Women Lawyers--Back on Track

Breaking free: In pursuit of setting a work-life balance

As I keep reiterating, women aren't the only ones seeking a better balance between work and "life"--at on the other side of the border.

In yet another article from our friends in Canada,we learn that men and women are gradually working fewer hours per work week than they had in the past:

According to Statistics Canada, the number of men who put in a long work week fell almost three percentage points during the past decade: 13.8 per cent of employed men now work 49 hours or more a week. Men aged 55 and over registered the most significant shift (3.2 percentage points) away from a long work week... Men of all ages retreated from long work weeks during the past 10 years...It means that although the average Canadian male works more hours (39.6) than his female cohort (33.1 hours), the gap between the two is closing. Women are working more hours than ever, in part because more and more are entering the workforce as highly educated professionals...

And what about the legal field?  Is it faring any better?  Nope:

Law firms, the report said, have failed to modify their cultures and introduce family-friendly reforms such as part-time employment, predictable hours, job sharing or flexible hours.

The Ontario Bar Association recently responded to the report with its own submission, which concluded: "Many young lawyers, both men and women, find that the culture in law firms is not conducive to a balanced, humane life. Young lawyers want more balance in their lives. They are not willing to sacrifice all other aspects of life - family, volunteer activities, community involvement, physical and mental health - for work."

It's only a matter of time before these trends have a definitive and noticeable effect upon the workplace.  Employers who fail to acknowledge the reality of this trend will ultimately pay the price in costly and avoidable high attrition rates.

It's a Generational Thing, Stupid.

I've said it before and I'll say it again--work/life balance issues are not "women's" issues, they're generational issues.  The vast majority of Gen X (and now Gen Y) lawyers of both genders value life balance over a large bank account balance.  Period.

Once that concept eventually worms its way into the thick skulls of those Boomers at the "top" of the legal profession, things will begin to change--and quickly.  I predict that as Gen Y floods the legal marketplace, change will be fairly obvious by 2012 and that the change in the infrastructure of law firms will become increasingly evident with each passing year.

Yet another article highlights this very fact, this time from the Fulton County Daily Report.  The article discusses the generational differences and predicts that the younger generations' outlook may soon have a startling effect upon the legal field.

From the article:

Fundamental differences in how people of different ages communicate -- in large part because of new technologies -- have created gaps in the workplace. "These problems are real," said Arin N. Reeves, the lawyer, professor, scholar and diversity consultant who moderated the discussion and who is president of the Chicago-based The Athens Group. "The communications issues cause real conflicts in the workplace"...

Conflicts stem from the different technologies each generation grew up using to communicate, Reeves said, but the problem is much more complicated. People of different generations seem to view almost everything differently. Reeves urged the gathering of in-house lawyers and law firm partners, associates and summer interns attending the event to think about issues from others' point of view...

Also, the generations define the work day differently. Lawyers now carry laptops, cell phones and BlackBerrys wherever they go and answer calls and questions day, night and on weekends. This all-access environment has prompted younger lawyers not to feel compelled to come in early and stay late at the office, Reeves said. They might not even feel compelled to be there from 9 to 5. They value a work-life balance more and see no need to sit in an office all day when they know they're going to be on their laptop at midnight.

Toe Cleavage: Offensive to the Legal Profession?

Apparently, a group of lawyers in Memphis recently spent a lot of time mulling over just such weighty issues as toe cleavage.  According to this Memphis Daily News article, a bunch of Memphis lawyers and judges met to discuss the issue of a dress code for local lawyers. 

The meeting included "an impromptu modeling of shoes to determine if either pair represented “cocktail shoes,” and if they did, whether they were inappropriate or disrespectful to the courts."

Some attendees were particularly "offended by too-short skirts, too much cleavage or too much arm being shown, and running shoes being worn in the courthouse."

At issue was a dress code proposed by a number of Memphis Bar Assocations.

The proposed rule at issue reads as follows:

“All attorneys should wear appropriate attire. Men shall wear coats, ties, slacks and appropriate footwear, which does not include athletic shoes or shoes without socks. Women shall wear professional and conservative attire, such as dresses with jackets, suits or pantsuits (with appropriate tops), and appropriate footwear, which does not include cocktail shoes or sandals or athletic shoes."

I think my favorite part of the rule is that the attire for women is specifically described as "conservative."  For some reason, men need not dress "conservatively".  Presumably 1970's style leisure suits would be perfectly appropriate for men to wear court.

And, one wonders how cold-weather-climate attorneys like myself are expected to handle the issue of boots in the winter.  Boot are most certainly not "appropriate footwear" under the proposed rule.  However, they are an absolute necessity when you have to walk a few blocks to court in the middle of an Upstate NY winter. 

When I was an Assistant Public Defender, I would drag my 60 files behind me in a box on a luggage trolley through sidewalks covered with snow, wearing boots and carrying a bag with my heels inside of it.  I'd then change my footwear prior to court, but was lucky enough to have a place to store it, since I was essentially a fixture in the courtroom

Things were more difficult once I began working at a law firm.  I attended court only occasionally, and would have to change my shoes before entering the courtroom.  I always had a difficult time figuring out where to leave my boots, since there was no place set aside for that purpose.  Sometimes I'd just carry them inside the courtroom and leave them, wet and covered with salt from the streets, at my seat.

Men had the luxury of slipping "rubbers" over their (flat) shoes.  Many of them wore the unattractive foot coverings into court as well, and I never heard any complaints about that particular practice.

Meanwhile, the ABA Journal blog recently discussed the issue of dress codes for lawyers as well, and referenced this Wall Street Journal article:  Bare-Legged Ladies: Hosiery Reveals Office Divide.

I think that most women would agree that, in general, nylons are ridiculously uncomfortable.  And,  Nylons in 90 degree, humid weather are downright torture.   Lined pantsuits in the summer are even worse.  The only bearable option is a skirt without nylons.

Nylons are simply not an option in the summer.  Period. 

So, I would respectfully suggest, my fellow lawyers, that you take your dress code and implement it in a jurisdiction where the sun don't shine (and the snow don't fall). 

 

Are successful women avoiding motherhood?

So asks this article from a San Francisco ABC affiliate.  It's an interesting article, but the title is poorly worded in my opinion.  The article implies that the only way to be "successful" is to have a full-time career.

I completely disagree with that.  Success is in the eye of the beholder, as far as I'm concerned.  There is not one way to define success, and balancing a part-time schedule for a portion of one's career with family and achieving happiness is certainly a form of success.

That being said, it's an interesting, although somewhat depressing article.  I'm looking forward to the day when the statistics quoted in the article tend to be more favorable toward women with careers and families.

From the article:

A new study from Washington & Lee University shows professional women are walking away from motherhood and marriage -- more than the general population.

Law professor Robin Wilson's research makes up a chapter in a new book called "Rethinking Business Management."

She says, while four-fifths of senior male lawyers have children, only two-thirds of senior women do, and there is a similar break from marriage.

She looked at more than 100,000 people with at least a college degree, and found that women lawyers, doctors and MBA's are opting out of marriage at a higher rate than their male counterparts. When they do marry, women professionals have a harder time making it last...

"Professional men are much more likely to be married to homemakers or women who don't have the financial withdrawal to leave, even if they want or need to," says Williams.

Wilson's research show that among women with a law degree, just shy of 6 percent have a stay-at-home spouse, versus nearly 40 percent of male lawyers. For MBA's, nearly 10 percent of women have a spouse at home, compared with 44 percent of men. For MD's it's just over 12 percent for women versus 48 percent for male MD's.

As for having families, we asked Williams, what was wrong with careers where you can't have children.

"There aren't careers where you can't have children. There are careers where women can't have children. So the question is, are we going to design careers so that only men can have them if they want a conventional family life? Or are we going to design careers so that either men or women can have them if they want a conventional family life?"...

Williams says Gen-X and Gen-X men show signs of being different than their baby-boomer dads. The WorkLife Center hotline is frequently hearing from young men about issues like paternity leave.

Lady Law is Not Entirely Inflexible

There's been a dearth of interesting articles regarding women lawyers, so I thought the following article that I wrote for the Daily Record nearly one year ago might generate some discussion:

Lady law is not entirely inflexible

The law can be all encompassing. It’s always been that way — hence the saying “the law is a jealous mistress.”

Attempting to juggle one’s chosen career with non-legal obligations such as the demands of family life can be a delicate and difficult balancing act for both male and female lawyers.

Recently, an interesting study was conducted by the Massachusetts- based Equality Commission. Entitled “Woman Lawyers and Obstacles to Leadership,” the report concluded that “female law-yers continue to face intractable challenges in their attempts to become partners, causing them to abandon law firm careers — and the legal profession entirely — at a dramatically higher rate than men.”

In attempting to explain this disparity some echo U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s language in the recent decision Gonzales v. Carhart, claiming that the reason for the variance is the special bond between a mother and child, and that women can’t help but stay at home with their children. Others allege that women make the decision to have children and must, therefore, face the music when it comes to the consequences of that choice.

I disagree. The mother and father are involved in the decision to have a child, and fatherhood affects a man’s life just as much as motherhood affects a woman’s. Once the decision to have children is made, each family must determine how to incorporate realistically that choice into their everyday lives.

Women and men with advanced degrees have more options available to them as a result of their education and work experience. As a result, professional couples, not just women, are taking a hard look at their lives and making choices that allow them to improve the quality of their family’s life. For some couples the most viable option may be for one parent to take temporary hiatus from the workforce.

Such occasional detours along one’s career path should not prevent a lawyer from having a fulfilling and successful career through the course of a lifetime. Yet, as the Equality Commission’s report indicates, the decision to scale back hours temporarily, or to take a brief hiatus from the law can have a drastic and debilitating effect on a legal career.

The time is ripe for change and I believe the impetus for change will be the generational divide. Generation X and Y employees have far different values than the Baby Boomers and, as the workforce becomes populated with more Generation X and Y employees, their values will become the norm. Their collective refusal to bill hours 24/7 will become increasingly evident as they abandon high-paying jobs requiring inhumane hours for jobs offering a better work-life balance, albeit at lower salary.

The legal field has recognized this fact far more slowly than other fields such as accounting and, as a result, has failed to respond in any meaningful way to lawyers’ requests for accommodation and flexibility.

The private sector in large metropolitan areas such as New York City, which traditionally sets the standard for firms across the country, has been especially unwilling to bend to the demands of a new generation of lawyers. As a result, dissension is growing among the ranks of lawyers, and among younger lawyers in particular. Many are simply leaving large law firms in search of greener pastures, and they represent a lot of lost talent.

I believe that Lady Law is far more flexible than those at the top of the legal hierarchy. As more lawyers refuse to be absentee parents and slaves to the billable hour, the landscape, slowly, will change. Only time will tell if I’m correct. In the meantime, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Firms looking for ways to keep young associates around

Law firms seem to be really, really interested trying to figure out what all those "confusing" and/or "confused" young associates want.  In fact, they're willing to do study after study after study--and hire consultant after consultant after consultant--to try and figure out the answer to this oh-so-elusive question.

The Maryland Daily Record recently addressed this issue in a lengthy article that essentially rehashed all that we've heard before:  associates would happily work for less compensation in exchange for flexibility and more interesting work.  They're  bored, overworked and feel under appreciated.

One wonders how many times it needs to be said before changes are actually implemented?  Me thinks that nothing will change anytime soon, but perhaps I'm overly cynical.

From the article:

Whereas 25 or 30 years ago, associates joined a firm for life, associates today feel freer to switch firms in pursuit of their financial, professional and personal goals...

The NALP Foundation, which conducts research on the legal profession, found in 2000 that 59 percent of associates who had been out of law school for about five years had already left their first firm.

In 2005, that number was 78 percent, according to statistics cited by the consulting firm Hildebrandt International Inc. A recent survey by the Women’s Bar Association of the District of Columbia showed that of 551 attorneys polled, three-quarters of the women and half the men were considering leaving their jobs in the next five years.

Every time an associate leaves, it can cost a firm up to $350,000 to hire and train someone new...

But according to associates and associate retention experts, the major reason associates leave is not money. The top motivators are grueling hours, boring work and poisonous firm culture, they say...

“[F]orget about being able to balance work and family, they can’t even get a date because they’re so beholden to the whims of the partners,” Chanow said. Associates want to have “time with their family, time to meet people if they don’t have family, time to climb a mountain.” ...

Chanow said long hours are especially tough on women with children, so they end up leaving firms at even higher rates than men do. She said they are especially likely to leave if they feel they have no chance of becoming a partner.

Some women look around and see that no woman has made partner in their practice group in years, so they assess their chances as slim and decide to leave, she said...

Gallagher’s Linda Jones said salaries matter more to law students trying to decide where to work than they do to associates deciding whether to stay.

“Studies always show that compensation may be really important on the front end, but as long as people are satisfactorily compensated, it’s not the most important thing,” Jones said.

On Life Support

Denise Howell offers a great perspective on work/life balance in this American Lawyer article: On Life Support:

Even though we live in an age of million-dollar profits per partner and record-high salaries and bonuses for associates, large firms lose 80 percent of law school hires within five years, according to The National Association for Law Placement. It costs firms somewhere between $200,000 and $500,000 to replace attorneys who don't work out, according to Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at Hastings College of Law.

And the replacements are becoming scarce. In a recent ABA member survey, only 44 percent of respondents said they'd recommend the profession to others. The animosity doesn't stop at passive nonendorsement. Disenchanted lawyers are busy warning off the uninitiated via every channel available-chronicling the pitfalls of large firms and the profession in general. The result: Law school applications are down nearly 7 percent from 2006, when they were already down more than 5 percent from 2005.

Family time must bear some of the cost of this attrition. The Families and Work Institute has found that younger workers are more "dual-centric" (attaching equal importance to career and family) and less work-centric than in decades past...

If firms are to get serious about fostering environments of "reasonable balance," they may need to look back before they can move ahead. In the 1970s, my dad, who was a partner at a respected California firm, made sure that our family spent most of each August river rafting, and that we took some fishing trips during the rest of the year. In 1963, the ABA considered 1,300 billable hours full-time. This Kennedy-era approach and my dad's insistence on being a dad seem far more suited to the mind-set of the twenty-first century legal workforce than today's firms have yet to recognize.

Is BigLaw truly making an effort?

From Law.com comes an article about a law firm trying to "include" women attorneys: Mayer Brown Associates Take a Grassroots Approach to Networking.

Will it work?  Only time will tell.

From the article:

When the firm's New York office formed its Women's Forum, the group found an almost universal desire for access to the keys to success that often are not equally shared with women attorneys in major law firms: opportunities for networking, strong relationships with mentors, opportunities for business development and consideration when leadership roles are delegated. Thus, the mission of the Women's Forum -- composed of women associates, counsel and partners -- emerged: Promote the success of our women lawyers by creating networking and marketing opportunities both internally and externally...

The lessons learned here are important for developing successful women attorneys:

• Women need to ask for such opportunities. If we don't, you can be sure that nothing will happen.
• Women should ignore the myth that networking is an innate talent or requires pre-existing connections.
• The key to successful networking is careful planning and strategic thinking.
• Rainmakers and networking coaches alike emphasize the need to follow up.
• Providing early networking and client development training to women associates will give them the tools they need to take advantage of every opportunity.

Mayer Brown believes that in order to begin to change the cultural fabric of a law firm world in which there are inherent obstacles in the path of female attorneys, law firms must be willing to empower their women associates and counsel and to view those efforts as a benefit to the firm -- not simply a favor to women lawyers. Events like this one have the potential to hasten the slow process of changing those cultural obstacles. At Mayer Brown, that process is well under way.

The Progress of Women Lawyers at Big Firms: Steadied or Simply Studied?

From Ms. JD I learned of the following Fordham Law School Law Review article:  The Progress of Women Lawyers at Big Firms: Steadied or Simply Studied?  The conclusions were predictable and, for the most part, depressing. 

Women lawyers earn less than men. 

Women lawyers still represent substantially less than half of those at the top of the legal hierarchy, although the numbers have improved ever so slightly since 1988, the year that I graduated from high school and naively believed that the world was my oyster despite the fact that,  through no fault of my own, I possessed a uterus.

Oh, the silly fallacies of youth.

From the article:

I turn first to private practice, the setting where many lawyers choose to begin their careers.  Back in 1988, law schools were near the end of a twenty-year trajectory that saw women’s enrollment increase by an astounding 850%.6  This escalation promised rapid progress toward gender parity within the profession as a whole, presumably with large firms at the helm, as this newly populous generation of women lawyers rose through the ranks.

This was not to be the case.  Whatever the precise percentages, statistics for the past ten to fifteen years show that the nation’s law schools produce a relatively equal number of qualified male and female attorneys and that, though firms generally hire women associates in numbers correlative to the talent pool,7 women do not reach partnership at the same rate as men...

What has changed?  For one, “women’s issues” as defined in the 1980s are now increasingly gender neutral.  For another, firms are responding to increased pressure to show results in their diversity efforts, at the risk of diminished status within rankings and other external measures of firm standing and prestige—and at the risk of losing fresh talent and even clients.

What has not changed?  Three issues that were the focus of much criticism twenty years ago regrettably still linger:  the persistence of gender stereotypes, the resistance to flexible work arrangements, and the use of the billable hours economic model.  Given the breathtaking scientific, technological, and cultural advances of the past twenty years, does it not seem that greater progress should have been made?...

The 1988 ABA Commission on Women in the Profession report identified “subtle barriers” to advancement of women in the profession.70  Women perceived that they had to “work harder, do better and make fewer mistakes” to achieve the same degree of respect as men, and were “treated with a presumption of incompetence” that they had to overcome whereas men were treated with a presumption of competence “overcome only after numerous significant mistakes.”71  Men, the report found, “perceive fewer problems of discrimination, and . . . are more likely to regard the issues that greatly disturb women in the profession as silly or trivial"...

(W)hile my focus remains on women—and hopefully the substantial number of senior women lawyers in firms today can be especially helpful in preparing newer lawyers for the bumps in the road—in truth these issues increasingly have become genderless life issues, offering a special incentive for men as well as women to seek out solutions. 

Productive legal careers these days may go on for four or more decades.  Surely ways can be found to navigate a particularly challenging period that typically falls at the mid- associate level, enabling women to later enjoy their families as well as leadership in their firms, in the profession, on the bench, and in public life.

(emphasis added).

True dat.

 

Big-Firm Associates: Why They Go and How to Keep Them

In this Law.com article, which discusses ways to retain BigLaw associates, inexplicably, work/life balance is given nary a thought.  Not surprisingly, it was written by 2 male attorneys.

An excerpt follows:

The larger law firms are reported to be losing 30, 40, 50 percent of associates after three to four years -- with half to two-thirds of the defections due to associate, not firm, choice...

(O)n the basis of many discussions with students, associates, partners and inside counsel, we believe that for a significant number, their first professional experience after at least seven years of higher education is too unprofessional and demoralizing. That disappointment is a major reason for leaving their firm...

What can be done?...The general counsel and senior partners can revise the running rules to open up lawyer-to-lawyer meetings or legal proceedings so that young associates can observe the process (even though the firm will still have to foot the bill as a training cost)...Corporations can also encourage firms to secund third- or fourth-year associates to them for a year (and pay the costs, but not the profit margin)...Corporations can also encourage firms to secund third-or fourth-year associates to them for a year (and pay the costs, but not the profit margin)...Firms can also secund young associates to public sector agencies (e.g., the county prosecutor's office), where they can be paid by the firm but get far more hands-on experience than they would as twenty-first person on a multidistrict litigation team...Perhaps most importantly, firms could spend as much time on professional development as on marketing.