Case study: Lonely at the top

The Bowditch Institute for Women’s Success is a forum for female lawyers from any firms to come together and discuss career challenges. It is the brainchild of Lauren Stiller Rikleen, author and partner at Boston firm Bowditch & Dewey LLP. She tells Richard Brent why more needs to be done to tackle gender diversity across the legal profession.

In August 2007 Working Mother magazine and consultancy Flex-Time Lawyers LLC carried out a survey to identify the ‘50 best law firms for women’ across the US. Readers were asked to answer questions on a wide range of factors, from child care and flexibility to remuneration and career progression. The 50 to make the list included such big names as Baker & McKenzie, DLA Piper, Reed Smith, Mayer Brown, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and White & Case, while Suzanne Riss, editor in chief at Working Mother, concluded: “Forget the old stereotypes of law firms as inhospitable to women”. Those selected had been “quietly changing their policies in recent years to reflect changes that are afoot in society as a whole”, she explained.

This is not quite the experience of at least one working mother, however. Lauren Stiller Rikleen is a senior partner in the real-estate and environmental group of Bowditch & Dewey LLP in Massachusetts. She has a keen and enduring interest in the issue of womens’ advancement in the legal profession, and was a founding member of the state’s Equality Commission, set up in 2004 to look into the reasons for a general lack of women in law firm leadership. She also used her stint as president of the Boston Bar Association in the late nineties to form a task-force to tackle the balancing of professional challenges and family needs. The resulting report, Facing the Grail – Confronting the Costs of Work/Family Imbalance, made it clear to Rikleen that much needed to be done if the law was to stop the flow of talented female lawyers leaving the profession for good.

Rikleen therefore set out to speak to women in law firms across the US, large and small, to build up a picture. Over 100 formal interviews and countless conversations later, and the findings, stories and observed trends were published in her book, Ending the Gauntlet: Removing Barriers to Women’s Success, in 2006. So extensive were the perceived institutional problems for women in law firms, however, she also succeeded in winning her firm’s support to set up the Bowditch Institute for Women’s Success.

Getting together

The infrastructure and precise programme for this undertaking is still being finalised, but it is essentially a consulting and coaching service, designed to help female lawyers achieve their career goals. Comprising around six to eight sessions lasting up to two hours each, workshops will bring together a whole group of women from a law firm – or possibly a range of firms – to discuss any problems and identify strategies for advancement.

While many law firms already have women’s initiatives and affinity groups in place, Rikleen believes these are too often ineffective at tackling root causes. It is not an uncommon complaint that businesses can sometimes pay mere lip-service to diversity – making impressive statements of commitment, but with insufficient evidence of action on the ground. Although an increasing number of law firm’s clients are now demanding a more diverse legal team to work with too, Rikleen is of the opinion that some very basic problems persist in the US.

“The problem with affinity groups is they are often created without the appropriate resources, and without putting in place the right measures. You need to put together the right mix of activities to make sure the women involved get as much benefit as possible from the experience,” she says.

The format of Rikleen’s Navigator Career Workshop hopes to address this problem, bringing together groups of women and using anecdote, talks and group discussion to come up with some workable solutions. “Writing the book I heard countless anecdotes about the issues and problems at firms, and I would ask the women ‘what did you do?’ Far more frequently than not the answer was ‘I didn’t do anything because I didn’t really know how to,’” she says.

“One of the real problems I identified is that women tend to work in isolation. Perhaps with a family or other responsibilities, they come into the office, close the door, work very hard, and then go home. There was a sense of not having allies. Concerns could pile up unresolved, and rather than confront them the women would just leave.

“Women hate to live with ambiguity. I’ve seen so many women leave because they’re afraid of something – either that they will lose their stature, or will fail to live up to somebody’s expectations.”

Dispelling myths

Of course, even if senior female lawyers don’t feel isolated due to the demands of juggling firm and family, they are likely to be seriously outnumbered by their male colleagues in any case. In the UK, even in those firms faring best in terms of gender diversity, no more than around a quarter of partners are female – and this in spite of women equalling or outnumbering men at the more junior levels and intake.

Rikleen says: “One of the things happening internationally is that more women are going into law. At associate levels you have real critical mass, but moving forwards women around the world face the same issues about how they are evaluated and the stereotyping that goes on.

A particular frustration for Rikleen and the Equality Commission is therefore what she terms the ‘pipeline myth’ – the idea that we are yet to see a levelling off as female lawyers continue to rise through the ranks at firms. She explains that women have been equal to men in law schools for many years, and by the year 2000 there should already have been twice as many female partners based on the numbers. “People have to understand that pipeline has been clogged for two decades,” she says.

Moreover, at the same time as women are leaving the profession through ‘choice’ (some might say they are‘forced out’), Rikleen adds that others are “quietly” being de-equitised at the other end of the ‘pipeline’.

“Competition between firms for higher profits per partner means there’s an effort to de-equitise people at the lower end of the compensation range. And who are at the lower end? Invariably the female partners. In that respect some things are actually getting worse for women – not only a lack of an increase, but sometimes an actual loss.”

Another myth law firms allow themselves to believe and perpetuate is the reasons people give for choosing to leave the firm, she explains. One senior associate from a large firm told Rikleen her firm effectively explained attrition issues away by telling people that those leaving were going on to another “great job”. If that’s the case, the associate countered, “why does nobody see this firm as that particular great job?”

The economic argument

Rikleen says that law firms also seriously underestimate the pure economic cost of losing talent, whether women or men. With spiralling individual billing requirements, she maintains that the profession is built on a “fundamentally flawed economic model”, and if that sounds in any way melodramatic, adds that the numbers can range from $300,000 to $700,000 every time somebody key leaves a law firm.

“If you keep one or two talented people, that’s a serious return on investment. People push the hourly requirements up, but not enough attention is paid to the cost of continued high rates of attrition. The pressures of billable hours have become extraordinary for men and women, and for mothers, who survive by being efficient, you’re put in a realm where efficiency isn’t really valued,” she explains.

A further way the traditional structure and management of law firms can be an impediment for women’s advancement is from the point of view of working patterns, she adds. On top of the pressures of billing, lawyers notoriously work long hours to satisfy their clients. Many law firms now have flexible-working policies of some form or another, but most also make it clear that alternative working patterns must be compatible with the needs of the firm’s clients. Clients come first. As a result, some may say running a successful legal practice and running a family are simply incompatible.

But Rikleen feels firms overcomplicate the issue. “I am surprised at the extent to which the issue of flexible work is made to be so complicated by so many people. If firms had greater trust in their workforce to make judgements throughout the day – and not make judgements about whether someone is behind their desk – the difficulties of implementation would almost completely disappear.

“Time and again you hear that it is not issues with clients that cause the problems, but the firm itself and fellow partners. People who work on a part-time basis know their client base. The problem, and harder to manage, is the partner who has a particular assignment on their desk for two weeks and suddenly decides the individual who has to get that done is someone who isn’t scheduled to work.”

Overcoming the odds

Regardless of the hours they work or family commitments, however, Rikleen believes women are also more likely to suffer from bias as a matter of course. “In partnership elections men are judged more on their potential and women on their actual experiences,” she explains. Taken with the data on remuneration – which shows men earn more than women “in any field” – and the obstacles, and reasons for leaving, quickly pile up.

Each of these ‘institutional impediments’ is dealt with in a different chapter of Rikleen’s book. The institute’s Navigator Career Workshop then focuses on helping women find ways of dealing with them – for instance, asking how women can integrate business-development efforts with their working patterns. There are certain “gender differences” governing how men and women approach this, Rikleen explains, and again, these are often related to family responsibilities. “Women are less comfortable mixing business and personal relationships. Also, they may put business-generation off because they feel they can’t leave their desks. They need to get their hours in and get home.” Tied to this is the need always to be seen as what she terms a ‘go to’ lawyer within the practice group; that is, a lawyer who will be offered the best assignments. “Women need to stay engaged in getting good work, especially after having children, when research shows a decline in the quality of assignments,” she says.

A working mother herself, the stories Rikleen heard do chime with her own life in a law firm. “The desire to write the book really comes from my own experiences. I am the only female equity partner at my firm who is also a mother, although hopefully that will change. I have been the lone voice of women’s issues in the firm for many years, which can be a lonely endeavour at times.”

She adds, however, that Bowditch & Dewey has taken significant steps to make improvements over the past half decade, not least through the support it has shown for the Bowditch Institute. “I don’t know any firm that has supported a partner in this kind of business venture. It has taken my passion for these issues, and created a model that fits the firm’s framework and allows me to stay and continue to contribute,” she says. It remains to be seen whether the project can make a lasting difference to female lawyers’ overall experience – and impact on the attrition Rikleen finds can costs firms so dear.