Last week, the ABA Journal reported on Judge Kimba Wood’s Order denying (in part) the firm’s motion for summary judgment and permitting the case to proceed to trial.  A New York Law Journal article reports the fact in more detail than the ABA Journal’s summary:

The judge said remarks by Cohen Pontani managing partner Martin B. Pavane that Collins was insufficiently “sweet” in dealing with a paralegal “could be construed as reflecting discriminatory animus.”

“A reasonable jury could find that Pavane’s statement indicates that (1) he holds stereotypes that women should be ’sweet’ and non-aggressive, and (2) that Pavane believed that Plaintiff did not fit this stereotype,” Wood wrote in Collins v. Cohen Pontani Lieberman & Pavane, 04 Civ. 8983.

Collins joined 30-lawyer Cohen Pontani as a litigation associate in 1997. . . . 

According to her November 2004 complaint, Collins was told in 1999 that she would never be promoted to partner, despite positive reviews, because the partners, all of whom were then men, were “uncomfortable” with her. The firm’s Web site currently lists two female partners.

Collins claims she was thereafter passed over for work assignments that were instead given to male associates. This allegedly led to her having low billable hours, which the firm then cited in denying her salary increases.

On Sept. 16, 2003, Collins sent an e-mail to Cohen Pontani partners citing an article about the potential benefits of having women serve as lead counsel in patent litigation. She said Cohen Pontani was “behind the times” because women lawyers at the firm were not being given positions of responsibility.

She was terminated on Sept. 18, 2003. The firm claims it fired Collins that day because she sent a series of “insulting and unprofessional” e-mails to lawyers and paralegals distinct from her Sept. 16 message. According to Cohen Pontani, Collins had a history of clashing with other lawyers and staff and the Sept. 18 e-mails were the “last straw.”

While the suit itself is interesting, the ABA Journal report produced comments that are fascinating.  Many of the comments are brief, concluding that the firm did discriminate against Collins or that a woman who is criticized for being insufficiently “sweet” is no worse off than a man who is criticized for being insufficiently “masculine.”  A few of the comments purport to share stories from women lawyers who were faced similar situations and yet made partner at their firms.  One woman reports being the only woman left from her class by her 5th year of practice and realizing that more junior male associates received preferential treatment:

Later, of course, when I realized what was going on and that the partners weren’t going to lift a finger to help me – and in fact, said that the reason for the problem must be that I wasn’t “nice” – I did get angry. Then, I admit, I wasn’t “sweet”; I came to the conclusion that I could get my job done, or I could have all the staff think I was “nice”, and since their behavior was unfair, I was not so worried about them liking me so I’d get my job done. Nonetheless, this is an impossible position to be in. At one point, our head of secretarial services, the person who was responsible for instructing the staff on what their jobs were and how to do it, explained to me that she fully sympathized with staff who didn’t want to work for women, because after all, they shouldn’t have to do menial work for women. I repeated this to the supervising partner; he thought it was funny . . . .

While it’s easy to line up (largely anonymously) either for or against Collins on the basis of only a small amount of information about the case and the evidence, the comments — and the amount of time the responders took to share their comments — are striking.  I’m inclined to agree with the several commentors who suggested that the case will likely settle and so we’ll learn nothing more, but the conversation is, nonethless, fascinating.

I’ve worked with assistants (plural!) who’ve told me flat out they prefer not to work for women, and I’ve seen a number of women succeed in law firms (of various sizes) apparently without facing substantial gender-based issues.  Anyone care to comment here?

Rob Hockett offers simple advice on retirement issues in Through the Looking Glass: Why Many of Your Retirement Assumptions Are Wrong.  Retirement may seem lightyears away, but acting as if that’s the case is (in my financially uneducated opinion) a mistake.  I appreciated Rob’s article because it provides some benchmarks that anyone can use to begin getting a handle on what needs to happen to make a reasonably comfortable retirement a real possibility.

Sheryl Sisk Schelin gives terrific advice on Leaving Your Employer to Launch Your Solo Practice, most of which is absolutely applicable (with a few adjustments, of course) for leaving one firm to join another. 

Facts presented in Carl Cooper’s Women  Attorneys of Color Work Under a Sword of Damocles surprised me greatly.  Articles over the last few years have demonstrated that women attorneys of color face special challenges in the profession, but I was astonished to read that, according to NALP, 100% of African-American women have left their firm by the 8th year of practice.  This article presents some steps toward a solution, though clearly this is a deeply ingrained and multifacted issue.

Stephanie West Allen, Victoria Pynchon, Gini Nelson, and Diane Levin discuss The Human Factor and how lessons learned in mediation and negotiation can be applied more broadly to your life and work.

For those thinking of leaving the practice: Monica Parker presents seven reasons to leave the law in Before You Choose Your Exit Strategy, Choose to Exit.  (The article is an excerpt from her book (to be published this month!) Unhappy Lawyer: A Roadmap to Finding Meaningful Work Outside of the Law.)  And Anne Whitaker offers an insightful self-assessment to help determine not only whether leaving practice is the thing to do but also what might be a better choice.

And finally (for now, anyway), I wrote an article discussing three common challenges law firm associates face (”I made a mistake and I’m not sure I can recover,” “They must not like me,” and “I’m not advancing professionally”) and how both associates and their firms might work to resolve those challenges.  I’ve seen lawyers leave when they needn’t have, and I’ve seen them hang on when they shouldn’t have.  Should I Stay. . . or Should I Go? is intended to provide guidance in each of those situations as well as in others.

I would like to highlight most every article in this issue, and I may highlight more in a later post.  Do yourself a favor and check out all of the fine articles.  There’s such diversity among them that you’re sure to find one that speaks to you.

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The latest issue of The Complete Lawyer addresses this question through the eyes of a number of authors.  Time doesn’t permit me to highlight all of the articles that so richly deserve to be highlighted, but here are a few selections:

Holly English (president of the National Association of Women Lawyer) writes, “We’ve been talking about gender issues for 20 years. Enough already with cataloguing the problems!  Let’s see some progress!”  Progress would include equal pay, reasonable hours, and adequate numbers of women in leadership positions.  The bottom line: “Increasingly, younger practitioners are voting with their feet, preferring a workplace that is sympathetic to lifestyle considerations rather than those that view young associates as replaceable widgets. This brings pressure on the profession as it attempts to attract and retain the best and brightest. The only way to do so will be to be responsive to these concerns.”

Paulette Brown writes, “Women Lawyers Want What Every Other Lawyer Wants: Success with all its attendant components.”  So, what challenges stand in the way?  “Consider three generally accepted principles for success: work ethic, presentation and relationship building. Long established vestiges of our society, such as traditional gender roles and expectations, the male/woman power dynamic and institutional biases, add another layer of complexity to these challenges. These factors are prevalent within society in general, but are particularly prevalent within the legal profession.”

My answer to the question is summarized quickly: Women lawyers want the whole enchilada.  That means succeeding in the practice of law, doing so in ways that draw on their unique strengths and perspectives, and having the freedom to succeed and to make a professional contribution in a way that fairly honors their choices about whether to have a family and, if so, how to manage those demands.

I’d like to highlight other articles, and may do so in the next several days.   But if you’re interesting in what matters to women lawyers, you must read this issue of The Complete Lawyer.

And, I’d like to share a celebration with you: I learned last week that I’ve received the ACC credential (Associate Certified Coach) from the International Coach Federation.  While I’m the first to admit that the path to that credential was nothing like as onerous as getting my license to practice or becoming registered to practice before the Patent Office, it’s a significant accomplishment nonetheless — especially in light of the fact that only about a quarter of ICF members are currently credentialled, and many, many other coaches aren’t ICF members at all.  I know some excellent coaches who aren’t credentialled, so I help certainly don’t intend to cast any aspersions there!  But I’m quite pleased, and happy to share the news with you.  I learned in practice to celebrate at least briefly whenever an opportunity arises, especially since those moments can be awfully fleeting, and I follow that habit today.

Now, on to the legal news!

Leading BigLaw Leaders to Lead  That’s the title of a recent article from the New York Lawyer.  (Free registration required.)  The article offers a nice overview of some of the leadership training alternatives in which law firms are now investing, ranging from one-on-one coaching to in-hour training to multi-day programs at major universities, including Harvard and the Wharton School.  It raises a few warning bells:

Paul Zwier, a professor at Emory University School of Law [and] author of the book Supervisory and Leadership Skills in the Modern Law Practice (National Institute for Trial Advocacy, 2006), said that in some cases leadership training can serve as an “opium of the masses.”

In other words, what some firms call “leadership training” in reality is a way to get lawyers on board with a firm’s strategy, rather than truly honing leadership skills.

Dubbing it “leadership training” can make participants more willing to sign on to a program and feel more valued if they think that they are recognized as special. However, Zwier said that even lawyers without supervisory duties within a firm need leadership skills, since such skills are necessary in dealing with clients.

And, as recognized by Larry Richard, an attorney and psychologist with Hildebrandt International:

To truly change behavior, training must include much more than a few days at an impressive school, Richard said. He divides programs into two categories: conceptual education and skills-based education. Conceptual education models are the popular “boot-camp” executive programs offered at prestigious schools that use mainly the case-study method. Those programs are valuable, he said, but limited. Attorneys also need long-term training, or skills-based education, to enhance specific leadership behaviors, which are more readily measurable.

I’m a proponent of leadership development work (both training and coaching) for lawyers.  Some might question whether expenditures on such “non-essentials” can be justified, especially in today’s economic climate.  My answer is, not surprisingly, absolutely.  More on why in a future post.

If leadership interests you, I invite you to receive my complimentary weekly email newsletter, Leadership Matters for Lawyers.  Each month, you receive 2 articles on aspects of leadership, a book review, and quotations and other resources pertinent to leadership.  My goal is to present material that will assist you in your own leadership development and that you can apply right away to increase your client service and development skills and your satisfaction with your practice.  Sign up here.

It’s About Time II  The Georgia Association for Women Lawyers released its study of flexible and part-time work arrangements this week, following up on the 2004 initial study.  From the Executive Summary:

Results from this study suggest that it is about time. Few working professionals feel the “time crunch” more acutely than attorneys. Billable hours requirements render the business of law virtually all about time. Should it be any wonder then that the issue of time would weigh so heavily in attorneys’ evaluation of the work they do? Our findings indicate that the availability of flexible and part-time work arrangements is extremely important to male and female attorneys alike. Regardless of whether they themselves plan on taking advantage of such policies, attorneys place a high value on the availability of flexible and/or reduced-time work at their firm. Isn’t it about time that firms recognize that value as well?

Interest in flexible and part-time arrangements is particularly strong among women attorneys. Reduced-time work options are so highly valued that women are willing to exit employment to find more flexible work arrangements. Indeed, firms that provide formal, written policies governing part-time work arrangements enjoy higher retention rates of women lawyers and firms that maintain a successful part-time program reap the rewards of retaining highly satisfied, highly motivated, and highly committed attorneys.

The study is based on surveys completed by 84 Georgia law firms, and the results fall squarely in line with national results: flexible and part-time options are important to lawyers, many firms don’t have written policies to solidify those options, many lawyers are concerned that taking part-time or flex status is a career-limiting move, and there’s evidence to support that concern. 

The full report is almost 100 pages long.  The Executive Summary is 3 pages.  It’s well worth a read.  GAWL and Kilpatrick Stockton are presenting a panel to discuss the findings on March 20 in Atlanta.

Your personal Board of Directors  I always recommend that lawyers develop a group of mentors.  Did you notice that’s mentors, plural?  Because each mentoring relationship is unique, I find that those who have multiple mentors realize significant benefit.  And mentors need not be in your firm or city (indeed, some mentors absolutely should be “external”) or even in your profession.  Collectively, this group of mentors forms your personal board of directors.  Wondering how to fill all the spots?  Michael Melcher, author of The Creative Lawyer (which is on my list of books to review here) has suggested finding people with 25 attributes and narrowing down the nominees to a group of 6 to 10 “board members.”  Attributes include:

4.    Can give you encouragement in tough times
5.    Can talk to you straight about your weaknesses
20.    Gives good advice about office politics
21.    Gives good advice about professional development
22.    Gives good advice about how to get ahead
23.    Thinks you are great at what you do
24.    Thinks you have great talents other than your present career

Check out the whole list.  You may be surprised.

While considering a theme for this week’s Blawg Review, it struck me that lawyers do not spend as much time aimlessly meandering the web as would, for instance, a typical air traffic controller. As a result, most lawyers are woefully detached from the Zeitgeist embodied in the lowly Internet meme. An Internet meme is any amusing video, email, picture, audio clip or other material that spreads virally across the internet. Unlike computer viruses, which spread based upon how many paint chips the people opening them consumed in their youth, Internet memes spread based upon how entertaining viewers find them.

Although blawgers are more aware of Internet memes than your average lawyer, blawgers still find there are not enough hours to stay up to date with each new version of someone reenacting the Thriller video at a wedding. To save you from this critical legal research, I assiduously complied several of the most popular memes for you. While the list might not necessarily “make” your day, at least it might maintain your work/life balance in sufficient equilibrium to stave off the rubber room for another week. The list is not comprehensive, but it is the best I can muster without being served pre-marital divorce papers. For those of you true professional Internet slackers, swing by memelabs and test your meme IQ.

It’s a fun way to organize some of the week’s blawg posts, and it’s certainly worth a read.

What women lawyers think of each other. Or not.  I was all ready to blawg about the recent ABA Journal article titled What Women Lawyers Really Think of Each Other.  The results (presented primarily with graphics in the print magazine) were interesting, suggesting that women under 40 think male supervisors give better direction, give better constructive criticism, and are better at keeping confidential information private.  Women over 40 were reported as believing that women take directions and constructive criticism better than men and have better discretion than men.  And then, just as I was beginning to compose my thoughts, I noticed the critical modifier to each set of results: 58% of respondents said that gender doesn’t matter, and the cited statistics came from the 42% who expressed a preference for working with either men or women.  Sometimes it isn’t the story that matters, but rather the story behind the story.

The article’s title hit me also: law firms let women forge their own way(s)?  My impression is more along the lines that women have been working and seeking improvement within the profession (and especially in large law firms) not to mention leaving private practice in droves, and I’m not quite sure how that translates to law firms letting women do much of anything.  But, I (perhaps) digress. 

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Published in 2003, the book offers best practices in the following areas:

*  Culture
*  Marketing
*  Internal women’s groups
*  Networking
*  Work assignments
*  Management participation
*  Compensation

The Best Practices Summary (5 pages) lists concrete steps that firms (and, often, corporations with legal staff) can implement to provide a setting and structure that supports women in advancing their legal careers.  The recommendations can be boiled down into a few overarching principles:

1.  Create a women’s initiative and/or diversity plan that has buy-in from top management.  Set policies and procedures to encourage promotion of women and work/life integration, and survey to determine how effective these programs are.

2.  Make sure women are exposed to the firm’s clients, to other lawyers in the firm (for cross-selling and referrals), and to networking and marketing events that are successful for business development.

3.  Create mentoring groups and other opportunities for women to interact with other women in the firm.

4.  Design a system to ensure that work is fairly assigned and measure group leaders’ success in part based on the career development of the lawyers they supervise.

5.  Ensure that women have a seat on management and compensation committees.

For women seeking professional advancement, the tips may be summaried as follows:

1.  Be assertive.  Ask for the work you want, the firm leadership positions you desire, the marketing opportunities and client exposure necessary to advance.

2.  Be aware.  Know who’s in power, know who’s handling which clients, and know what the situation is for other women in your firm/practice area/geographic area.

3.  Develop mentors who can guide you on your career path.

4.  Be assertive and ask for what you need and want.  (Repetition for emphasis of key theme.)

This book offers a wealth of resources for those seeking action items and concrete steps that can be implemented.  If you’re looking for more of a discussion of themes, experiences, and findings, you will likely want something beyond this book; even so, I’d recommend that any woman in practice or in law school (and every law firm leader of either gender) read Empowerment and Leadership.  It’s even available as a PDF download, so you could skim it tonight.   For $25 and maybe an hour and a half, it’s a no-lose proposition. �

10. Your nameplate is your shingle. Remembering this mantra will help you learn how to operate in the firm setting. In many ways, you are a solo practitioner, and the partners and senior associates in the office are your clients. Think about what makes these clients want to hire you — consistently good work, value-added creativity and efficiency. Run your office so that you can deliver this type of work product to your clients every day.

How did a small IP firm build a 54% female partnership?  One of the interesting things about having practiced patent law is the overwhelming male domination in the field — though that’s changing.  So I took notice of this article about Lahive & Cockfeld, a 30-lawyer IP firm in Boston that boasts 7 women in a 13-member partnership.  Lahive represents clients such as Biogen Idec, Navartis, and Wyeth and bills over $30 million annually.  It has created a flexible compensation system that rewards lawyers for billing as well as business generation, client maintenance and associate mentoring, and the firm offers a work/life balance-friendly work structure:

“We didn’t want to encourage attorneys building their own practice in isolation,” said Giulio A. DeConti Jr., chairman of the executive committee. “We wanted to encourage being like a firm.”

Lahive fully embraces the notion of full-time flexibility, or allowing attorneys to vary their hours and office time while juggling a full workload.

Today, seven of Lahive & Cockfield’s 13 partners are women and a full pipeline of women are waiting to move up the ranks, including 67 percent of its patent agents and 58 percent of its technical specialists. Patent agents, who can represent patent applicants at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and technical specialists typically have advanced science or technical degrees and are usually attending law school part time. The firm has 18 patent agents and technical specialists.

Work/life fit:  As regular readers of this blog know, I continue to struggle with the term “work/life balance” and seek something more descriptive of the real situation — because “balance” just isn’t it.  I was delighted to discover “work+life fit inc.”, whose tagline is “It’s Fit, Not Balance.”  The company has recently sponsored a survey of 900 adults who work full time, with the following finding:

When asked what is the single most important change they would make to their jobs, respondents (51%) chose options that entailed working differently over making more money. When considering a different work style, 35 percent of those surveyed rated flexibility as most important and 16 percent rated responsibilities that better use their talents.

Of the 35 percent who chose flexibility, only 5 percent said reducing their schedule by more than 10 hours was most important. This was equal for men and women and counters previous research suggesting more people are interested in “part-time” employment. Working the same number of hours but with a more flexible schedule was most important to 13 percent, while 10 percent would opt to cut their schedule by 1 to 10 hours and 7 percent would prefer to work from a location outside the office.

“The perpetuating myths that people want to work significantly fewer hours and that work life flexibility means working less are simply not true,” said [Cali Williams] Yost [president of Work+Life Fit, Inc.].  “Most employees don’t want to work less, they just want to work differently in a way that better utilizes their talents or is a better fit with the rest of their lives’ demands and desires.”

I found one of the most encouraging findings to be the following.

Predictors of High Originations
    *  Years of legal practice
    *  Time spent doing business development each month
    *  Using a targeted approach to business development
    *  Participation in pitch groups
    *  Cross-selling other firm services
    *  Asking clients for introductions to others who may need legal services

The report addresses a variety of women’s client development obstacles, some self-imposed and some resulting from limitations or perceived limitations imposed by the law firms in which the women practice.  Nevertheless, reading the report impressed upon me the benefits of some activities that any woman can undertake or begin immediately.

The report contains a great deal of information.  Any woman who’s interested in client development should read it, as should law firm leaders who’d like to support the business development opportunities their female lawyers may cultivate.

Bruce MacEwen of Adam Smith, Esq. offers a fascinating interview with Bruce Stachenfeld of Duval & Stachenfeld, a New York-based firm that’s made the news recently with its unusual compensation plan.  The firm pays first-year lawyers $60,000 and calls them “opportunity associates.”  The pay goes to $80,000 after 9 months and then increases semi-annually in $10,000 increments.  After 2 years (and sometimes earlier) successful associates are promoted to “full associate” level, at which point the pay is equivalent to Cravath’s pay plus $10,000.  The Adam Smith interview offers the back story on how the program came to be and how it’s working.  Fascinating.

Steve Seckler of Counsel to Counsel reminds lawyers that “success in the legal profession means having the ability to generate work and the best place to look for work in the future is by keeping up the relationship with existing clients today.”  Cultivate those relationships!

Current or recent job-seekers have no doubt dealt with the question of what constitutes an appropriate writing sample.  Eugene Volokh of  The Volokh Conspiracy started an interesting conversation about the Ethics of Writing Samples recently, springing from a junior associate’s question about what can be used as a sample without requesting the firm’s permission (and thus tipping the job-search news).  The comments touch on ethics, copyright law, opinions drafted by law clerks and their use as writing samples, and more.  As one commenter observed, “what I find interesting is that people cling strongly to conflicting opinions. In practice, this seems to mean that whatever an applicant does is likely to result in a significant percentage of employers eliminating him for it, even though other employers would have eliminated him for not doing it. Wonderful!”

And Orin Kerr, also of The Volokh Conspiracy, posted Fewer Women Seeking Law Degrees,which cites an article from The National Law Journal reporting that the percentage of women in law school has declined each year since 2002.  While the drop isn’t precipitous (46.9% this year as opposed to 49% in 2002), it is significant.  The article speculates that “fewer women want a lawyer’s life.”  The comments spin off into a discussion of legal “jerkiness,” including which gender exhibits more of it and who will and won’t tolerate it in others. 

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The deadline is approaching!  Please visit this post for information about joining a free teleclass titled Five Foundations of Time Management for Attorneys on Thursday, October 11, 2007.  If you’d prefer, you can also sign up to attend and to receive the recording of the call (as well as a few other reasources, which all together comprise the Life at the Bar Survival Kit) by visiting this page of my website.  I hope you’ll join us!