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.
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