Solving Biglaw’s Gender Gap

Imagine you are a woman in your first month at a large law firm. Imagine that you escape the office to attend your daughter’s dance recital, and that when it ends, you find your phone littered with missed calls from the female chair of your new firm. If you expected to hear a friendly voice interested in your daughter’s performance on your voicemail, you chose the wrong profession. Instead, when you return those calls, you are scolded for being unavailable and told emphatically to never turn your phone off again.

That is a true story. It’s a disturbing one, but not unusual in the world of Biglaw—if you’ve spent time in or around large law firms, you know scores of women with similar anecdotes. I repeat it here because it is so representative of a message that women continuously receive at the highest levels of the profession: you can work here or care for your family, but don’t expect to do both. This particular scenario happened to involve a woman working for a woman—a dynamic that presents its own unique issues, as a female colleague pointed out to me—but the problem is bigger than that.

The message sent to the woman above is just one contributor to a broader “gender gap” that has plagued the profession, negatively impacting the compensation, retention, and advancement of talented female lawyers for years. The gender gap is a frustrating problem, all the more so because it has persisted despite being the subject of significant attention (or at the least, lip service) over the last few decades. Whatever its other failings, the legal profession does not lack for intelligent problem solvers. And yet, anecdotes like the above remain commonplace. Hard statistics—like the fact that fewer than 20 percent of partners in large law firms are women—are even more telling of just how far we have to go.

The time has passed to get mad about the gender gap. But the time has not passed to do something about it. Fortunately, an influential contingent of the Biglaw community will be gathering at Stanford next month to do just that.

The event is called the Women in Law Hackathon. I’m thankful that Bloomberg Law will be part of it, having myself regretfully watched more than one female law school classmate give up a partnership at an elite New York firm because those firms could not accommodate the needs of working mothers. The stories they tell—one friend installed a playpen in her office in order to be in the company of her child—can be painful to hear. That’s speaking as a man who has benefitted from Biglaw’s failure to retain women (Bloomberg Law Vice President and General Manager Melanie Heller, for instance, was formerly with large New York firms). I can only imagine how enraging the “gender gap” is to those it affects more personally.

Certainly, there are some obvious reasons why the gender gap has proved difficult to close in the legal profession. First and foremost, sophisticated firms pride themselves on being available to clients whenever and wherever needed. Many firms publicly boast of their 24/7 accessibility. It’s an ethos that, at least on its surface, feels incompatible with the demands of parenthood—or at least primary caregiving.

Second, corporate clients have not demanded more change. In my frustration over the gender gap, I recently asked Aric Press, former editor in chief of the American Lawyer and now partner at Bernero & Press, if law firms were genuinely committed to addressing the problem. He answered with a definitive maybe, but noted that sustained serious pressure from corporate clients would really move the needle. “So public relations haven’t changed things,” I asked, “but public companies could?” Aric agreed. When clients demand, firms adapt.

None of this, of course, excuses law firms for the continued existence of a gender gap. Whatever explanations exist, the fact is that law firms have proven adaptable when faced with problems they truly want to fix. Since just the recent recession, law firms have actively deleveraged, developed a new class of employees (non-partner track associates), moved back offices to low-cost jurisdictions, outsourced certain work, and created other new roles and structures.

Now, it’s time to apply the profession’s adaptability and creativity to the cause of gender parity. At Women in Law Hackathon, nine different teams will compete in a Shark Tank-like format, presenting ideas aimed at improving the retention and advancement of women in Biglaw. Representatives from 54 different firms are participating, and two thirds of the participants are managing partners, practice group chairs, or others in leadership positions.

Each of the nine teams of nine will include two thought leaders on talent and diversity issues, as well as one Stanford law student, further diversifying the perspectives.

Bloomberg Law will be awarding prize money to the top three teams. (More precisely, prizes of $10,000, $7,500, and $5,000 will go to the winning teams’ choice of non-profit organizations advancing women in the legal profession and beyond.) I don’t have the solution to closing the gender gap, but I will be thrilled to be hear lots of new ideas for doing so as one of the judges.

It’s time for us to stop imagining horror stories, and instead, imagine new possibilities for women in Biglaw.

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David Perla is the President of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg BNA’s Legal division. Perla plays a key leadership role in the continued growth of the company’s legal business, which includes legal, legislative, and regulatory news analysis and the flagship Bloomberg Law technology platform. You can reach David at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @davidperla.