The fourth annual Survey on Retention and Promotion of Women
in Law Firms by the National
Association of Women Lawyers is out and reports that:
women are significantly under-represented in the upper levels
of law firms and that the large majority of women who start as associates in
firms do not advance to equity partnership and even fewer become law firm
leaders. Male lawyers remain the most powerful and best compensated members of
firms, hold the vast majority of ownership shares, dominate firm governing
committees and represent the overwhelming number of major rainmakers in firms.
NAWL’s Survey annually tracks the professional progress of
women in the nation’s 200 largest law firms. Rainmaking was a major focus of
the 2009 Survey.
From the Survey:
We found the role of women as major rainmakers is
surprisingly weak. Almost half the firms – 46% – count no women
at all in their top 10 rainmakers. The fact that women do not play dominant
or even substantial roles in law firm rainmaking also impacts their prospects
for leadership and compensation. (emphasis mine)
And later:
Our data cannot tell us whether this underrepresentation is a
function of less aggressive rainmaking activities among women, or the result of
“inherited” clients of the firm flowing to men, whether women are given
opportunities to participate in business development on an equal footing with
men, whether women are receiving credit for business development at the same
rate as men, or if there is some other explanation for the observed
differences.
But the blogosphere is abuzz with possible explanations. The
Legal Intelligencer reports that Roberta Liebenberg, chairwoman of the
American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession, says she has
been working with other groups like the Minority Corporate Counsel Association
and the Project for Attorney Retention on the issue of women rainmakers. Those “groups
have heard anecdotally that women aren't always getting proper origination
credit and aren't inheriting clients from retiring partners proportionately to
men.”
From Above
the Law’s Elie Mystal:
My guess is that this is the kind of thing that gets sorted
out over time. As firms make more female partners and those partners become
more established, the contacts and the business should come over time. When you
are trying to change the ways of a long-established network, it just takes a
lot of time.
KJ
Dell'Antonia at XX says her male lawyer friends thought perhaps more women
tried to balance work and home life, meaning not enough time for rainmaking, or:
Put it in the category of "change that hasn't filtered
up yet." Top rainmaking men, they proposed, just haven't died out. Most
"new business" isn't really new, of course—law firms collect new
deals from the same old banks and clients, and those relationships, many established
decades ago, still persist.
But her female friends at top law firms:
noted the macho culture that still walks the walk at many top
firms—and at the offices of their clients. The men at the top are still more
comfortable hanging out with men, along with which goes the chest-thumping, the
desire to hold conversations that aren't exactly PC. One recalled men who
refused to socialize with women colleagues out of fear of what their wives
would say—which doesn't exactly encourage the kind of comfortable interaction that
leads people to want to continue working together. All of them tagged the
ruthless competition.
Whatever the reason, for now, at least, the rain at big law
firms falls mainly on the men.