Post Polak's Holly English
A new game plan for retaining women at firms
Retention, promotion, and how men can feel comfortable mentoring.
July 14, 2008
The National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL) will urge law firms to compensate senior attorneys for promoting diversity, monitor how credit for business development is meted out and teach senior male attorneys to be less fearful of mentoring women in a new report aimed at advancing women's legal careers.
The group hopes the report, to be released on July 17, will increase the percentage of women in top legal positions beyond the 15% mark, where the needle has been stuck for years despite women and men graduating from law school in nearly equal numbers.
The recommendations focus on creating transparency so junior lawyers know how to climb the leadership ladder, financially rewarding senior attorneys who mentor a diverse group of lawyers and holding people accountable for women being treated fairly and given opportunities.
It also calls on firms to measure and track how they're progressing in the promotion of women.
"The focus is on actions — what specific actions the firms can take to advance women and enhance their own leadership structure," said Stephanie Scharf, a partner in New York-based Schoeman Updike & Kaufman's Chicago office who chaired the committee that assembled 110 legal leaders last November in Washington to contribute to the report.
While some of the recommendations are not new, the authors say that they offer ways pre-existing tools can be more effective and suggest that firms need to use more of the tools than they have in the past. The report gives firm leaders a blueprint to effect change, said Holly English, NAWL's president.
"The single most important thing is that leaders at the top of law firms endorse these practices," said English, an attorney at Post, Polak, Goodsell, MacNeill & Strauchler in Roseland, N.J.
Among the fresher tips is incentivizing senior partners to assign high-profile matters to women, pass along important clients to them in succession situations and share credit with them for successes. To the extent that senior attorneys take such actions, they should be recognized for it in annual evaluations and rewarded with additional compensation, the report said.
The report emphasized that business development is key to women advancing in firms. Pushing equal opportunities for pitching, networking and marketing clients as well as broad attribution of credit for successes is critical to helping women get the work, pay and recognition that will advance their careers, the report said. The report suggested setting up an "oversight committee" to resolve disputes regarding proper attribution of credit.
"Law firms continue to struggle with processes and procedures and protocol that would recognize the contributions of many team members," said Lynn Grayson, a partner at Jenner & Block who leads the Chicago-based firm's women's forum.
With respect to mentoring and training junior female attorneys, the report urged senior male colleagues to participate because there are more of them than senior female colleagues. Part of the firm's task is to train senior male attorneys on how to feel comfortable working with women, and not fearing that such relationships will be seen as improper.
To keep women from leaving firms, the report encouraged creating programs that allow more flexible work schedules and installing a coordinator to see that the commitments to the individual and the firm are both honored.
"Firms in the past have been saying all the right things, of course; the execution of this is much more difficult," said Jerry Clements, one of the few women in the country to lead a major firm, Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell.
Clements, who didn't work on the NAWL report, said her firm is trying to pursue some of the ideas. For instance, Locke Lord is making its flex-time program more structured and less of a stigma for those who use it, Clements said. The firm is also starting to take diversity issues into consideration for compensation, even though it's difficult to translate that into dollars, she said.
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