More Good Content with a Bad Headline

In an article [paywall - but you can get one free article] discussing panels held during ALM’s Global’s Women, Influence & Power in Law Conference in New Orleans, Corporate Counsel states that “Women in Law Don’t Self-Promote Enough at Work—and Can Pay a Big Price.” I saw women repost this article saying something to the effect of “Yes! We should definitely do this more!” While women should, of course, promote themselves at work, the article itself (1) contains no data about whether women do, in fact, promote themselves at work; and (2) actually addresses a number of other topics discussed during the conference, which the headline fails to capture. While for many years people said that women don’t promote themselves at work, that’s at best half the story. Women promote themselves at work, but men don’t listen. Or women get penalized for advocating for themselves. So can we stop publishing articles with headlines based on old tropes about how professional women are at fault for failing to make it to the top, and can we stop reposting them as if they are truth? The article and the conference deserve to be shared, but not that way.

Law Firm Compensation Incentives

Law.com reports [paywall] that law firms are struggling to align compensation models with their value systems. One of the biggest areas that needs to change is compensation linked to leadership achievements and performance. One example? It can take years (or decades) to build a strategy to attain market leadership in a practice area, yet time spent on that goal is unlikely to be rewarded in a compensation system that only asks what you accomplished (or what hours you billed) last year. The article also mentions that mentorship and other leadership skills go uncompensated, despite benefitting the firm. Sound familiar?

Rainmaking Advice

• Elise Holtzman gave a TED-Style talk at the Legal Marketing Association’s Northeast Regional Conference entitled Fueling Business Development Success: How Rainmaking Differs for Women Lawyers. Her LinkedIn post summarizing the talk is packed with actionable advice about how law firms can make business development easier for women. While I’ve requested the full presentation, I haven’t gotten it yet.

• Also - my friend Betsy Miller at Cohen Milstein interviewed June Pineda Hoidal at Zimmerman Reed about rainmaking skills for women. While the article’s focus is on a plaintiffs’ practice, it has good advice for women on the other side of the v. as well. I just wish the advice of being “great to work with” applied to men as much as it does to women.

Sharing Our Stories

Along the lines of the Girl Power issue last week, this article from Law.com International [paywall; single access permitted] describes the power of women lawyers sharing their stories. The stories described in the article are positive experiences, but the thesis is the same: women feel alone at the top and need to hear others’ voices.

Our Sisters Across the Pond

According to the Financial Times [paywall], British law firms have the same dismal numbers about women in leadership that we find at U.S. firms. (Of course, most of the law firms are U.S.-based firms.) The data also showed that, even when women became partners, they earned significantly less than their male counterparts. The article goes on to suggest that the problem originates from the difficulty of having a family while practicing law, although last time I checked men are parents too.

Share Comes Now!

If you’re enjoying this newsletter, please share it with others and encourage them to subscribe. And if there’s a particular issue that moves you, drop a comment on the website or on my post about an issue on LinkedIn. Have a topic you’d like me to address? Send me an email at [email protected].