such as this post at Above the Law.

The ugly:

• The "evolutionary" theories parroted in this Volokh Conspiracy post regarding the Spitzer scandal:  men can't help but to have sex with as many babes as possible, while women act unnaturally when they have more than one partner.  Ridiculous.  Some of the comments are just as bad as the post, if not worse.

Law Firms' New Partners Still Mostly Male

The Project for Attorney Retention just released the results of a 4 year study which charted the percentage of women making partnership in BigLaw.  There's a nifty chart in the study results, should you care to take a peek.

Not surprisingly, women didn't fare all that well.  How depressing.

From the study:

For some time now, we have known that the lack of women in leadership positions at law firms is not a pipeline issue.  Women have been graduating from law schools at a rate of 40% or higher since 1985 and entering private practice at the same rate as their male counterparts – 70% – during that time...We collected promotion statistics for a total of 77 law firms representing a variety of sizes and locations.  We chose these firms based on inclusion in prior years’ surveys, firm size, reputation and availability of information.  We also combined the new information with the data that we had collected in previous years so that, for the first time, we could see whether a particular firm has made strides or slipped over the past four years...

At a dozen firms, 50% or more of the new partners were women...

At many firms, between a third and a half of the partners promoted this year were women...

However, other firms are seriously lagging behind...

Some of the most interesting information can be found by examining the trends for individual law firms.  For instance, in all but one of the past four partnership classes at Crowell & Moring women have been 50% or more of the firm’s new partners.  Likewise, women have been 40% or more of the new partners in the past three partnership classes at Cadwalader.  DLA Piper has had three years of steady but moderate progress followed this year by a substantial increase to 54%.  In two of the three previous partnership classes at Ropes & Gray, women have been more than a third of the new partners and the firm this year was one of the path-breakers with 70% of its new partners being women.  In contrast, at Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge, the percentage of women promoted to partner has steadily decreased in each of the last three years  (30% in 2006, 20% in 2007, and 11% in 2008).  And at some firms such as Akin Gump, Fried Frank, and Vinson & Elkins, women have been virtually absent from all of the past four partnership classes.

Free yourself from the grip of BigLaw

Thanks to Susan Cartier Liebel of the Build a Solo Practice LLC blog for pointing out a great resource for women lawyers: the most recent edition of the Complete Lawyer.  Her blog, by the way, is a great resource and one that is well worth following.

This month's focus is "What Do Women Lawyers really Want?" 

Over the next few weeks I'll be highlighting articles from this edition.  Today's article is written by Susan and is entitled "Free Yourself From the Grip of BigLaw."

Solos work very hard 24/7, but most will tell you that the reason they work so hard is for the freedom it affords them. And for not having to apologize for, or feel guilty about decisions that put their family first. Not having to risk their promotion or job because life means more to them than eighty hour work weeks. Not having to ask anyone’s permission to live their life the way they choose...

(W)e ... live in a culture of fear: fear we won’t meet our student loans, fear we won’t be able to pay our living expenses, fear we won’t have clients, fear we won’t know what we are doing, fear of not having a steady paycheck and health insurance, and so on. And then there is fear of what others will think if we try to make a go of it as a solo practitioner...

Unfortunately, this fear can take a disproportionate toll on women in the legal field. A very disturbing article in the Boston Globe, (May 2007) reported: "Of the 1,000 Massachusetts lawyers who provided data for the report, 31 percent of female associates had left private practice entirely, compared with 18 percent of male associates. The gap widens among associates with children, to 35 percent and 15 percent, respectively—reflecting the cultural reality that women remain the primary care givers of children and are therefore more likely to leave their firms for family reasons. The dropout rate among women lawyers is overwhelmingly the result of the combination of demanding hours, inflexible schedules, lack of viable part-time options, emphasis on billable hours, and a failure by law firms to recognize that female lawyers’ career trajectories may alternate between work and family.” ...

It’s impossible to put a price tag on the freedoms solo practitioners enjoy, including the freedom to balance and improve the quality of their lives, and the other psychological bank accounts that get hefty deposits every day. Apparently, 74 percent of all private practice attorneys have done Ben Franklin lists when making the decision to work for themselves. If the statistics tell the tale, then independence, autonomy and a day at the ballpark is winning by a long shot.