Greetings!

Hello, readers. Admittedly, I’m a little light on R&T content this week. That’s because, rather than reading a healthy balance of nonfiction and fiction, I’ve been spending our Washington, D.C. “snow days” devouring Rebecca Yarros’s Empryrean series. I enjoyed them so much that I entirely missed the controversy about the mispronunciations—and apparently Yarros’s complete ignorance —of the Scottish Gaelic names in her novels. (This TikTok takedown is pretty brutal.) It appears I should return to my normal reading habits.

Is the Legal Profession Failing Women Returning from Maternity Leave?

Law.com International [paywall, but free trial available] reports on research conducted by BlueSky, a parental coaching platform that partners exclusively with law firms, about how women lawyers in the UK felt when they returned from maternity leave. The research, based on interviews with 100 women lawyers at various intervals after their maternity leaves, found that 72% of the women lawyers felt positive about work opportunities prior to going on maternity leave, but, three months after their maternity leaves, that number dropped to 38%. Women lawyers interviewed for the article attributed this drop to the difficulties that often arise in securing childcare and dealing with a child’s sicknesses. I agree that those factors are at play; however, I also suspect that law firms—like most employers—improperly view their obligations towards working mothers as ending at the conclusion of maternity leave. While some aspects of parenting get easier as your children get older, the balance never does.

Black Box on Partner Compensation

Law.com [paywall, but free trial available] reports that Paul Weiss went to black box style of partner compensation. (Paul Weiss is not the first: a handful of other AmLaw 100 law firms have done the same.) In the article, Paul Weiss justifies the move on the basis that it needs to pay recent laterals higher than other partners in order to maintain its competitive edge. At the outset, it seems strange to me that this type of model would reduce in-fighting, as the article claims, when every partner at the firm knows that the model is being implemented to disguise large differentials in partner compensation. But more relevant to this newsletter, I am always concerned that any type of black box compensation disadvantages women and other minorities, allowing gender and other types of discrimination to run rampant behind closed doors. That’s what some women lawyers from Jones Day alleged a number of years ago, in proposed class action they ultimately dismissed. And if AmLaw 100 law firms are choosing black box style partner compensation to stay competitive in the lateral market, that’s more likely to benefit men. As this report references, women are less prominent in the lateral market than men.

Would love to hear other thoughts on this issue.

Signs that Your Office’s Hybrid Work Policy is Actually Toxic

HuffPost has a great article about how to identify whether your office’s hybrid work policy is toxic. The article gives some advice about what to do if your office has these characteristics, although most of the advice involves finding these things out before accepting a job offer. Sigh.

Ways Men Can Advance Gender Equity at Work

Along the lines of the Comes Now issue about male allies, the Harvard Business Review published an article about how men can advance gender equity at work. My favorite recommendation: helping men to realize that advancing gender equity (as with all kinds of equity) helps everyone. From the article:

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, please share it on social media. Even though the algorithm doesn’t like it, you can even share it on LinkedIn!

Have a topic you’d like me to address? Send me an email at [email protected].