Legal News

Why Don?t Women Stay at Law Firms? Here?s One Take

By Ashby Jones

It’s undoubtedly a statistic that could use some explaining: Over the last two decades, nearly half of the law-school graduates have been women. Still, women only make up fewer than twenty percent of big law-firm partners.

To quote D’Andre Cole: What up with that?

Writing in Friday’s Las Vegas Sun (Hat tip: ABA Journal), Lisa Wong Lackland, a litigation partner in Lewis and Roca’s Las Vegas office, takes the issue on.

Writes Lackland:

I'll add my own, nonexpert reason to the list - many women don't want to be a partner at a big law firm. And that's OK.

Example number one, writes Lackland: Michelle Obama, a Harvard Law grad: “Obviously, she has chosen to forgo the partnership track for other pursuits. (Incidentally, so has her husband).”

But the lack of female partners isn’t wholly attributable to freedom of choice. Au contraire. Part of the blame falls in the lap of the law firms themselves, which just haven’t worked hard enough to do the things needed to keep and promote females. And where do law firms most need to improve? Lackland points to two areas: work/life balance and mentorship.

In regard to the latter, it doesn’t matter if the mentors are men or women, in Lackland’s opinion. “Gender is irrelevant so long as the associate forms a strong bond with a mentor who is committed to the young lawyer's development.”

On work/life balance, Lackland feels that “firms need to extend the notion further and allow a woman to stay on partnership track even if she has taken time off to have a family or if she wants to work part time.”

What do you make of this, LBers? Are women choosing not to stay at law firms because of the lousy work/life balance and mentorship opportunities? To what degree do you think something more sinister — like sexism — is at work, if at all?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 19, 2010 (boomark / email).