AIPLA WOMEN IN IP LAW VIRTUAL BOOK CLUB ENDING THE GAUNTLET – REMOVING BARRIERS TO WOMEN’S SUCCESS IN THE LAW BY LAUREN STILLER RIKLEEN Book for October to December 2006 In dissecting law firm structure, Lauren Stiller Rikleen presents a hypothesis on the reason why minorities and women leave firms and perhaps that the working business model has inherent structural flaws. While the majority of the statistics are gender oriented, the overarching themes are genderless. We will read this book until the MidWinter meeting as follows: October to November 24, 2006: Prologue, Introduction, and Chapters 1-8 Chapters 9-18 Chapters 19-27
November 25, 2006 to December 15, 2006: December 15, 2006 to January 15, 2007:
Prologue & Introduction – yes please read the Prologue. Share your reaction. Are women the canaries of legal coal mine or squawking that the sky is falling? Chapter 1 – In the mid-20th century, a woman who graduated #3 in her class from Stanford University Law School could not get a job: Sandra Day O’Connor. By the 1980s, 40% of the entering class in law schools were women, yet as of 2000, only 15.6% of law firm partners were women and only 13.9% were equity partners. The number of women in senior corporate positions are lower. Why aren’t the numbers climbing for senior female representation in the legal workforce? Chapter 2 – Have you done a search of literature on the business of running a “large” law firm? There are lots of books on how to go solo. There are no books on how to effectively run a medium or large law firm. Are modern law firms running a business under the old LLP structure, from the days when firms were 50 or fewer? How is management selected in a law firm? How are aspects of rainmaking, coaching, training, skill building, and retention rewarded at a law firm? Do you know? From a business model perspective, does it make sense to have the best rainmakers as the managing partners of a firm? Or do they arrive in that position because there is no other internal political choice? How does communication flow in a law firm? Are women unintentionally excluded from the grapevine, having to rely more on formal avenues of communication?
Chapter 3 – Getting the right work is crucial to any associate’s developing career – is work selection based on the most interesting work or is it doing the work of the most powerful person at the firm? How do women oftentimes choose the work? How do most firms go about staffing projects and making sure of even work distribution? Does firm committee work help or hinder career advances? Chapter 4 – The Billable Hour – it has become the benchmark and the greenback of the law firm monetary system. While it is easy to calculate what a $20/hour billing rate increase will mean over the course of the year for all the lawyers in a firm, is there negative impact? Rikleen contends the following impacts incurred by the billable hour: (1) decline in collegiality of firm culture and increasing associate departure; (2) failure to encourage project or case planning; (3) impeding cost prediction by client; (4) may not reflect a value to the client; (5) penalizes the efficient and productive lawyer; (6) discourages communication between lawyer and client; (7) encourages skipping steps; (8) fails to discourage excessive layering and duplication of effort; (9) fails to promote risk/benefit analysis; (10) puts client’s interest in conflict with lawyer’s interest; (11) clients run risk of paying for lawyer’s incompetence or inefficiency; (12) client runs risk for paying for associate training and (13) associate turnover; (14) client runs risk of aggressive time reporting; (15) itemized bills tend to report mechanical functions and not progress; and (16) lawyers compete on hourly rates. It may inhibit spending non-billable time doing internal cross marketing, let alone marketing outside the firm. Is a new model of valuation/measurement needed other than the billable hour? If yes, how would you propose calculating worth and the new business structure? Chapter 5 – Making Rain How do you do it? How do you learn to be a rainmaker or run a business when none of us went to business school? Do women have inherent relationship building and maintaining skills, which are under utilized or untapped? Chapter 6 – Pavlov’s Lawyer How do you change the system – you change how people get compensated. Compensation drives behavior. For example, the U.S. corporate initiated endeavor begun to increase diversity and women at firms by firing those firms that fail to adequately meet their goals. What happens when you make partner: are you prepared to be an independent income generator? Are you prepared for the change? Does the partnership model further erode retention in a gender neutral manner? Chapter 7 - Mentoring Absolutely necessary to advancement. However, depending on issues, powerful mentors may be hard to come by, and there are few senior women available to mentor.
Remember earlier books, men generally categorize women as one of the following type casts: mother, sister, daughter, wife, or lover/girlfriend. Those relationships can be awkward or lead to problems during mentoring. Also, assuming that a woman mentor is available, do women fail as mentors to other women and why? Are there similar type casts for women? How are these issues resolved or mitigated? Chapter 8 – Introducing a Child into the Legal Career When distributing work, does a person’s family ever alter how work is distributed? Does it change if the person receiving the work is a woman and/or a “mother”? Maternity leave, paternity leave, and pregnancy – The United States ranks with Lesotho in what it offers for leave (3 months unpaid leave and a job to come back to). Men do not frequently assert paternity leave policies or may be derided if they do, as part of a male versus male issue. How do we change the culture and prevent such male v. male, male v. female, and female v. female scenarios? There are numerous quotes in the book, most fairly modern, about how the firm culture views women with children and pregnancy. If those things are currently being said, why is it a surprise if a woman leaves the work place? Chapter 9 – Part-Time Pay, Full Time Work If a “good” lawyer bills 2,000 hours per year and a “great” one bills in excess of 2,500 hours, how many hours should a lawyer working a reduced schedule bill in order to be considered a valued member of the firm? If corporations are now offering various packages and incentives to entice female lawyers and professionals back in the workforce, why isn’t this also being embraced by law firms in their business model? Of Counsel versus Partner – if you know the stuff, are expected to market, and have your own clients, why should you be relegated to a lower status? While it may take you longer to get there, if a person contributes, why can’t they be a part time partner (some firms have instituted policies to allow this, but they are not the norm). Chapter 10- Making Partner, Breaking Hearts In 2002, women constituted 42.4% of associate and staff attorney talent, but only 16.3% were partners. Why? Are women evaluated on their performance and men evaluated on their potential? If people make judgment calls about people within 60 seconds to the first hour of having met them, should you as a woman hide the fact from men and women alike that you have children (for any number of reasons)?
Chapter 11 – Hey, Hey Goodbye Now Do women serve as poor role models to other women with their own struggles to succeed? Are we so caught up in our own struggle as to lack time to serve as role models to others? Is there a perception in the work place that a woman will leave after having her first child or more likely after her second? Is there a perception that the number of children correlates to a lack of commitment to the job? Chapter 12 – For Women Only Are some of our frustrations with such as lack of confidence in opportunities for advancement, backbiting, impersonal work atmospheres, lower compensation our own lack of skills in (1) negotiating for better salaries, (2) asking for certain work opportunities more aggressively, (3) and that women don’t support other women in these ventures? “Women on the other hand do not know how to promote the business they bring in, the success they achieve, because they think it is bratty and they think it is unladylike.” Page 224. Chapter 13 – The Managing Partners Speak How to run a law firm. Managing partners are expected to devote only 300-500 hours a year to their management function, even though their duties rival the responsibilities of many full time CEOs. Put another way, managers were expected to undertake the job of managing a $20 million line of business in essentially less than 2 hours a day. Why take the most successful rainmakers and make them managing partners, when their skill set is driven to making rain and not dealing with the day in day out tasks of running a firm? Do these issues have trickle down impact? Chapter 14 – Ending the Gauntlet As generation X and Y are entering and taking over, is there a shift? Are new associates, regardless of gender, no longer having aspirations of making partner? Is it a ceiling or the whole structure that is impacting not only women, but attorneys of diversity as well? What structural changes are needed and how can they be implemented or is everything based on a compensation drives behavior algorithm? Chapter 15 – Cracking the Code by Changing the Culture Are today’s large law firms capable of changing their culture? Do law firm managers promote a system of teamwork that operates not only to bring in new business but also to support the entire legal staff once the work is in the door? How?
Chapter 16 – Leadership Matters Does your practice group leader have the following qualities: (1) overall leadership and direction for the group including strategic planning, (2) work load management and attorney utilization, (3) quality control, (4) training and professional development, (5) forms, systems, and procedures, (6) financial management, (7) knowledge management, and (8) business development? If not why not? If women outscore men in management skill areas including problem solving, planning, controlling, managing relationships, leading and communicating, why aren’t there more female managers? Chapter 17 – Measuring Success How do you measure success in a gender neutral manner? Do these 8 steps assist in gender neutral evaluations: (1) developing multiple definitions of success that encourage varied communication styles; (2) instituting a mutual evaluation process which allows junior attorneys to evaluate supervisors; (3) designing an evaluation form that sets out performs criteria and narrative comments that capture factors that are not conducive to rating scales (4) conducting evaluation interviews and establishing an action plan to assist with the attorney’s growth; (5) holding goal setting sessions to capture, early in the process, the professional’s goals; (6) establishing an educational plan for everyone in the process and making sure everyone appreciates diversity and the potential for bias; (7) including women in all aspects of the evaluation process or any teams or committees; and (8) periodically reviewing the effectiveness of the process. Chapter 18 – Triumph Over Tyranny – The Road Away from Billable Hours Let’s run the numbers, for 1900 real billable hours, a person has to work approximately 2300 hours. The scale increases for more hours. When analyzing an alternative billing approach, what about asking (1) how much should this cost, (2) what has cost to do with this work previously, (3) what is the value to the client, (4) what is the benchmark cost, (5) what is the cost estimate based on the use of fulltime equivalents, and (6) what other methodologies should be analyzed? What is the future of the billable hour?