Litigators, Women's Issues

Calling Out The Boys' Club

Most professional women are familiar with the feeling.

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Businessmen beside wall outdoors with woman on other sideIt’s a familiar refrain — that an industry is a “Boys’ Club.” I’m sure many different types of women attorneys have felt it about their own little corner of the legal world. A recent study, presented at an invitation-only conference held by Duke Law’s Center for Judicial Studies, calls out the lack of parity in appointed lead plaintiffs’ attorneys in multidistrict litigation.

The numbers, they aren’t great. As reported by Law.com, the study found women in plaintiff-side leadership roles in only 16.6 percent of cases:

Women plaintiffs lawyers made up only 16.6 percent of the attorneys appointed class counsel or to plaintiffs steering committees in multidistrict litigations filed from 2011 to 2016, a new study found. However, in a sign of progress, the percentage of women in lead MDL roles jumped to 27.7 percent in 2015—an 11 percentage point increase over the five-year average.

Other depressing statistics highlighted by the study: of the 50 most frequently appointed plaintiffs lawyers for MDLs, a whopping 11 were women, and ninety-eight percent of MDLs have men among the lead counsel, while only half of the cases have women in those positions.

Dana Alvare, a lawyer and doctoral candidate in sociology who authored the study, stressed the need for these kind of hard numbers in order to better combat the problem:

“We needed data,” said Dana Alvare, a Pennsylvania lawyer and doctoral candidate in sociology at the conference and who authored the MDL study, Vying for the Lead in the Boys’ Club, for Temple University Law School’s Women in Legal Leadership Project.

“The enduring gender gap has not been going away, even though women have been graduating from law schools in the same numbers as men for 30 years,” Alvare said.

It is vital to get this issue in front of key decision makers — in this particular instance, judges:

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“We want to get this on the radar screen of key judges,” said John Rabiej, the director of the Duke Law Center for Judicial Studies. “If they make the appointments, then law firms and companies will follow.”

Judges have wide discretion to appoint lead counsel in MDLs, and they tend to give weight to attorneys who have had similar roles in the past, which can create a closed feedback loop, with little opportunity for outsiders to break in. Alvare also found in the course of her research that judges do not actively consider gender when making the appointments.

But some see a trend in the 2015 spike in women appointments to MDL plaintiff-side leadership roles. Elizabeth Cabraser, of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein and sole lead plaintiffs’ attorney in the Volkswagon emissions case, sees hope for the future:

“Womens’ progress has been invisible for years and now, finally, after years of supporting each other, we have the experience, talent and resources,” said Cabraser, who’s been in practice for 38 years.

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“I think there’s going to be a juggernaut,” she said, predicting that the percent of women in MDL leadership would jump to 35 percent next year. “We women are available now. We’re on a roll.”

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headshotKathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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