AmLaw Daily
Posted by Dimitra Kessenides
By Patricia Gillette
April 28, 2009 5:00 AM
Timing is everything.
Two years ago, I embarked on a study called The Opt In Project to look outside of the legal profession for examples of the successes and failures of retaining women and advancing them to leadership positions. At the time, I was a partner at Heller Ehrman. I had been working as a labor and employment lawyer for nearly 30 years and had started to believe that people in large law firms were too focused on part-time and mentoring/client development training programs as The Solution to the exodus of women from those firms.
Working with my colleague Anne Mercogliano (she was then a diversity coordinator at the firm), the hope was that our research would shed some light on the challenges faced by women in the legal profession and lead us to recommendations that might, over time, result in meaningful change.
Our findings were discouraging, interesting, surprising, and even hopeful. One point in particular made a strong impression on me. The factors that were pushing women away from law firms were the same ones cited by Gen Y lawyers entering the profession as important to their careers: a desire for a more balanced work life, even if that meant reduced pay. I was struck by the fact that the women voicing these concerns in law firms were seen as outliers; in corporations, the women were driving change.
In May, 2007, we published The Opt In Report (download the report here), presenting the argument that law firms must rethink their traditional structures in order to survive--from the way lawyers progress in their careers to the way clients are billed for services. Those changes, in turn, were needed to keep women in the profession.
Full Story: http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2009/04/women.html
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