Making Time
for Life
2006 SFAM Q3 12-29:Layout 1
9/1/06
3:19 PM
Page 2
Susan Kostal
Imagine running your sand company with only a sieve.
You could shovel some sand, if you worked very hard.
But so much ends up elsewhere that, despite your
heroic efforts, it’s impossible to deliver enough
T
hat’s the issue law firms face in retaining women
and, to a growing extent, Gen-X and Gen-Y lawyers
of both genders. And while retention has been a perennial issue for law firms, demographic factors have coalesced to bring it into painfully sharp focus.
“It’s definitely among the top five issues facing law
firms these days,” says Blane Prescott, senior vice president with Hildebrandt International, a legal consulting
firm. “Successful firms like to think five, ten years out.
12 FALL 2006
sand to your customers.
There aren’t many issues we can predict five to ten years
away, but we can predict population trends. And those
are making a lot of firms nervous.”
Simply put, the majority of law school graduates are
now either women or minorities. And these are precisely
the groups that most firms have difficulty keeping.
The problem isn’t simply a financial numbers game,
though that’s frightening enough. Experts estimate firms
lose between $100,000 and $250,000 in hard-dollar costs
2006 SFAM Q3 12-29:Layout 1
9/1/06
3:19 PM
Page 4
suffering boomers, who were willing to stay and work
for change from within, Gen-X and Gen-Y lawyers are
voting with their feet.
“The profession is so much more competitive and
corporate. It’s 24/7. Even though women in some ways
have more leverage now because of the numbers
and talent they represent, they still feel the squeeze,”
Abbott says.
The leverage of younger lawyers seems to have a
greater effect. The women who are in top management
at law firms today joined at a time when no one asked
about maternity policies or part-time schedules. Now,
applicants ask for such information at a very early part
of the interview process, along with pointed questions as
to how many equity and nonequity women partners are
at the firm. “Some top students refuse to interview with
firms that don’t bring women to conduct the interviews,”
Gillette reports.
Associates are excited by the buzz. “Personally, I am
very encouraged there is a dialogue,” says Victoria Carradero, a fifth-year associate with Orrick, Herrington, and
Sutcliffe’s employment law group and resident in the
firm’s Silicon Valley office. The bar’s leadership is helpful, says Carradero. “It’s a great positive step. It’s overdue, but it’s happening.” She’s also pleased with what’s
going on in individual firms. “Orrick has taken this beyond the discussion level,” she says. “There’s been a lot
of time and money and resources from the very top of
the firm put into our women’s initiative. It’s a serious
agenda item.”
Carradero says it’s important to remember that the
issue is not one-size-fits-all. “I work with people who
are on reduced schedule in my group as well as those
who are not. People go on maternity leave and come
back and jump right back in. I don’t see a lack of work
being thrown their way or a decrease in the quality of
the work. People do it differently, and I like seeing that.”
There are firms that have made strides in retaining
women without specific programs, but many tend to be
smaller firms. At Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass, for example, a sixty-five-attorney firm known for its real estate prowess, close to a third of the partners are women.
14 FALL 2006
(That’s twice the national average.) The firm has a wellused sabbatical program and allows partners to work
reduced-hours schedules (two women litigators work
half time), and it even opened a small office in Orinda
to accommodate the needs of two partners who were
managing both children and aging parents on top
of a commute.
“We don’t think of things under the category of ‘programs adopted in response to work-life issues,’” says
Managing Partner Harry O’Brien. “It grows more organically at a smaller firm.”
O’Brien explained that the firm was happy to open a
satellite office in 2001 in order to keep two valued partners. “They were feeling the crunch of trying to raise a
family, and so together we hatched a plan. Both women
went to part-time status, and because the commute from
the East Bay was a significant part of the problem, we
got them some space in Orinda.”
The office consists of two attorney offices, room for
one secretary, and a conference room, which is often
used by other attorneys who either live in the East Bay
or see clients there. The leased space, which is cheaper
than that in the firm’s office in the Ferry Building in San
Francisco, makes that work-life balance possible. “Both
of them are very organized and disciplined lawyers. Our
hope is they will eventually come back full time,”
O’Brien says. The message to both those partners and
the other attorneys in the firm is clear. “The important
thing is not that we have a program like that. It’s a culture of respect for things that aren’t captured on the
monthly financial statement,” O’Brien says.
Despite its currency, work-life balance is a decades-old
buzzword. Former BASF President Mike Lee conducted
the bar’s first flex-time/part-time survey in 1990,
Haratani says. But the issue has been on the front burner
for several years now with law firms and bar groups
around the country. Locally, the issue received additional
attention when distinguished professor Joan C. Williams,
an expert on work and family issues, moved to UC
Hastings College of the Law last year.
One key to the issue’s longevity is the degree to which
it’s been adopted by top leadership. This is not anony-
2006 SFAM Q3 12-29:Layout 1
9/1/06
3:19 PM
Page 3
for every associate that leaves the firm. (Prescott says if
you throw in “soft costs,” the figure is higher.) More importantly, clients want continuity on their matters, and
they want to hire attorneys that look like them. And increasingly, the in-house attorneys issuing the request for
proposal (RFP) are either women or attorneys of color.
“We are at the tipping point on the issue of the status
of women in the workplace,” says Patricia Gillette, a
partner with Heller Ehrman and a leader of her firm’s
Opt-In program, which is aimed at reducing turnover
and finding out what it takes to help women stay at the
firm. “Businesses recognize they need to be more responsive to the needs that are somewhat unique to
women. The good news is something will be done about
it. The bad news is that law firms lag far behind in thinking about how they can solve the issue.”
This year, only one law firm, Arnold & Porter, made
Working Mother magazine’s list of the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers. While there have been more
law firms on the list in previous years (most notably
perennial Morrison & Foerster), there are never more
than a handful.
BASF’s Work/Life Balance Initiative, with its survey
of practices and policies that affect all lawyers, but in
particular women and caregivers (whether of children,
partners or parents), aims to change that. BASF has
asked firms to share their part-time policies for partners
and associates with the goal of identifying best practices.
BASF President Joan Haratani, a litigation partner at
Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, has made it the touchstone of
her presidency.
Haratani is one of the city’s successful minority women
partners and a leader in both local and national bar
groups. But in her twenty-two years in large law firms,
she’s found it’s lonely at the top.
“Many of my very best friends I made in law firms
left,” she explains. “They felt there were too many demands, too much pressure, to make it work.” While each
woman entered with the goal of becoming a partner, the
tension of balancing work and family life was too great.
“My hope is there is a kinder, gentler, more realistic,
more holistic way of looking at the whole of a person
and their legal career,” Haratani says.
Work-life balance advocate Charlie Spiegel, a real estate transactions lawyer who is of counsel with Stein &
Lubin, echoes that sentiment. Spiegel has worked a flexible, reduced-hours schedule since shortly after his
daughter was born in 1997, first at a national law firm as
a partner and now at Stein & Lubin. Spiegel also took
two years off completely to raise his daughter and was
able to return and find meaningful work. Spiegel acknowledges that his career path is “progressive, veering
on revolutionary” in the eyes of many, but he says he
feels good about his decision, both for his family and
the profession. “This is forward movement for the
human race, for diversity,” he says.
Still, many focus on work-life issues as part of their efforts to retain women. Most experts confess they believed there would be more women partners at law firms
by now, and more women in leadership. “Some days I
feel really frustrated,” says Ida Abbott, a longtime consultant to law firms on issues of training and mentoring.
“I have not felt really optimistic for a long time.” Abbott says she also “expected things would be more equitable on a micro level, within families.” But women still
carry the bulk of the family and home duties.
“Young women partners are exhausted. They are
squeezed in every direction. They are the most beleaguered group in the profession,” Abbott says. Not only
are they expected to bill a full load, serve clients, and
bring in their own clients, but also they are expected to
be sympathetic to associates who come in and say, “You
can appreciate the need for me to get home at six for
the sitter.”
Women joke that men with wives have always had
work-life balance. And while individual women have
reached the upper echelons of their firms, attorneys
agree it’s more difficult these days, in part because billable hour requirements are higher and technology has
had the perverse effect of making it harder to be truly
away from work. While baby boomers were willing to
make sacrifices to “have it all,” conventional wisdom
holds that today’s younger attorneys are not. They want
to see immediate change, and unlike the more long-
THE BAR ASSOCIATION OF SAN FRANCISCO SAN FRANCISCO ATTORNEY 13
2006 SFAM Q3 12-29:Layout 1
9/1/06
3:19 PM
Page 5
mous grumblings bubbling up from associate committees. It is being advanced by firm leaders such as
James J. Sandman, managing partner of Arnold &
Porter, who in 2003 wrote the oft-cited “The Business
Case for Effective Part-Time Programs,” first published
in the Women Lawyers Journal.
Many firms, including Orrick, Wilson Sonsini, Reed
Smith, Holland & Knight, Paul Weiss, Vinson & Elkins,
and Kirkland & Ellis, have adopted women’s initiatives
that are designed to increase the retention of women attorneys. Others, such as Heller Ehrman, have designated
partners to focus on retention. Some, like Sonnenschein
Nath & Rosenthal, use their firm Web sites to publicize
how many attorneys work part
time, as well as the percentages of
women partners and associates,
along with similar statistics for
minority and LGBT attorneys.
Experts agree that true change
will need to go beyond part-time
policies. “We need to change firm
dynamics and look at careers over
the long term, not just year by
billable year,” says Gillette. “In a
twenty-year career, you may have
two to three years, or even four to
five years, that are not as productive,” she says. Heller’s
Opt-In program has adopted that attitude, she says.
“Opt-In means you have made a conscious decision to
look at your time with the firm as a career,” she says.
As part of her work, Gillette has begun interviewing
every attorney who leaves Heller between his or her third
and sixth years. “It’s been very informative,” she says.
“Billable hours are the primary reason people cite for
leaving. These associates have usually made their hours,
but they are afraid of not making them.”
More importantly, Gillette is part of a group that interviews women who stay. Still a work in progress, the
group hopes to publish its findings. Thus far, early work
shows common traits in women who stay, including
an appreciation of the “work” half of the work-life
balance, a sense of reality about their abilities,
and a pragmatism that seems to allow for a more
guilt-free existence.
Part of the discovery process of what’s possible in
seeking work-life balance is an investigation of other industries, particularly accounting and investment banking. Both bar leaders and those in large law firms have
opened dialogues with women at accounting firms.
While there are still factors that make law firms very different from both accounting and banking firms, there
are lessons to be learned.
For example, Prescott points out that while everyone
talks about the importance of training and mentoring,
the law firm model gives it short shrift. “Lawyers are
paid by the hour. Gee, if I sit here
and mentor you, I make less
money,” Prescott says. “Fortunately, there are lots of humans
who will do things that are not in
their economic interest.” At one
large accounting firm, says
Gillette, partners are penalized if
they bill more than a thousand
hours annually. The focus, she
says, is supposed to be on bringing in business and training and
mentoring those below you (key
in a business where the leverage is significantly higher
than in law firms).
In the end, though, retention of women won’t be won
because of cost savings, says Prescott. “The truth is, law
firms have operated forever with these costs. Most law
firms don’t worry to an extraordinary degree about this.
No one attempts to increase profits by reducing
turnover. More important is the effect on morale when
good people leave the firm. That is far more damaging
than the dollars.”
Susan Kostal is a longtime legal affairs writer based in
San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected].
THE BAR ASSOCIATION OF SAN FRANCISCO SAN FRANCISCO ATTORNEY 15