Case study: Mallesons Stephen Jacques

Setting the standard

Kate Rimer and Catherine McNair reveal how Australian firm Mallesons Stephen Jacques has succeeded in positioning the firm as a government-accredited 'employer of choice for women'.

Mallesons Stephen Jacques’ (Mallesons) gender diversity journey began in 1984, when the firm appointed its first female partner, Robyn Chalmers. A few years after Chalmers went on leave to have her first child and during this time she was instrumental in driving the firm’s first paid parental leave. Later, when it came to returning to work, she drafted the flexible-work policy for partners and became the firm’s first part-time partner. This work established the foundations for the firm’s gender diversity strategy, which focuses on attracting and retaining top female talent.
By 2002, the firm’s senior leadership team recognised the need to further develop our strategy, to address the barriers to partnership for women. A Gender Strategy Committee was established and charged with a mandate to investigate the disconnect between the number of women entering the firm as graduates (around 63 per cent of the firm’s intake) and the number being admitted to the partnership (around 15 per cent at the time).
The committee sought feedback from all partners and staff and received a substantial number of submissions from a broad group within the firm. As a result it made a number of significant recommendations including the development of programmes to support work/life balance and greater flexibility in both work structure and future career paths.

‘Working together’ initiatives
These recommendations were implemented through a programme called ‘Making work work, together’. Launched in 2004, the programme was considered a watershed for the firm in terms of raising awareness, instigating organisational change and enhancing staff engagement, attraction and retention. Demonstrating that we had listened to what our staff wanted was a key success factor in embedding ‘Making work work, together’ as an integrated component of the firm’s culture. The programme, designed to support all staff members in managing their work, family and other aspects of life includes the following policies and initiatives: 12 weeks paid parental leave; emergency childcare; family events policy; work/life links (such as online community resources) childcare and elderly care kits; mentoring; meeting times policy; a ‘swap pay for leave’ scheme; and, time in lieu guidelines.
Building on the success of this initiative and continuing the commitment to act on the recommendations of the Gender Strategy Committee, the firm then launched ‘Making flexible hours work, together’ in 2005. This initiative was a direct response to providing greater flexibility in work structure, and formalised the offering of flexible work arrangements that had been available to staff for the past 20 years.
Both programmes were launched by the firm’s chief executive partner Robert Milliner and endorsed by the leadership team, not only lending credibility to the initiatives, but also sending a clear message to staff that the firm was committed to developing long-term strategies to build a sustained culture that would support flexible work practices.
Alignment with the firm’s business strategy was also considered critical to the long-term success of the outworkings of the Gender Strategy Committee. The business model at Mallesons is built on the service-value profit chain where engagement and retention of employees are key enablers to the delivery of excellent client service and achieving business results. By responding to our staff’s individual and family needs with tangible programmes, we had begun to see the signs of success in driving change, engagement and raising levels of awareness as to how our staff can best achieve a balance between personal and professional commitments. Rates of flexible work practices increased, the firm saw an improvement in the percentage of women returning from maternity leave and, perhaps most significantly, the percentage of female partners began to increase, from 17 per cent in 2004 to 21per cent in 2009.

Flexible work consultation project
The drive to embed the gender strategy into the firm’s culture continued in 2006, with the ‘flexible work consultation project’, which was conducted nationally. This involved a review of current policies and consultation with employees who had flexible work arrangements. The project identified the need to provide more support to partners and employees to facilitate open discussions about flexible working options, particularly the need to have these discussions early in the case of female staff taking maternity leave and considering returning under a flexible-working arrangement. The flexible working resource pack was developed as an outcome of this project. It contains checklists and tips to help both partners and staff to fully consider these requests.
The outworkings of our gender diversity strategy continued to ensure that talent retention was seen as a business critical issue for the firm. Indeed, Milliner made equal employment opportunity (EEO) and gender diversity among his top priorities. The firm’s commitment was further demonstrated by the appointment of an EEO and flexibility manager in 2006, reporting directly to the executive director of the firm’s people and development department. The focus of this role was to continue to educate, promote and drive the programmes that would continue to respond to our staff needs and generate outcomes for the firm.
The focus has now moved to providing targeted programmes that will enable our female staff to develop the awareness and skills to effectively manage their careers. More dedicated support will also be provided to our high-potential female senior associates and female partners, particularly those with young families.

Career resilience and success programme
In 2006 the firm also piloted the ‘career resilience and success’ programme. These initiatives were specifically offered to female senior associates and provided support in managing and taking control of careers. More than 64 senior associates have now taken part in this programmme, which has been running since 2006.
One of the issues this programme highlighted for female senior associates was the linear nature of career progression in many firms and the lack of alternative career options if partnership was not their ultimate motivation. Over the course of 2005 and 2006 the firm consulted widely with senior associates in relation to expanding potential career paths for this group. Following extensive internal consultation and a review of the practices of our competitors in Australia and major law firms overseas, it was proposed that the definition of the role of special counsel was expanded beyond its traditional application of a technical black-letter law specialist, so it has broader appeal to our lawyers and greater flexibility to meet the needs of practice teams and our clients.
The redefinition of the special counsel role was formally announced in August 2007. And by 2009, 52 per cent of the firm’s special counsel were women. Such an achievement went some way to illustrating the firm’s commitment to retaining its top talent and its efforts to provide diverse and rewarding career paths for firm staff.
At the same time as a number of these initiatives were being launched, we found that many of our recently-promoted female partners were having their first child in the three years following promotion to partnership, putting them under enormous strain. Many of these women were in dual-career families.
While we had had female partners in the firm for over 20 years, there was an acknowledgment that female partners juggling work and family faced very specific challenges, particularly when their children were very young. In 2008, we therefore decided to establish our ‘partners work and family’ programme for all Australian-based female partners with young families. This involved a series of facilitated workshops, run over a six month period and intended to formulate solutions to address the challenges of combining parenting and partnership responsibilities. Feedback from the programme was overwhelmingly positive, with partners reporting it was one of the best development offerings provided by the firm.

Mallesons engaging women
It was increasingly clear that the provision of role models in both the legal sphere and other industries was being viewed as extremely important, providing practical approaches and insight and inspiration to others. In 2007, the firm therefore launched the ‘Mallesons engaging women’ initiative to bring together a wide range of activities from across the firm, focusing on the advancement of women. The forum hosts events and initiatives each year, which profile women leaders across business, politics, science, community and the arts. This initiative results from two key business drivers: our commitment to the advancement of women in the firm as part of our culture of meritocracy and our desire to provide opportunities to enhance our relationships with clients that are interesting and engaging. Launched initially in our Sydney office, the success of the programme soon reached other centres and is now available across Australia.

Mentoring
Mallesons now also offers a formal mentoring programme, which forms part of our learning and development strategy. Programmes such as ‘career resilience’ and ‘partners work and family’ stress the importance of each individual taking ownership of their careers and ensuring that a mentor is just one element of their long-term career plan. Another powerful outcome was women in leadership positions across the firm recognising that, as individuals, they play a key role in the development of the future female leaders within the firm.
Day-to-day support is also considered essential and an integral component of the firm’s gender diversity strategy. Executive coaching for both male and female partners and high-potential or highly-valued female senior associates is used extensively throughout the firm. The firm’s coaching panel has also been expanded specifically to provide coaches for senior women. Many of those within the firm who are accessing coaching are women seeking support in managing career and family issues.

My learning
Our learning and development strategy, ‘my learning’, provides a broad range of development opportunities to partners and staff, regardless of gender. It provides training on a broad range of specific skill areas, while also building capabilities that the firm needs in the future. Over the rest of 2009 more than 30 different programmes will be offered, ranging from one-hour modules to three-day residential programmes. Women on parental leave are invited to attend all relevant programmes with onsite childcare provided. Male and female staff with young babies have been in attendance at the last five offsite conferences and workshops.
Our flagship residential programmes are designed to engage lawyers at all levels in understanding our business, our clients, future trends and the impact of the economic drivers in the Australian and Asian regions.

Outcomes
Mallesons has gained recognition for our long-term commitment to gender equality in the workplace. The results of our integrated strategy to advance women in the workplace has received a very positive response from our clients, recruitment firms, prospective employees and staff.
The ability to measure our success has been critical. In addition to our annual integrated employee opinion survey, The Vibe, which launched in 2004, Mallesons has benchmarked the firm’s initiatives against other organisations, seeing this as an important way to measure the firm’s progress. The Vibe has an 89 per cent participation rate among partners and staff, with 93 per cent of staff feeling proud to be associated with Mallesons, 87 per cent recommending it as a good place to work and 81 per cent believing strongly in the goals and objectives of the firm.
An area of particular focus is continuing to increase the number of female partners and women in leadership roles across the firm. Since the 1980s, we have had women in leadership roles, including centre staff partners, practice group team leaders, client relationship partners, general counsel, managing partners, chair of the admissions committee, board membership and chairman of the board.
Our progress to date includes the following:

Twenty-two per cent of total partners at the firm are women;
In 2009, 50 per cent of new partners were women. Forty-one per cent of those promoted to partnership since 2004 have been female;
Fifty-four per cent of senior associates are female;
Sixty-three per cent of graduates are female; and
Of the 290 staff on flexible work arrangements in 2008, 94 per cent were women.

While we acknowledge the fact there will continue to be challenges, Mallesons has made a clear commitment to work towards addressing the barriers to the advancement of women in the workplace. This year we will launch a diversity council. The council will be made up of champions in senior positions from across practice teams and centres. We see the involvement of our staff an important element of the structure of the committee to ensure we appreciate the issues faced by all our staff across demographic groups. The council will provide stewardship of the diversity agenda sending a strong and clear message of the firm’s intent to continue to implement and drive cultural change. With the commitment of our chief executive partner and leadership team, Mallesons will strive to find innovative, practical and commercial solutions to attracting, developing and retaining talent for the future and maintaining our position as an Australian government Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency ‘employer of choice for women’ in the markets in which we operate.

Kate Rimer is executive director of people and development and Catherine McNair is equal employment opportunity and flexibility manager at Australian firm Malleson Stephen Jacques. They can be contacted at kate.rimer@mallesons.com and catherine.mcnair@mallesons.com.