We know there is a gender gap in Biglaw partnerships. But according to a new survey from the National Association of Women Lawyers, there is also a business generation gap between female and male partners. The Legal Intelligencer reports:

Whether this new statistic, measured in the latest survey by the National Association of Women Lawyers, can be seen as the fault of the firm or the fault of women lawyers themselves is a question the survey didn’t answer….

According to the survey results 46 percent of large law firms have no women at all among their top 10 rainmakers. Almost another third, or 32 percent, have only one woman on that list. About 15 percent of large firms have two women among their top rainmakers and 6 percent have three or four in the top 10. About 72 percent of large firms have no women at all among the top five rainmakers in the firm, the survey results showed.

“The results are astounding, even to those of us familiar with the dynamics of legal business development,” NAWL said in its report on the survey.

The raw data doesn’t provide a concrete reason for this gap. But there are a lot of theories.

It’s partner promotion season in Biglaw. This year, Sullivan & Cromwell is making five new partners — and four of them are women. Am Law Daily reports:

Firm chairman H. Rodgin Cohen attributes the growth in female partner ranks to policies, such as flex-time and maternity leave, aimed at promoting and retaining greater numbers of women, the NYLJ’s Nate Raymond reports.

“I think hopefully as we have more and more women joining us it will be the new normal,” Cohen said. “We certainly for a long time have been trying to promote more women and more minorities.”

Are diversity policies actually starting to work?

There is even more good news from this round of partner promotions. Three of the five new S&C partners are in corporate. Green shoots? That looks like a mighty bean stalk, Jack.

Female partners, corporate partners, this is all pretty good news for a Thursday.

S&C Promotes Five Associates—Including Four Women—to Partner [Am Law Daily]

Earlier: Can Remote Access Help Firms Make Female Partners?

There are firms that want to make more female partners (and minority partners for that matter), but honestly do not know how to make that happen. Retaining top female associates through a couple of years of around 3,000 billable hours is just difficult, especially if those women want to have a family.

Over on the WSJ Law Blog, Ashby Jones explores the female partner problem facing Clifford Chance:

The issue was the topic of an interesting article this week in the UK’s The Lawyer. The focus of the article was Clifford Chance, which has pledged to increase its percentage of female partners to 30 percent.

As the Lawyer reports, however, “the firm has a long way to go.” Currently, only 15 percent of its partnership is female.

The Lawyer article explains that there is no quick fix to the problem:

“There’s no one thing that will solve the problem,” says Childs. “There’s no quick fix. It’s a long-term goal that we’re very focused on. It’s something that all firms face and there are many ways you can approach it.”

Aggressively pursuing a dramatic increase in female partners is problematic, Childs argues. Firms need to find creative ways to change their cultures and encourage females to strive for partnership.

Give Clifford Chance some credit here. You aren’t going to fix this issue without confronting it head on.

While firms contemplate their cultural impediments to dramatic growth in female partnership , Patricia Gillette — who is a partner at Orrick — sees one simple change that could make eating the hours a little easier for all attorneys.

Here at Above the Law, we’ve reviewed a lot of employment discrimination complaints over the years. But this one is special.

The firm (like it matters):

Maron Marvel Bradley & Anderson.

The plaintiff:

Jennifer Braude.

Why you care:

Do I have your attention? Click after the jump for more details, plus Maron Marvel’s response.

Last month, I roundly criticized a receptionist for peeing on herself. She claimed that her employer wouldn’t allow her to take bathroom breaks. I argued that personal hygiene and basic self respect demanded that she use the bathroom and worry about suing the firm if they actually fired her for it.

A woman in Ohio was in a somewhat analogous situation. She needed additional bathroom breaks so she could go pump breast milk. Evidently her employer objected, but instead of just — I don’t know — leaking in the middle of the office, she took the breaks anyway. She was fired, she sued her company, and an Ohio court held that firing a new mother for taking breaks to pump breast milk wasn’t gender discrimination.

???

True/Slant has the trial court’s decision:

In its verdict in favor of Totes/Isotoner, the trial court found that:

“Allen gave birth over five months prior to her termination from [Isotoner]. Pregnant [women] who give birth and chose not to breastfeed or pump their breasts do not continue to lactate for five months. Thus, Allen’s condition of lactating was not a condition relating to pregnancy but rather a condition related to breastfeeding. Breastfeeding discrimination does not constitute gender discrimination.”

On appeal, the trial court’s decision was upheld. And there were women on the appellate panel. Details after the jump.

If you side with those who think baby-making is a good option these days, you’ll read this post with special interest. The Bulldogs have named the top ten pup-friendly Biglaw firms.

Here are the best firms for the family-minded according to the Yale Law Women:

Arnold & Porter
Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton
Covington & Burling
Jenner & Block
Katten Muchin Rosenman
Mayer Brown
Munger, Tolles & Olson
Patton Boggs
Sidley Austin
WilmerHale

Earlier this month, Working Mother named the 50 Best Law Firms for Women. Covington, Jenner, Katten, Munger, Sidley and WilmerHale have bragging rights for making their way onto both lists.

So what are the stats at these firms that earned them this distinction? Hint: Granting more than three months of maternity leave is a good start.

Working Mother magazine has released its annual review of law firms and named the 50 Best Law Firms for Women. No shame on these firms (unlike the one in our caption contest), at least when it comes to “flex-time, reduced-hour and other family-friendly policies”:

[O]ur winning firms have more lawyers working reduced hours (8 percent versus 5 percent nationwide) and also employ more female equity partners, who share in their firm’s profits (20 percent versus 16 percent nationwide)—and that’s just for starters. We salute these firms for recognizing that making the legal profession work for women is good business for everyone.

As pointed out by the ABA Journal:

A bad economy may be hurting law firms, but it’s opening up more flex-time opportunities for male as well as female lawyers.

Only one firm from the top five most prestigious — as ranked by Vault last year — made the cut.

Back in March 2008, we named Daniel Hynes our Lawyer of the Day. Hynes was convicted of theft by extortion after trying to shake down at least 19 New Hampshire hair salons by accusing them of gender and age discrimination (in the form of pricing haircuts differently for men, women, and children).

Now, a quick update, from the ABA Journal:

The New Hampshire Supreme Court has upheld the extortion conviction of a lawyer who threatened to sue a Concord hair salon for charging women more money for haircuts than men or children.

Daniel Hynes is identified as a Manchester lawyer and a 2006 graduate of the Western New England College School of Law in a story published by the Concord Monitor in March last year. A jury convicted him of theft by extortion after deliberating for only 1 ½ hours.

One and a half hours? Ouch. And Hynes didn’t fare better on appeal.

If you’re a minority female, you’ll likely say ba-bye to your firm within five years, says a study from Catalyst, a non-profit focused on women and business issues.

The organization recently released a report titled, “Women of Color in U.S. Law Firms:”

According to Catalyst’s Women of Color in U.S. Law Firms, women of color face complex barriers compared to other groups that may significantly decrease job satisfaction and increase the intent to leave their current firm—factors that affect a firm’s bottom line. The study is the fourth and final in Catalyst’s Women of Color in Professional Services Series examining how the “intersectionality,” or combined identities of gender and race/ethnicity, puts women of color at a unique disadvantage in the workplace. Despite widespread existence of systems created to develop and advance women of color, research has shown that more than 75 percent of these women will leave their employer within five years, costing an amount potentially greater than each person’s total salary and benefits.

The organization surveyed 1,242 lawyers and conducted focus groups with women of color—including Asian women, black women, and Latinas— and then produced a 72-page report [pdf]. Here’s the short version from the Chicago Sun-Times:

75% bail within 5 years due to barriers.

Female lawyers of color being flaky is maybe not exactly the message that Catalyst wanted to send.

We skimmed the report, and must say it’s a bit dry. We’ve extracted the juicier bits — mainly the individual stories — after the jump.

Since the recession began hitting the legal industry, we at Above the Law have received various reports alleging gender or racial discrimination when it comes time for firms to fire associates. Some of our sources have claimed that the rounds of layoffs have disproportionately affect women or racial minorities. Usually, these sources have sparse statistical evidence to back up their claims.

Conversely, other sources have claimed that the layoffs are disproportionately affecting white males. They claim that firms are loath to fire women or minorities, for fear of employment discrimination lawsuits. Again, these sources lack numbers to support their fears.

Well, this week we received some hard data.

In April we reported that Squire Sanders laid off around 30 associates. The final official number of layoffs turned out to be 32 attorneys. But of those 32 attorneys, 20 of them were women. It’s surprising to see 62.5% of firm layoffs affect women.

Did the Squire Sanders layoffs have a disparate impact on women? Of course, numbers don’t tell the full story. And Squire Sanders has some numbers of its own that helps to explain this situation.

Check out the details after the jump.

There is an interesting employment discrimination complaint coming out of Connecticut today. A local news anchor claims that she was discriminated against due to her age and gender by Fox 61 (which is owned by the Tribune Company).

The forty-year-old Shelly Sindland (pictured) claims that she was the most senior reporter at the local news channel. But she claims that prestigious assignments and promotional considerations were given to younger women. Sindland also alleges that the Fox 61 working environment was less than ideal.

When reached for comment by the Connecticut Employment Law Blog, Sindland’s attorney had this to say about her client’s situation:

As her complaint affidavit alleges, Fox 61 actively encourages younger women to ‘be sexy,’ and favors younger women and men of all ages over older, more experienced female on-air news professionals. It is always a difficult decision for someone who is still employed to file a complaint against their employer, particularly in this industry. The issues in the complaint have been raised by Shelly and others internally without any corrective action, however, and as a result, Shelly felt it was appropriate at this point to file a formal complaint with the Commission.

How inappropriate was the behavior at Fox 61? Sindland’s complaint alleges the following:

* On or about January 30, 2009, during a meeting with reporters and anchors, on information and belief, Rockstroh stated that the Friday newscasts looked like “Big Boob Fridays,” and that as a result of at least one female reporter wearing a tighter shirts on Fridays, the station’s ratings did well on Fridays. On information and belief, Graziano was present and stated “hey, whatever works.”

* On or about February 25, 2009 the respondent held a photo shoot for several of its news anchors to be used in promotional pieces. During this shoot, on information and belief, the female anchors were told to be more “sexy.” On information and belief, male anchors were not instructed to be sexy.

This complaint is definitely “hot.” After the jump we have more excerpts from the complaint, and of course, pictures.

Summer associates have landed at offices across the nation. They’re working harder this year, even if some of the work is fake, and they’re eating out less often. But the Biglaw recruits are still having fun — sometimes too much fun.

We’ve been asking you about the big events for this year’s summers — concerts, movie previews, booze cruises, etc. Look out for contest finalists soon!

Cadwalader may have already established itself as a front runner in the competition. Last week, the firm took its summers to see a Mets game. Afterwards, some of the attorneys and summers went from Shea to shady. [FN1] From a knowledgeable source:

After the game, some of the male associates took some of the male summers out for some “after-event” bonding. The problem with this bonding is that it was a trip to the strip club. I’m not sure if the firm knew about the afterparty event or if it was sanctioned by or expensed to the firm, but this certainly seems to send a message of exclusion to women; or at least — even if any female summers attended (which none did) — that the firm not only tolerated but supported the objectification / degradation of women that occurs at these venues.

The firm was aware of the outing, but it doesn’t support these Cadwalader cads. The official response, after the jump.

American Lawyer has released another report that shows that while women make up a significant percentage of Biglaw associates, they are under-represented in law firm partnership ranks:

And while the ranks of female partners have grown steadily, women still account, on average, for fewer than one in five big-firm partners. The greatest numbers of female lawyers remain concentrated at the associate level.

At the same time, it’s worth pointing out the wide variation among firms when it comes to female head count. Despite the laggards, some firms—such as Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; and Ropes & Gray—are nearing the 50 percent mark in their overall percentage of women lawyers. Even better, at a few other large firms—including Littler Mendelson, Ice Miller, Arent Fox, and Epstein Becker & Green—women make up at least a quarter of the partnership.

The disparity is most clearly seen when we talk about leverage:

Crunching the numbers further tells a more interesting story. Of the female lawyers we counted, what percentage are partners? In other words, are women reaching the senior levels of a firm in proportion to their overall numbers? To find out, we calculated the number of female partners as a percentage of all women lawyers. We found that at the firms surveyed, about 23 percent of female lawyers were in the partnership ranks. For every women who’s made partner, there are three women in the nonpartner ranks.

That 3:1 leverage among female lawyers is double the leverage among all lawyers—male and female—in the firms surveyed. Nationally, we found that 41 percent of all lawyers are partners: For each partner, there are about 1.5 nonpartners. If one looks just at male lawyers, the leverage essentially vanishes: There is about one male nonpartner for each male partner.

The report also exposes a somewhat obvious fact: firms that tend to be good for female attorneys don’t necessarily score highly on other diversity factors.

More details from the report after the jump.

Is it national “women in Biglaw” month and nobody told me? Yesterday, we learned that women who don’t put their careers on hold in order raise children can expect a similar salary to their male counterparts. A few days ago we learned that women hate working for other women. A couple of weeks ago, we had a story about alleged gender bias on the board of the Cardozo law review.

Isn’t there a sporting event or contest of some kind I can go watch? I’m happy to drag my knuckles all the way to my cave.

In any event, a new study out today shows that a large number of women are very dissatisfied with their jobs:

Dissatisfaction with work-life balance is pushing women lawyers in New Jersey out the door and into new jobs, a survey has found.

Most of the respondents—almost two-thirds—said they were satisfied with their ability to integrate their work and personal lives and the predictability of their hours, according to a press release. But the numbers were different for women lawyers who had changed jobs in the last five years. More than 70 percent of the job-hopping lawyers said their previous employer was not supportive of full-time flexible alternatives, while only 30 percent described their current employer as unsupportive of such arrangements.

“An important new finding of this study is that women lawyers often choose an exit strategy when faced with the dilemma of choosing between work and family obligations,” the study said. “The business case for more family-friendly approaches to the practice of law could not be more clear.”

In a perfect world, a more family-friendly approach would seem like an excellent business idea.

But in the world wrecked by the current economy, firms are actively trying to force attrition. You’d hope that the attrition would be gender neutral, but at this point everybody who voluntarily leaves a firm is one less person that will show up on Layoff Tracker.

After the jump, Legal Blog Watch points out that even when women do jump from one job to another, the grass is often just as dull.

A new study shows that women who have children — but don’t put their careers on hold to raise the kids — perform just as well as men when it comes to salary and partnership prospects:

A study of data concerning graduates of the University of Michigan Law School showed no significant difference between men and women who had children yet didn’t interrupt their careers or work part-time to take care of them. However, it revealed a significant gap between those attorneys and their colleagues—both male and female—who put their careers on pause for several years to stay home with the kids, says law professor Kenneth Dau-Schmidt of Indiana University at Bloomington.

“Gender was secondary, and much less important, than whether they had interrupted their careers to do child care,” he tells the ABA Journal.

This is excellent news for nannies and au pairs everywhere.

On Monday, we asked readers if this was a terrible time to have a child. Over 60% thought having a kid wasn’t the best idea in this economy. But maybe many of your were assuming that if you had a kid you’d have to feed it or talk to it or something.

Apparently that is not the case. And if you outsource the child rearing, there might not be any deleterious professional consequences.

Of course, women that take significant time off to spend with their young children can get something a little more intangible than money.

More notes after the jump.

* We are not the only ones talking about the problems women have with each other at the office. The New York Times says women bully women. [New York Times]

* Ex-Judge of the Day Hall of Famer Samuel Kent, the first federal judge to be charged with a sex crime, will be sentenced today. He could have gone to the big house for up to 20 years, but his two decades on the bench have made him sentence-savvy. He’ll face three years max thanks to a plea agreement. [Houston Chronicle]

* Former Ohio AG Marc “the Dannimal” Dann has found a new niche. [Legal Newsline]

* A cobbled-together article suggesting that suicide is a trend for stressed attorneys. [National Law Journal]

* Every move you make, every turn you take. A Wisconsin appeals court says the police can slap a GPS tracking device on your car. No warrant needed. [CNet]

* SCOTUS, SCOTUS, SCOTUS. Trying to get into President Obama’s head when it comes to his judiciary thinking. [New York Times]

* White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel may be heading up the SCOTUS nominee search but Vice President Joe Biden is enjoying his grand poobah role in the process. [Washington Post]

* The gambling odds on the nominees. Sotomayor’s the favorite with odds of 13-8. Michelle Obama’s odds? 500-1. [Fox News]

* A guide to the YouTube moments of potential SCOTUS nominees — gaffes and brilliance. Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s clip is the “best” of the bunch — short, concise, and damaging. [Slate]

* The New York Times wants readers to pick Souter’s replacement. Vote Lat! [The New York Times]

The debate over the merits (or demerits) of having a female boss is a perennial one. Well, maybe not perennial, but has been going strong in recent decades since skirt suits on bosses have become the norm.

The American Lawyer sticks its toe in the perilous gender waters in an article in this month’s issue: The End of Sisterhood. In its sure-to-make-you-angry-if-you’re-XX intro, Vivia Chen says that female partners, counsel, associates, and staff attorneys are talking about gender equality while bonding over “sushi, cosmos, and the occasional mani/pedi treatment.”

After they imbibe too many cosmos though and the truth starts flowing, things might get a bit uncomfortable:

[S]cratch the surface a bit deeper, and some members of the sorority tell another story: that women—particularly their immediate superiors—can be their worst tormentors. Fact is, despite the veneer of harmony and the decades of shared struggle, there’s tension on the women’s front. Talk to any group of women lawyers, and there will be plenty of war stories on the betrayals—real or perceived—that they have experienced at the hands of other women.

Sounds promising, right? But there are no juicy cat fights in the story. Just statistics. If you have stories, feel free to share in the comments.

After the jump, we’ll tell you more about why women don’t like working for other women.

We’ve been bringing you a number of stories about law students melting down as the recession, finals, swine flu, and a spate of year-end elections takes its toll on America’s next generation of lawyers.

The latest missive comes from a female Cardozo student who accuses the Cardozo law review board of gender bias. It turns out that this student lost an election to be Editor-in-Chief of the Cardozo law review.

But it also turns out that the executive board of the Cardozo law review has no female members.

The situation is so surprising that school officials have organized a meeting of all the law review 2Ls to discuss this matter. Unfortunately, the student who lost the Editor-in-Chief election will not be able to attend. Fortunately (for Above the Law readers), she decided to commit her thoughts to email:

I believe the journal does have a problem with gender bias in elections that we should address. It was striking that, for the second year in a row, the executive board does not have a single female member. It also stands out that, of all the editorial board positions with input into the article selection process for both the Law Review and de novo, not a single position is held by a woman.

The all-male composition of the most influential positions on the editorial board is at odds with the composition of the journal. It is also at odds with the objective performance of the female members of the staff. Of the thirty-seven Vol. 30 staffers, sixteen (43%) are women and twenty-one (57%) are men. The results of the blind Note-selection process mirror these statistics: of the sixteen Notes selected for publication in Vol. 31, seven (44%) were authored by female staffers and nine (56%) were authored by male staffers. Statistics are not available by which I could objectively assess the quality of staffers’ C&Sing work. However, the Note publication rates suggest that, when blind judging is applied, female staffers perform as well as male staffers. This objective fact regarding the quality of female staffers’ Notes is not reflected by the results of the past election. I believe there were well-qualified female candidates for the executive board and other editorial board positions who were overlooked.

Are law reviews still just an elaborate old boy network? You’d think not, you’d hope not, but this student provides other compelling stats after the jump.

Many of the events we attended at last week’s NALP conference were on the depressing side. After a decade, or perhaps two decades, of growth, the legal profession is experiencing a painful contraction.

But perhaps the current carnage, and the challenge it poses to the existing law firm business model, could give way to reform. As James Jones of Hildebrandt explained, the economic crisis could lead to positive changes in terms of the cost-effective delivery of legal services. “A financial crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” he quipped.

Jones is not alone in this assessment. We attended a panel discussion entitled The 21st Century Lawyer: New Models for Practicing Law, in which three pioneers of the profession — Audrey Bracey Deegan, of Deloitte Consulting LLP; Deborah Epstein Henry, of Flex-Time Lawyers LLC; and Mehul Patel, of Axiom — discussed the alternative models of practice represented by their organizations. These models could become more compelling as the Great Recession forces firms to rethink how they do business.

An account of the panel, which was ably moderated by Professor Carole Silver of Georgetown, after the jump.

A fun part of traveling is observing “cultural differences.” It’s okay to pick your nose in public in some parts of Kenya, to comment on someone’s significant weight gain in the Philippines, and to burp mid-meal in India. The practices may not be your cup of tea, but that’s the fun of exploring other cultures. But what about a culture of gender discrimination in the workplace?

A group of female hospital administrative staff have filed a lawsuit in Ohio against Summa Health Systems and Dr. Santosh Potdar alleging gender discrimination. Among their allegations against the doctor, from the complaint: