I like it when judges show a sense of humor. It gives me metaphysical joy when judges refuse to act like legal automatons, and it makes my job easier.

Hennepin County District Judge Stephen Aldrich is a man who understands that court proceedings need not be devoid of the occasional one-liner:

Three weeks ago in family court, reviewing a domestic violence order for protection, a transcript shows Judge Aldrich telling the husband and wife, “I’ve been married 45 years. We’ve never considered divorce, a few times murder, maybe.”

As Chris Rock says, you haven’t been in love unless you’ve considered killing your spouse “and the only thing that stops you is an episode of CSI.”

I think Judge Aldrich should be applauded for his humor. But we live in America, the land of perpetually bunched panties. So it’s not so surprising that some people are calling for Judge Aldrich to resign.

Details after the jump.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One would think that the current global economic crisis would be taking a toll on women’s issues. Work-life balance? Please, any associate not on track with their hours is a candidate for a layoff. Retention of women? Whatever, welcome to the world of forced attrition.

But is the prevailing view accurate? Patricia Gillette, an Orrick partner and founder of The Opt In Project, doesn’t think so. Today on AmLaw Daily, Gillette makes the argument that now is the perfect time for firms to address issues traditionally important to women:

There is another school of thought, the one that I subscribe to. It is this—the economic crisis provides law firms with opportunities they never before had. Those include: to step away from the salary and bonus programs that destroyed collegiality and prevented flexibility; to make structural and organizational changes long overdue; to kill the billable hour once and for all; to get ahead of the sea change that is coming to the legal profession.

Now is the time to take advantage of the immobility of partners and associates and the weakening bargaining position of law students, to make changes that may not be popular with everyone, but are long overdue. And these changes, in the long run, will benefit women and will answer the cries of all Gen Y lawyers for a kinder and gentler law firm life.

It seems to me that moving away from lockstep compensation necessarily leads to more subjective forms of salary advancement. The billable hour might be the bane of a lawyer’s existence, but it is at least based on objective criteria. Will putting salary decisions in the hands of intra-firm politics and relationship building really lead to a “kinder and gentler” law firm? Or will it lead to an “eat-what-you-kill” approach that many partners complain about when it comes to their compensation structure?

After the jump, Gillette outlines three big moves that could help women in law firms.

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.

A new book details the challenges that women face as they try to climb the corporate ladder. Author Kathy Caprino argues that in many instances women’s contributions are hard to compare against “hours” and “profits.”

Careful not to blame their male counterparts, Caprino says many female professionals are dominated at work by generally white-male competitive career models that emphasize linear career paths and the assumption that top-performing women are motivated most by money and power.

Nicole Nehama Auerbach, of the Coalition of Women’s Initiatives in Law Firms, takes Caprino’s analysis a step further and argues that women have been socialized in ways that aren’t always compatible with Biglaw success:

Women often bring intangibles to the firm such as nurturing business and a knack for making client teams work, Auerbach says. And these are qualities are difficult to quantify compared to billing hours in a profit-driven world.

“I think a lot of the issues she seizes upon would never be issues men would point to as a reason for not succeeding,” Auerbach says. “Traditionally, women are not as vocal about getting what they want; women were previously conditioned not to complain. That’s very different from the way a lot of men were raised.”

Is this type of analysis really all that helpful? More after the jump.

Whenever we do a post on gender inequality in the legal profession, some readers insist on finding arguments to make the income gap “acceptable.”

Another survey was released yesterday, this time from the National Association of Women Lawyers, that shows pay and promotion inequality is still the norm.

The WSJ Law Blog puts the facts plainly:

There is also a considerable pay gap. At 99% of the firms, the top-paid partner is a man; on average, male equity partners earn more than $87,000 annually than female equity partners. (Fifty-nine firms in the AmLaw 200 reported compensation data.)

Can you imagine what those numbers would look like if the other 141 AmLaw 200 firms had bothered to report their compensation data?

The survey itself deals straight-away with one of more common justifications for continued inequality:

In spite of more than two decades in which women have graduated from law schools and started careers in private practice at about the same rate as men, women continue to be markedly underrepresented in the leadership ranks of firms. Women lawyers account for fewer than 16% of equity partners, those lawyers who hold an ownership interest in their firms and occupy the most prestigious, powerful and best‐paid positions. The average firm’s highest governing committee counts women as only 15% of its members - and 15% of the nation’s largest firms have no women at all on their governing committees. Only about 6% of law firm managing partners are women.

Let me access my inner Joe Biden and repeat that: two decades, starting careers in at the same rate as men, 16% of equity partners.

More survey results after the jump.

There are moments in life when one is confronted with the inconsideration of others and can be moved to despise one’s fellow man — e.g., when stepping in discarded bubble gum, or passing through an exhaled cloud of smoke while jogging.

One Yale Law School student had a moment like this in the ladies’ restroom, and she has blasted the student list-serv urging greater consideration in the future.

Here is an excerpt:

Dear Prissy Chicks of YLS,

WHY do you squat over the toilet seat and splatter it with pee instead of just sitting on it like everybody else — or at least cleaning up after yourself? I just went to the ladies room downstairs by the ATM and two of those friggin toilets were liberally spritzed, thanks to your selfish carelessness. Consider:

1. Yes, toilet seats at our school come into contact with the asses and thighs of many many people. But your ass and thighs are not alone in this world!!! Would it kill you to put your naked buttcheeks on the toilet seat, anyway? It’s not like you’re going to be eating off them! By squatting above the toilet seat and cattily spraying everywhere, you force sensible women to deal with your uric carnage. You either make that toilet unusable, or make the braver women wipe off your peepee…

You might not want to sit on the toilet seat, but *nobody* wants their bum and thighs to be dampened by your prissy potty puddles.

The hazard of being a female. There have been many replies to this, reproduced after the jump. We wanted to highlight this comment, scoring a point for Harvard in the YLS / HLS debate:

You’d think a school with the resources of YLS could tend to its most basic sanitation requirements. (Harvard provides free tampons in the women’s restrooms, and perhaps their toilets function, as well.)

Full angry e-mail — with detailed instructions on bathroom use, and myriad replies — after the jump.

You never know where you’ll find sexism in our society and our profession. It knows no party or ideology.

But it has no place in court. In a decision yesterday, 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner took a shot at a plaintiff’s attorney who thought this was still 1950.

The case, Thorogood v. Sears Roebuck, was perfectly set up for a sexist wisecrack by an attorney cheap enough to take it. The case involved stainless steel clothes dryers that nonetheless caused rust stains on some clothing. A massive class action suit was mounted against Sears because “stainless steel” was not used for every part of the appliance.

During oral argument, the plaintiff’s attorney suggested that the all-male bench “ask their wives” about the problems associated with rust stains from dryers.

Posner did not find this funny. Writing for the majority (and holding for Sears) Posner shot back:

At argument the plaintiff’s lawyer, skeptical that men ever operate clothes dryers—oddly, since his client does—asked us to ask our wives whether they are concerned about rust stains in their dryers. None is.

Nice.

Prior ATL articles have shown that some men really expect their wives to do all the laundry, but they are a dying breed (I think). There’s no way that attorney would have joked about women washing clothes if there was a woman on the 7th Circuit panel.

Hopefully, getting smacked around by Posner will teach this attorney that he should not make sexist remarks in open court regardless of the gender diversity on the bench.

Thorogood.SearsRoebuck.Opinion.pdf

Earlier: And No, She Doesn’t Do Windows

A NALP report confirms what we see everyday: minority women partners barely exist. The National Law Journal reports:

Minority women remain the most underrepresented group among law firm partners, according to the report. They currently make up 1.88% of partners at law firms. By contrast, the report found that minority men make up 4.21% of partners, and women overall account for 18.74% of partners.

That. Is. Embarrassing.

Before everybody explains away the numbers by saying “there aren’t as many minority women in the pipeline,” note that there are a lot of minority women downstream:

In 2008, 45.42 percent of summer associates were women, 24.04 percent were minorities and 12.99 percent were minority women. In the associate ranks, 45.34 percent are women, 19.11 percent are minorities and 10.74 percent are minority women.

Many minority women start off on the Biglaw path, but they leave. To have babies? Not according to the ABA:

A 2006 study by the ABA Commission on Women, “Visible Invisibility: Women of Color in Law Firms,” concluded that women of color are leaving the profession in droves because they are the victims of an uninterrupted cycle of institutional discrimination. Many women responding to the ABA survey said they felt they were denied the same opportunities to succeed as their male and nonminority counterparts.

More numbers after the jump.

Many people have interviewing horror stories. But few people actually bother to send a letter to the offending firm.

One Georgetown University Law Center student did just that. After her interview with Harris Beach, the student sent a letter to James Spitz, CEO of Harris Beach:

I was looking forward to the interview until Mr. Frederick Fern and Ms. Judi Abbott Curry entered the conference room. This was the worst and most unprofessional interview that I have ever been on. Not only did Mr. Fern insult me by repeatedly stating that “the only reason” I had received the interview was because my “mom or somebody” had “called in a favor,” he then suggested that I was lazy because I did not have a job yet. “What have you been doing since July?” he kept exclaiming.

I didn’t even know how to respond. When I finally responded, he proceeded to read a document or tap on the table with his pen while I spoke. It was awful.

Harris Beach’s firm motto is “Lawyers you’ll swear by, not at.” It is worth noting that our own personal experiences with Harris Beach attorneys have been positive and professional. But perhaps these particular attorneys could have used a little more tact when dealing with a student trying to navigate these uncertain employment waters.

The full memo after the jump.