Case study: Reed Smith

Women’s Initiative 2.0?

Catherine Chaskin, a partner at Reed Smith and chair of the Women’s Career Advancement Initiative (WCAI) reveals why programmes like this are the future for law firm gender equality initiatives.

In the early 1960s, before Aretha Franklin became Lady Soul, the icon she is today, she was signed by Columbia records through the legendary talent scout John Hammond. Columbia groomed Franklin to be an all-purpose entertainer, and toned down the gospel sound she and her sisters learned from their father. During her Columbia years, Aretha Franklin had one hit, ‘Rock-a-bye Your Baby’, that topped out on the ‘Billboard Pop Singles Chart’ at number 37. Then, in 1966 producer Jerry Wexler recruited Franklin to Atlantic records, where he encouraged her to sing like she had sung in her father’s church. The result was that Aretha Franklin and Jerry Wexler reshaped American music. In the process, Franklin recorded more million-selling albums than any other woman in recording history.
The story of Aretha Franklin’s career at Columbia records and her career at Atlantic records highlights the difference between talent recognised and talent optimised. Given the right set of incentives and opportunities, Franklin began singing in her unique and powerful style. Although more dramatic than most, her story is not unique, or even unusual. There are analogous stories in the legal profession. Although few can boast they have reshaped American law, most successful women can point to a mentor or champion who personified a turning point in their careers when their talents were no longer merely recognised, but were optimised.
The legal community as a whole, however, has struggled to optimise the talents of female lawyers. Superstars exist, but many efforts to improve the measurable success of women at large law firms have had little or no impact. It is generally accepted wisdom that women have not achieved parity with men in ‘big law’ because women leave law firms in large numbers before being considered for partner, and many more are not elevated for partner, resulting in lacklustre numbers of female leaders at law firms.
In an effort to get beyond anecdotal successes and increase the retention and promotion of more female lawyers, many firms formed women’s initiatives. In fact, nearly 97 per cent of large law firms today boast women’s initiatives, which are generally designed to provide programmes for women in their firms on professional development, networking, mentoring and business development.1 Many women’s initiatives also serve a support function for the women within their firms. The results of those initiatives have yet to be quantified, but anecdotally, their focus has been on softer, more supportive aspects of women’s careers, such as training and networking, rather than attempting to provide quantifiable opportunities for women.
In fact, despite some creative marketing and public relations efforts on the part of big law firms, the results of efforts made on behalf of women in the past few years have been modest at best. At large law firms, women lawyers account for fewer than 16 per cent of equity partners. They comprise on average only 15 per cent of their firms’ highest governing committees, and only about six per cent of law firm managing partners are women.2 In fact, those numbers have barely budged since 2006. At Reed Smith, our numbers were above average, but we felt we could do better.
Everyone can do better. This is an opportunity for women’s initiatives to rethink their mission. The current economic climate is not conducive to standard operating procedures, and women’s initiatives will need to meet stiffer challenges with fewer resources. In addition, changes are afoot within women’s legal communities, with ‘calls to action’ for increased female representation within partnerships and firm management. Women are less willing to wait for time to bring about changes. Women’s Initiatives will need to become more muscular in response.
The Women’s Career Advancement Initiative (WCAI) at Reed Smith is emblematic of this evolution. Reed Smith is one of the 15 largest law firms in the world, with more than 1,600 lawyers in 24 offices throughout the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. It has no ‘home office’ but is organised by practice groups comprised of lawyers all over the world, and a management team that is also spread throughout its worldwide offices. The impact of this organisational structure is that a lawyer’s true home within the firm is their practice group, rather than their local office. The Women’s Initiative is similarly structured, it has a single director, assisted by a core team of five advisers from human resources, education and marketing. But the heart of the Initiative is the office chairs, women from each office or market who are charged with establishing and maintaining the community of women in her jurisdiction.
Launched in 2003, the Reed Smith WCAI had the staunch support of senior management. It needed to win over the hearts and minds, however, of certain men and women at the firm who were sincerely concerned that a women’s group was either unnecessary because there was no institutional bias against women’s success, or that a women’s group might look like ‘special education’ for women. As a result, everything the WCAI did was thoughtful, strategic and careful. Once the WCAI was established, it made sure to focus on all the right things: training, networking, support and business development. Anecdotal responses to various programmes were positive. In particular, WCAI developed customised training programmes in conjunction with Catalyst, the leading non-profit membership organisation that works with businesses to expand opportunities for women. The programmes, which were targeted at specific groups of women based upon seniority, were well-received. Further training provided through Reed Smith University, the firm’s in-house, firm-wide education, training and development programme, supplemented the Catalyst programmes. A programme of all-female business development events, launched at each office, was successful. And yet, like almost all of its peers, the quantifiable results with respect to the retention and promotion of women at Reed Smith were modest.
One aspect of this dilemma that the Reed Smith WCAI is focused on is whether our Women’s Initiative can be the Jerry Wexler of our firm, through understanding and supporting our talented women at all levels of seniority, and inspiring them to start really singing. But doing so will require a new approach, or rather, a new approach that builds on the platform already in place. Enter, Women’s Initiative 2.0.
In rethinking the direction of Reed Smith’s WCAI we began working with the firm’s global chief people officer in order to determine how to continue doing everything our predecessors worked so hard to establish with respect to training, networking, support and business development. On top of that, we felt that the time had come to show quantifiable results with respect to the retention and promotion of women. Reed Smith’s WCAI, therefore, developed a new mission statement, which stated: “The Reed Smith Women’s Initiative is a growing global community of lawyers dedicated to a workplace that attracts, engages, develops, supports and rewards our women lawyers.”
The global aspect of the Initiative was the first challenge. In an effort to make the WCAI less US centred, we established a core team of advisers comprised of US and non-US members. In addition, we determined that the WCAI was for all women lawyers, and set about expanding our reach beyond the US and Europe. For example, although Reed Smith’s lawyers have been advising clients in the Middle East for over a quarter century, and although there was a critical mass of female lawyers in our Abu Dhabi and Dubai offices, they had not been integrated into the firm’s Women’s Initiative. The same was true of the Hong Kong office, which was a more recent addition to the firm. To our surprise, the Middle East offices had already informally implemented many of the programmes the firm-wide initiative promoted, and the Hong Kong office boasted an impressive 30 per cent of female partners. It soon became apparent that we have a lot to learn from these amazing and talented women.
The ‘community of lawyers’ aspect of the Initiative was the second challenge. We chose to include all lawyers in our broader community, rather than just women. It was time for broader discussions of the challenges facing women and the steps needed to meet those challenges. Keeping the conversations about work-life balance or the challenges of returning from maternity leave in a ‘pink ghetto’ where everyone agreed about what needed to be done was helping no one. Senior management had always been strongly supportive of policies and programmes that supported women. We simply had to reach out to mid-level power brokers and decisions makers if we were ever going to make progress on the ground.
Our first experiment with communicating to a broader audience took place in connection with our ‘Pipeline Project’. Like many of our new projects, implementation relied heavily on the commitment and quality of a designated woman leader in each Reed Smith office, named as office chair of the WCAI. For the Pipeline Project, we identified all female associates who had been practising law for five or more years, and each office chair was charged with reaching out to those women in her office, in order to learn how the Women’s Initiative could help them succeed and achieve their goals. As part of that effort, we sent an e-mail to all practice group leaders and all Women’s Initiative office chairs, explaining the project and inviting them to work together. The entire following day was spent responding to the outpouring of interest from the practice group leaders. Clearly, the time had come to reach a broader audience with our efforts. Some leaders were hungry for help and guidance on working through difficult issues within their groups. Other leaders had grappled with and overcome challenges in their groups and were eager to share strategies. All the input benefited the project, and there was an added bonus as the office chairs had an opportunity to work with and form relationships with firm leaders on an important project.
The balance of the new mission statement can really be summarised as steps that must be taken in order to increase the retention and promotion of women. We believe women leave firms for the same reason men leave firms. Anyone who is bored, going nowhere, unsupported and unrewarded will leave any job. We are currently studying the aspects of attrition within our firm that are unique to women. The analysis is both quantitative and qualitative, and will be a primary driver of specific projects within the Women’s Initiative strategic plan for 2009.
That strategic plan will also include a customised business case establishing the need for, and benefits of, increased retention and promotion of women lawyers. The need to create a business-based rationale for the strategic plan grew out our belief that a women’s initiative without a business justification would lack power within the firm, as well as our dissatisfaction with currently-available business justifications for women’s initiatives. Most point to the fact that attrition is expensive, without explaining through firm-specific data when and why women leave their firms. Others point out that as clients become increasingly diverse, law firms will need to follow suit in order to capture business. This rationale is more persuasive, but given that only 18 per cent of general counsels of Fortune 500 companies are women3, and many diversity requirements are trumped by a company’s short-term legal needs, this is not so much an air-tight business case for women as it is an incentive to find one.
The Reed Smith WCAI business-based rationale for the retention and promotion of women links the women’s initiative to the firm’s core values, as well as the firm’s business objectives. We know women are valuable and productive. By seeking to understand with better precision how women are valuable and how women are productive, and also where they struggle, both as a group and as individuals, the strategic plan writes itself, because the initiative can build on that understanding to help women where they need it, and in a way that is consistent with the firm’s core values and objectives.
The boldest aspect of this new take on the role and goals of the Women’s Initiative is our belief that the results need to be quantifiable. We need to be accountable and women need to be demonstrably successful at achieving the numbers that count toward the firm’s bottom line. The thinking behind this approach is that when women are quantifiably successful, they will be better compensated. When they are more successful and better compensated, they will be more satisfied with their career, they will see the possibility of upward mobility within their firm, and they will not seek employment elsewhere. If they do not seek employment elsewhere, they will be in the pipeline for partnership and leaderships positions, and their chances of promotion will be increased, because they will have been tutored in how the numbers work for them, not against them.
The legal community as a whole has failed to move the needle with respect to the retention and promotion of women. And women are voting with their feet. At Reed Smith, we believe the time has come for a sea change with respect to the mission of Women’s Initiatives. All the good work that has taken place so far needs to be kept in place, but pragmatic fixes need to be crafted based on the actual needs of female lawyers as evidenced through firm-specific research and hands-on projects geared towards supporting and advancing women - in co-operation with human resources and firm leaders. These fixes should be targeted to address the specific and quantifiable problems associated with attrition, as revealed by quantitative and qualitative data. After all, nothing truly gets done until it is quantified, and when women’s initiatives start racking up victories, their women will start really singing.

Catherine (Kit) Chaskin is a partner at Reed Smith and serves as the firm-wide chair of the WCAI. She can be contacted at kchaskin@reedsmith.com

References

National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL) Report of the Third Annual National Survey on Retention and Promotion of Women in Law Firms, November 2008.
NAWL Survey at 2.
MCCA Survey Shows Growth in Fortune 500 Female GC, The Legal Intelligencer August 11, 2008