Worth another crack at the glass ceiling

You can be flippant about this Alex, but what other profession that you know of countenances such a substantial loss of talented and expensive people from its ranks? A&O's pitiful moves in the right direction are to be encouraged but I am beginning to wonder whether more drastic action is needed. At 44, I am one of the few female corporate finance partners left in the City. Most of my contemporaries having given up or moved into PSL or less stressful roles, before they had to tackle the hurdle of partnership.

City Woman -22 Jan 2010 | 17:58

The whole article and idea misses the point. You can't have partners working 3 or 4 days a week - clients will not tolerate it. Partners, like they expect associates to be, must be available when required. You certainly cannot work in a transactional environment where there is this sort of part-time nonsense. You are either in or you are out.

Mealy mouthed and softsoaping PR releases and platitudes are irrelevant. Can you imagine the deal planning? "Well, we can't have drafting meetings Mondays or Fridays, because our client partner is out, and you can't do Tuesday and Wednesday for the same reason... so that gives us Wednesday, no hang on, the senior associate is off then..."

If you want to be in these senior positions and to 'have a career', you have to work your socks off whenever and however - all this will end up as is some partners working seven days a week for less money and some very irate clients finding substitute partners dropped in who don't know the client or deal well enough to do the best job - it might look good in diversity surveys or graduate recruitment brochures, but it's nonsense and the people involved know it...

realist -23 Jan 2010 | 17:18

To City Woman, I certainly can be flippant when the mood takes me but I wasn't in this case. And is A&O's move 'pitiful'? I think it’s a genuine attempt (and before people start telling me I’m naive, bear in mind that I’ve seen more of the underbelly of commercial law over the years than most thanks to my job).

Which brings me to 'realist'... You say you can’t have partners working four days a week - I disagree. It would require law firms and clients to get used to doing a few things differently, but that doesn’t make it impossible. As to the issue of partners working part-time in a transactional environment, that is why A&O has come up with the option for corporate lawyers to take additional leave spread over the year, rather than a four-day week, recognising that it is more practical in a deal-driven environment.
"Can I imagine the deal planning?" If the transaction planning of major City firms is so woeful that they can’t cope with the possibility of 5% of their partnership being on a pretty modest flexi-time/part-time basis, then I wonder what kind of service they are selling clients.

A partner appointment should be a 20-year plus commitment, so it makes plain business sense to allow talented and experienced lawyers to move onto flexi-time arrangements for three or four years to help manage family pressures. If the status quo continues, law firms will continue to see a 55% female intake translate into a 10%-15% female partnership, which I doubt is sustainable in the long term.

Alex Novarese -25 Jan 2010 | 09:50

Alex, deals are not planned by lawyers, they are planned by clients and circumstance. If you get an opportunity to do a good transaction, you don't hold off. What you say works fine for juniors, but up the pyramid, it's not a runner - those relationships are hard and expensively won, that is because the client buys into the partner....

Lawyers, contrary to what we may think, are not the deal drivers, we are mostly reactive. If I am a FTSE client or a decent PE shop any my client partner is not around when I want and need them, I will likely look why and then find a new partner and firm who are there when I want them. Being blunt (and slightly sarcastic), am I going to go back to my board/LPs and say "well you know, we didn't get the A team on this job and it cost us more/was not as good, but, the client partner at Cliffield Overpaines, she is having a lovely time - took the kids to the zoo last week, they had a great time..."?

realist -25 Jan 2010 | 12:21

Realist - of course lawyers don’t drive deals – you’d have to be an idiot to think that. But they do manage the allocation of their own resources as a team. Your argument is that the only possible model for client relationship management is to have the contact partner personally available 24/7 and there’s no grey area. Well, maybe in private equity though, as I can’t think of a single female private equity partner, that’s probably an academic debate. Such flexibility would need 24/7 client service but who is to say it has to come from a single partner? It’s key account management 101 to have a secondary senior point of contact for top-tier clients. And private equity is an extreme example, as is your ‘swanning around in the zoo’ motif. City law is long hours but even in general corporate, especially if your clients are a large plc, the tension is less extreme. More so in other, less deal-driven practices.

For a bit of context, below are some comments from the general counsel of one of the UK’s largest companies at a debate I recently attended. This very issue came up and the general counsel said: “It shouldn’t be beyond the bounds of possibility for law firms to be able to structure transactions so that they work [with flexible work patterns]. Law firms, and particularly big law firms, have many, many years of structuring transactions, and there is a particular way of structuring which can make life quite difficult for people. I, as a buyer of legal services, don’t particularly want anybody in front of me who has already been awake for 48 hours, because apart from the other issues we’ve been discussing I don’t think I’m getting value for money from them when they’ve already been awake for two days."

At the same debate, a corporate partner at a magic circle firm, one of the City’s best known M&A partners as it happens, responded: “I was going to say that I fully endorse what you’re saying, because there is a reluctance among a lot of partners in law firms to actually engage the client about how you manage things and to share all these ideas. You’ve got to get rid of the 24/7 culture, it’s not just about women this, it’s about men as well, I think it’s a stupid culture. The service has to be 24/7 but you’re not on duty 24/7, and we have people in our organisation who say, ‘Well you are on duty 24/7. You pick up that phone 24/7’. I don’t agree.”

Alex Novarese -25 Jan 2010 | 13:42

Look at women in-house

I am sick and tired of hearing those mediocre men who benefit from less competition spreading scare stories about how flexibility will not be tolerated "in-house".

Look around you. In-house is full of women, making it to the top of their profession. Clients are increasingly demanding evidence that firms are promoting women, precisely because in-house is full of talented women who could not make private practice work for them.

Not only that, but I know of many examples of successful male partners who take off the whole summer to be with their kids, or work from home one day a week.

The truth is, if men in the legal profession were primary carers for children, a few years of flexible working would be the norm. If it can work in-house, it can work in private practice. Heaven forbid we move towards a profession whose billing is based on efficiency and quality rather than lonely men of average intelligence grinding out long hours to produce mediocre work.

Female lawyer -25 Jan 2010 | 15:20

ignore the naysayers

If you built it, they will come.

kevin costner -25 Jan 2010 | 15:22

Yes, there are some female talented lawyers in the City. If City Woman is saying she is in the minority with females dropping to PSL functions, then something is clearly wrong with legal education. There has to be a reason for female lawyers dropping down a level. Stress?

ANON -25 Jan 2010 | 15:49

Total re-think

The whole approach to women's careers in law needs a total re-think. A&O's move is a step - albeit a small step - in the right direction of working out how best to manage those careers. In Norway, legislation has intervened to require a certain percentage of women on boards of all Norwegian companies. Anecdotally, I understand it has not created weak boards, but rather it has broadened the perspectives of organisations which before had the same smaller group of men sitting on the boards of several companies. I can see an analogy here in the law - until there is an intervention that requires a re-think, we won't see the changes in perspective that a required for women to progress their careers as well as a family.

Anonymous -25 Jan 2010 | 18:44

Different drivering factors

Of all the people I studied law with, not one who has a training contract with a magic circle firm has a desire to stay there - but the reasons were startlingly different for men and women. In general the men saw City law as a springboard to chase money - in law and elsewhere, looking to jobs in places like banks and hedge-funds as the financial markets recover. As the primary driver is the money they are far more likely to continue up the City law path if the £££s are increasing.

Conversely, almost all the women viewed a big-firm job as a good start but thought that they would want to make a fairly quick move to a smaller firm where the work/life balance was better - this is not just a 'having children' issue, but a broader awareness that chasing the £££s and a City partnership is not the only way. Maybe there will continue to be less women partners for the very good reason that they have worked out that the additional stress and potential financial risk is not worth it!

Al -27 Jan 2010 | 14:23

working 24/7

Realist, even if you are right that clients require the ability to call a meeting at any time (which I doubt), your conclusions do not follow.

I work part-time in projects, with clients being able to call meetings on any day of the week. I just fit in my time off around the client meetings. Even at the height of a project, it's a rare week I can't have half a day at home. Of course this means I need to stump up for five days childcare rather than three, but I just mark that down as an investment in my sanity.

Of course, it still might not be showing enough commitment to be given a chance at partnership, but if I don't get given that opportunity, no one will be able to argue it's due to 'impact on client service'. I assure you they are all delighted.

Pearson -27 Jan 2010 | 16:42

Cloudy Glass

I work for an LPO, and do not understand this obsession with the constant availability of people. We routinely plan for absenteeism and attrition with up to 20% buffer. It's a simple solution, and works. The benefits we get from retaining good staff more than wipe out the cost of reduced margins, if any.

The idea is to move towards 24/7 service, not 24/7 jobs. The converse must concurrently happen.

If the system must have this individual or that, to function or to move, it's not a good system. Period.

No consumer must be made to rely on it, no billing must happen against it.

It doesn't matter how deals have always been done, or how transactions work, no consumer pays for the benefit of one individual, consumers pay for the benefit of a service.

What would happen if a male partner fell ill? Would we shrug and accept the law firm not providing his clients with the services of a cover? Would the client accept a sub-standard cover?

The issues of service availability, role definition, client expectation management are independent issues. They have very little to do with worker preferences.

Why do we collaborate? To bridge the gap between worker preferences and consumer expectations through systematic, joined-up effort.

If teamwork isn't working to achieve this, just what is it yielding in a knowledge based profession like law?

Suhasini Sakhare -12 Feb 2010 | 11:21