Larry Bodine Law Marketing Blog
Top 10 Family-Friendly Law Firms
What a great marketing distinction to have: your firm is family-friendly. This means that your law firm is not a golden sweatshop where attorneys are pressured to bill hours and generate big invoices for clients. It also demonstrates that the firm is not run by sharks, but is instead managed by humane lawyers who respect that people have real lives outside the office.
Yale Law Women announced the Top Ten Family Friendly Firms of 2010. In alphabetical order, they are:
- Arnold & Porter
- Debevoise & Plimpton
- Dorsey & Whitney
- Kirkland & Ellis
- Mayer Brown
- Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky & Popeo P.C.
- Perkins Coie
- Sidley Austin
- Steptoe & Johnson
- Wilmerhale
In its fifth annual survey of the Vault Top 100 Firms, YLW found that many firms have already embraced more flexible career paths.
- 24% percent of firms who responded to our survey offer formal “off-ramp / on-ramp programs,” which allow attorneys to leave the firm for a number of years to pursue other types of legal practice or to take time off to spend with their families.
- Some firms have created child care facilities and Work-Family Balance Groups to discuss issues concerning work-life balance.
- Firms have organized formal and informal mentoring relationships to support attorneys to stay long-term and advance within the firm.
Flexible and part-time work options are also becoming the norm: 100% of part-time requests were granted on average at responding firms, and 100% of them automatically grant part-time requests if conditions in a written policy are met. On average, 6.3% of attorneys at these firms were working part-time in 2009.
YLW found that, on average, 44.8% of associates at responding law firms are women, women make up only 19.4% of partners and 18.9% of executive or management committee members. Additionally, women made up just 28% of the partners newly promoted in 2009, on average.
Interestingly, six firms identified last year are no longer on the list:
- Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton
- Covington & Burling
- Jenner & Block
- Katten Muchin Rosenman
- Munger, Tolles & Olson
- Patton Boggs
“YLW remains concerned about the low rate of retention of women, the dearth of women in leadership positions, the gender gap in those who take advantage of family-friendly policies, and the possibility that working part-time can derail an otherwise successful career,” a YLW announcement says.
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Larry,
I hate to say it, but lawyers who work in the larger firms are very skeptical of these types of surveys. Like websites and brochures, survey responses often claim work-life "amenities", like support or affinity groups and mentoring programs, that have not been fully institutionalized (read: little or no partner buy-in or follow-through).
And the really important data is telling a different story. Quoting YLW: "YWL remains concerned about the low rate of retention of women, the dearth of women in leadership positions, the gender gap in those who take advantage of family-friendly policies, and the possibility that working part-time can derail an otherwise successful career,†a YLW announcement says."
The latest data to command headline attention was the documented de-equitization of women partners in many firms.
And then there's the fact that NALP refuses to require firms to distinguish between equity and non-equity partners in their data on diversity.
What about another NALP numbers loophole: NALP presents post-graduate hiring success for law schools based on 9-months from graduation without separately reporting (1) "jobs" created by the law schools themselves to assist out of work grads and (2) public interest positions funded by the law schools as one of their responses to poor placement numbers.
There is so much misleading data out there--how can a firm be truly "family friendly" if it's friendly only in the here and now, or only on paper, and not when it's time to advance women attorneys?
helpful for anyone who wants to go for good law firms to resolve their problems.