Case study: Freehills

JUGGLING FOR BEGINNERS

Frances Drummond, intellectual property lawyer and partner at Australian law firm Freehills, reveals how networks can be used to create a supportive firm-wide work environment for mothers and mothers-to-be.

Search Google for links about women’s networks and you will be inundated with results. However, much of these links focus on how to build business networks and how to make your mark on the corporate world. Very little is written about networks designed to support you through breastfeeding at work, for example, or to help you meet like-minded people inside your own organisation.
Creating internal networks is important for the development of women lawyers. In law firms, large or small, we have to continually look at ways to make our business better and ultimately more profitable.
The two highest costs for our firms are staff and property. We cannot do much to influence the rent we pay. That is largely driven by the market. We can, however, make sure that the staff we spend considerable sums to recruit stay with us and are proactive and profitable. Large law firms in Australia have great success in recruiting the best graduates from the law faculties. Our graduates are at least 50 per cent women. However, the low percentage of women in partnership roles (around 20-25 per cent) would indicate that we are not great at making the women stay. This is a critical business issue and one which commonly occurs five to six years post qualification. Why? Because these days many women are choosing to have children later, waiting until they are in their early 30s. As a result, two of their key life goals crash headlong into one another – reaching partnership and having a baby. Women lawyers, calculating that this is likely to happen at around five to six years post qualification, are opting out of firms before the smash happens. For some of these lawyers, it is an acceptable choice. Perhaps they have had a really enjoyable five or six years but know that the legal profession is not for them in the long term. Others agonise over the choice and may leave without being convinced this is the correct choice.
At Freehills we have high profile, successful women partners – they have managed to negotiate the challenges. But we have also realised that we need make it clear to women that there are careers which allow them to combine family and work. We need to support the choices women make about both aspects of their lives, recognising that women have different needs to men.

Corporate Mums programme
To encourage our women to achieve their full potential and to see out the long path to partnership, we decided to develop tools to assist our women to make choices. Indeed, we have now successfully created a number of networks which form part of the ‘tool kit’ in this area. One of the most innovative and successful has been our ‘Corporate Mums’ networking initiative. This was piloted in the firms Sydney office in 2005, and rolled out nationally in 2006. It consists of six forums run over a number of months and is designed to build internal networks, share experiences and develop skills and knowledge to assist in maximising the value of the time that is devoted to career as well as the time devoted to family.
While not all women lawyers want to have a family, many do and they quite rightly assume that combining family and work will be a challenge. One big challenge is allowing our female members of staff to connect with a suitable role model. Many of the women partners at Freehills have children and successfully combine career and family. Yet a notion exists that these women, me included, are superwomen, only succeeding in combining family life and professional success through superhuman powers of organisation. I know that I am not superhuman and I have been vexed by how I give out that impression.
Research conducted by the ‘Women at Freehills’ initiative (established in 2004 to focus on understanding and removing barriers that may work against our women lawyers) quickly identified the need for suitable role models to be visible and the importance of providing opportunities for women lawyers to network among themselves and with their role models.
After discussion with many external coaching organisations, we found a facilitator who could provide a programme to assist our women lawyers to plan and organise their careers while managing their family – and so the Corporate Mums programme was born. While some were not sure about the title, we went with it on the basis that this is a programme about how to be successful in all areas of your life and to promote acceptance of the fact that many female members of staff have two roles to play – a lawyer and a mum.
The programme is offered across the firm to all female fee-earners. We encourage a mix of attendees and encourage women partners with children to attend.
The programme is a series of six, three-hour sessions facilitated by an external specialist provider covering key topics all intended to help lawyers at the firm with children, or trying for children, balance their home and work life.
The topics are covered in each series are:

Knowing what is important as a working mother;
Making the best use of your time;
Dealing with guilt and negative thinking; and,
Communicating with others for positive results.

The objectives of the programme have been clearly articulated so that the attendees know what they are getting involved in. Having clear objectives in place also helps the firm to measure whether or not those goals are achieved.
In taking action and offering real support to mothers, the firm has benefited by providing an advocacy and negotiation channel to shape future employee policies and increasing retention.
The mothers, or mothers-to-be, attending the programme benefit by:

Learning from other corporate mothers;
Having an opportunity to talk about how they are managing their dual roles and how they might be able to improve said management; and,
Gaining a relevant and supportive network within the organisation which they could utilise as role models and mentors in the future.

The topics covered in the sessions, attended by groups of 12 people, include: identifying key challenges for corporate mothers so that they could be clearly defined, prioritised and addressed by the group; strategies to help attendees invest more time boosting energy levels and productivity; ideas on how to manage their time, energy and resources on a daily, weekly and monthly basis; managing the transition from home to work and back; addressing career development and management, considering what they want to do and how to promote themselves; and, ascertaining who or what resources the group might want access to during follow-on forums.
To date, the programme has been rolled out in each of our offices across Australia and going forward we intend to continue to offer the programme to staff members.

Feedback
The feedback has been unbelievable.
One lawyer commented: “Becoming a mother was more of a ‘shock to the system’ than I ever could have imagined. Suddenly, I had responsibility for a very demanding person (my baby boy, Jack) who had no comprehensible way of communicating his unrelenting need. I had very little time for myself or latitude to make decisions for and about just myself. I was coming to terms with being a ‘good mother’, none of my suits fitted me any more and I missed the intellectual rigour of my work and the excitement of the deals I had been working on before going on maternity leave – it was overwhelming! I found myself unsure of how I might be able to integrate back into the workplace without being seen as ‘soft’ or incapable by my colleagues and still be able to nurture and support Jack in his infancy. Participating in the programme taught me that my uncertainties were not unique and that there were other women in the firm experiencing similar concerns. This was probably my favourite thing about the initiative, the collegiality that developed amongst the participants. Another highlight was the sense of ownership and acceptance I formed about my decision to be a high-performing lawyer and mother. Accepting this led to my becoming more open to suggestions and stories about the kinds of strategies, mindsets and resources I could employ to make the challenges of working motherhood far less stressful and, more often than not, fulfilling. Our group facilitator was affable, non-judgemental and humourous. She fostered a trusting and affirming environment at the sessions which helped us learn and feel empowered in our roles as corporate mums. I am grateful to my firm for running these sessions – it makes me feel valued as an employee and it tells me that, not only does the firm acknowledge how unexpectedly life-changing becoming a parent can be, it is willing to support us through that change in a positive and constructive way. I feel transformed by the programme and recommend it to all women in our firm who have children.”
Rebecca Davies. the chair of our Women at Freehills steering committee, Freehills partner for 25 years and mother to teenage children, also found the programme very valuable. “Some of the things I appreciated about the sessions were the interaction with the other participants, the practical advice we all shared and the positive and constructive mood created in each session,” she says. “Rather than reinforcing notions that it’s all too hard, we were encouraged to think and talk about the choices we were making in a positive and affirming way and I’ve seen that make a difference to me and to others. And those changes in us then lead to changes in those around us – both at work and at home. It is programmes such as this that enable us to change the corporate environments we work in and present more opportunities to those who will follow after us.”
Once the course is finished, we encourage the participants to maintain contact with each other and many former programme attendees have now gone on to form their own informal networking group. I don’t think there has been another programme at Freehills which has been so favourably reviewed. While it is early days, we hope that our Corporate Mums programme will continue to provide mothers at our firm with the necessary tips and tricks that make it easier for them to balance their lives.

Frances Drummond is an intellectual property lawyer and partner at Australian law firm Freehills. She can be contacted at frances.drummond@freehills.com