The 50 Best Law Firms For Women (2017)

Congratulations to all of the law firms that made this important ranking!

Year in and year out, we watch law firm after law firm pay lip service to their commitment to diversity in the legal profession, with promises to put women attorneys on equal footing with their male counterparts, whether it be through hiring and retaining more women attorneys, promoting more women attorneys to equity partnership ranks, providing more leadership positions to women attorneys, or adopting more family-friendly policies to ensure that women attorneys are able to excel at their jobs while maintaining a stable work/life balance. Despite these assurances, and despite the fact that a number of firms have made great efforts to improve women’s stature in the law, there is still more to be done.

Today, Working Mother released its annual list of the 50 Best Law Firms for Women. These law firms are considered pioneers in the field when it comes to attracting, retaining, and promoting women lawyers. These law firms not only stand out as being family-friendly workplaces, but they also ensure that women shine in their equity partnership ranks.

With on-campus interview season coming up soon, these law firms are places you might want to work. Which firms made the cut for this year’s ranking?

To earn themselves a spot on the Working Mother Best Law Firms list, self-selected applicant firms with 50 or more lawyers must complete an extensive application (usually around 300 questions long) with topics ranging from workforce profile, flexibility, and development and retention of women. Working Mother then selected the 50 best firms based on data provided by those firms from the year 2016. Subha Barry, senior vice president and managing director of Working Mother Media, told us that there were some changes made with regard to the 2017 rankings methodology. “This year, we gave additional weight to firms with great female equity partner numbers,” she said. “We also removed the questions regarding flex-time specifically because we found that as time went on, these questions resonated with fewer and fewer firms. We still ask many questions about other flexible work arrangements, including working remotely and working reduced hours.”

Here are some of the interesting results gleaned from Working Mother’s study:

• Over the last 10 years, the percentage of equity partners who are women has increased to 20% from 16%, and the percentage of nonequity partners who are women has grown to 30% from 22% at the Best Law Firms. This year, the Best Law Firms employ more female equity partners (20%) than the national average (18%).

• Among their Top 10 rainmakers, 83% of the top firms have at least one woman.

• Since last year, the number of paid weeks of maternity leave offered at the Best Law Firms increased one week, to an average of 16 weeks. Yet the average number of weeks of maternity leave taken by lawyer moms stayed the same, at 14. An average of 8 weeks of paid paternity leave was offered, with an average of 4 weeks taken.

• A majority (53%) of all lawyers at the top firms report working remotely. This makes remote work, which is offered by all of the winning firms, the most popular flex option among both male and female lawyers at every level.

Women have made great progress at Biglaw firms in recent years, but which firms have been most receptive to their advancement? Here’s the list of the 50 Best Law Firms for Women in 2017 (in alphabetical order):

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Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer
Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz
Baker McKenzie
Blank Rome
Chapman and Cutler
Cooley
Crowell & Moring
Davis Wright Tremaine
Dentons US
DLA Piper
Dorsey & Whitney
Drinker Biddle & Reath
Faegre Baker Daniels
Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner
Fisher Phillips
Foley & Lardner
Fox Rothschild
Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz
Fredrikson & Byron
Goodwin
Gray Plant Mooty
Hanson Bridgett
Hogan Lovells
Holland & Hart
Hunton & Williams
Husch Blackwell
Ice Miller
Katten Muchin Rosenman
King & Spalding
Kirkland & Ellis
Latham & Watkins
Lindquist & Vennum
Littler Mendelson
Manatt, Phelps & Phillips
McDermott Will & Emery
McGuireWoods
Morrison & Foerster
Norton Rose Fulbright
O’Melveny & Myers
Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe
Perkins Coie
Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman
Quarles & Brady
Reed Smith
Schiff Hardin
Seyfarth Shaw
Shook, Hardy & Bacon
Sidley Austin
WilmerHale
Winston & Strawn LLP

For analysis of issues pertaining to women in the Biglaw workforce — like promotion rates, usage rates for flex-time hours, and the number of women represented in a firm’s top 10 rainmakers — click here to see the study’s executive summary. For ratings on all of the firms on the list, click here.

Congratulations are in order for the 39 firms returning to the list this year: Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer; Baker McKenzie; Cooley; Crowell & Moring; Davis Wright Tremaine; DLA Piper; Dorsey & Whitney; Faegre Baker Daniels; Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner; Foley & Lardner; Fox Rothschild; Fredrikson & Byron; Goodwin; Gray Plant Mooty; Hanson Bridgett; Hogan Lovells; Holland & Hart; Ice Miller; Katten Muchin Rosenman; King & Spalding; Kirkland & Ellis; Latham & Watkins; Littler Mendelson; Manatt, Phelps & Phillips; McDermott Will & Emery; McGuireWoods; Morrison & Foerster; Norton Rose Fulbright; O’Melveny & Myers; Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe; Perkins Coie; Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman; Quarles & Brady; Reed Smith; Schiff Hardin; Seyfarth Shaw; Shook, Hardy & Bacon; Sidley Austin; and WilmerHale. Way to represent your women attorneys!

For what it’s worth, some firms that placed on the Yale Law Women’s list of the Top 10 Most Family-Friendly Firms (Cleary Gottlieb; Jenner & Block; Munger Tolles; Proskauer; and Simpson Thacher) were nowhere to be found on this year’s list. Similarly, 25 firms that received Gold Standard certification from the Women in Law Empowerment Forum, an achievement measuring benchmarks in women’s power, pay, and prestige, were left off of this year’s list entirely. Last, but certainly not least, a handful of firms from Law360’s Glass Ceiling Report — the firms with the with the highest ratio of female equity partners to male equity partners in the United States — were excluded from this year’s list.

As hard as it is to find a Biglaw firm that will promote a respectful number of women to partnership, pay them handsomely, and offer family-friendly benefits — all at the same time — it’s apparently even harder to find a list that will measure all of those important characteristics at once. Women are presented with financial rankings, family-friendly rankings, and one ranking that purports to cover both of those areas but fails to capture all of the data available.

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We’ve made this suggestion a few times in the past, but it bears repeating: Please, please get together to compare notes with all of the women in law affinity groups that publish law firm rankings. Young women still in law school are using these lists for guidance when starting their Biglaw careers, and it can get very confusing. Please consider this before you roll out next year’s lists — because if you don’t come up with an optimal ranking system, someone else will.

Now we’ll turn this discussion over to our readers. If your firm didn’t make the cut, do you think it should have? If your firm did make the cut, was it deserved? What can be done to improve work/life balance for women and working mothers? If you’d like to let us know what you think, you can email us, text us at (646) 820-8477, or tweet us @atlblog. Congratulations to all of the law firms that made this important ranking! We hope to see your names again next year.

The 2017 Working Mother 50 Best Law Firms for Women [Working Mother]

Earlier: The ATL Law Firm Gender Diversity Index (2016)


Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky has been an editor at Above the Law since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.