'Cheat Sheet' Helps Women, Moms Pick Friendly Firms
Petra Pasternak10-20-2006
For any law students who have been stumped about how to select a women-friendly employer, now there is a cheat sheet.
Conceived as a tool for students and practicing attorneys to use when speaking to potential employers, the "Cheat Sheet" released on the East Coast in mid-September -- and showcased recently at a Bay Area law school -- is a list of in-depth questions women can ask to ascertain a firm's commitment to retention and advancement. It focuses on areas that, historically, have been stumbling blocks for women, including mentoring, workplace flexibility and partnership advancement.
"The goal is to really work change in the profession," said Deborah Epstein Henry, the "Cheat Sheet's" principal author and the founder and president of Philadelphia work-life balance consulting company Flex-Time Lawyers. Her company released the guide along with the New York City Bar Association last month, and Henry flew into the Bay Area last week to tout the guide at Hastings College of the Law.
Her visit coincided closely with the release of Working Mother magazine's annual "100 Best Companies for Working Mothers" list, which this year featured three law firms with California offices: Arnold & Porter, Covington & Burling and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman.
Wendy Feng, an insurance litigator at Covington & Burling, is among the attorneys who've taken advantage of the flexibility her firm affords.
After she got pregnant with twins, now 4, "I took my full maternity leave, three months fully paid, and I also took an extra month unpaid on top of that," the of counsel said. "My twins were premature, and this firm was extremely flexible." And when she returned to work and asked to go part time, she said, no one raised an eyebrow.
At her firm, Feng added, cutting back doesn't appear to compromise a lawyer's advancement chances. She pointed out that over the past few years, four lawyers at Covington have become partners while working part time.
"Everything the firm could do to make it easier to juggle everything, they have done," Feng added. "The main thing is the independence they give all the individuals to set their own schedules."
Washington, D.C.-based Arnold & Porter, which Working Mother notes is run by a female executive director and offers a full-time, on-site day care facility, was named to the magazine's list for the seventh time.
It was something new, though, for Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, the first mention it's gotten since 2005, when it merged under that name, a spokesman for the firm said.
The market for measuring female-friendliness appears to be growing, too. Henry says that Flex-Time plans to release a survey next fall in cooperation with Working Mother that will, more specifically, rank the woman-friendliness of law firms with more than 50 lawyers.