NO ACCOMMODATIONS NECESSARY: Pictured, left to right, are partners Karen Painter Randall, Karen Munster Cassidy, Linda Palazzolo and Patricia Pindar of Connell Foley LLP, where 'everyone makes it on their own with no special treatment,' Palazzolo says.

Women Show Strong Net Gain In Partnerships They account for more than half the increase in partners at the average N.J. firm this year By Henry Gottlieb New Jersey Law Journal 09.13.99

With gender parity at the law school level, equal influence in the legal community would follow, they mused. "We guessed it would take about 10 years," says Lashbrook, the senior associate at Woodbridge's Wilentz, Goldman & Spitzer.

OK, so it's taking longer, especially if the definition of influence is being a partner in a large New Jersey firm. The latest survey of 18 firms the Law Journal has tracked since 1990 shows that 14 percent of the partners are women, compared with 8 percent the first year of the study and 13 percent in 1998 and 1997. (See chart.)

That's progress at a glacial pace, considering the massive growth of the number of women associates in the past decade.

But there is one sign of faster movement. Since last October, the net gain in partners at these firms has been 26, and the net gain in women partners has been 14. In other words, the elevation of women accounted for more than half the increase in the number of partners at the average firm. In earlier years, women's share of the growth in partner ranks never exceeded 25 percent.

Twelve of the firms have more women partners than they did last year. The number of firms whose percentage of women is below double digits is three, compared with six in 1998 and 1999, seven in 1995 and 11 in 1990. And at two firms in the survey for the first time -- the New Jersey branches of Philadelphia firms -- women account for 15 percent of the partnerships.

The two new firms on the survey are Drinker, Biddle & Reath, whose 63 partners include those at what was formerly Shanley & Fisher in Morristown and Fox, Rothschild, O'Brien and Frankel, whose 45 New Jersey partners are at three locations: Atlantic City, Lawrenceville and Vorhees. (The two firms said they did not include Philadelphia-based lawyers who use New Jersey offices occasionally.)

Women's 14 percent share of the partnerships at the big firms mirrors the national ratio. Judy Collins, a spokeswoman for the National Association for Legal Placement says that women comprise 14.5 percent of the partnerships of NALP member firms that have between 101 and 250 lawyers.

As in New Jersey, the percentage around the country is creeping up slowly. Five years ago, the percentage of women partners in New Jersey was 12 percent, compared with 12.9 percent nationally.

Lashbrook suggests that the numbers would be higher in New Jersey if early 1980s attitudes toward partnership had remained in effect. Then, an incoming associate could expect to make partner -- not necessarily a rich one -- by exhibiting legal talent, loyalty and a willingness to work hard.

Now it's almost impossible for men or women to make partner, so the rise in the number of women associates hasn't helped.

The 26 new partnerships in the 18 firms, for example, represents only a 3.52 percent increase over the 758 partnerships in those firms last year. So it's hard to make partner for women, despite the gender equality in law schools. According to NALP, women account for 45 percent of law school students.

It's become almost a cliche that women lawyers who are raising families prefer corporate law offices to firms because corporations -- the line goes -- require fewer irregular hours and are more advanced in their thinking about providing flexible time for working mothers.

The accepted wisdom also says the pool of prospective women partners shrinks because women associates drop out to tend to their families.

Lynn Miller, of New Brunswick's Miller & Miller, says such themes were discussed last month at a diversity conference she organized for the Middlesex County Bar Association.

Miller says participants at the conference suggested that law firms -- particularly the large ones in New Jersey -- have a clubbier atmosphere than corporations because they started small and have grown the same way family businesses grow.

"It's them and their friends and their buddies," she says of these firms. When it comes time to make partners, the question is "who do they want to have breakfast, lunch and dinner with?"

Still, having more women partners in law firms is inevitable because the composition of people at corporations who hire firms is becoming more diverse, speakers at the conference suggested.

The way to be a woman with power in a law firm is to avoid the big partnerships, says Miller, who used to be an associate at Woodbridge's Greenbaum, Rowe, Smith, Ravin, Davis & Himmel. Some of the name partners there have enlightened views, she says, but she prefers her own operation. In her two-lawyer firm, she has half the power. Her partner, who is her husband, has the other half.

Not every woman has the luxury of having her own firm, however, and for those in the big ones, a question has been whether firms are willing to accommodate women partners who have child-rearing responsibilities.

Karen Painter Randall and Linda Palazzolo, two of the nine women partners at Roseland's Connell Foley LLP. bristle at the suggestion such accommodations are necessary. Palazzolo, who has been a partner since 1980, says "everyone makes it on their own with no special treatment."

The key to having a high percentage of women partners, they suggest, is to have a firm that is blind to gender, as Connell, Foley was in 1968 when it hired its first women partner, Palazzolo says.

Steven Hoskins, the managing partner at Newark's McCarter & English and Robert Max Crane, the hiring partner at Newark's Sills Cummis Radin Tischman Epstein & Gross say their firms do nothing special to smooth the way for women into partnerships.

"It's not an easy road for a woman who wants to be a full- time lawyer," Hoskins says of women who take on family responsibilities. He says the firm does have a part-time policy for some attorneys, women or men, "if they need it for family reasons."

When it comes to partnership, though, "We haven't made any adjustments or compromises or special rules," Hoskins says. "It's a level playing field."

Debra Rosen, the hiring partner at Haddonfield's Archer & Greiner, says that at her firm, "we're always concerned about diversity issues." For women who have family responsibilities, being able to put in the hours that are required for making partner can sometimes boil down to something as simple as location.

Archer & Greiner is in a leafy part of Camden County, within five minutes of residential areas, so it's easier to be a working mother there than in, say, Philadelphia, Rosen says.

She says the firm also tries to embrace a nongrinding lifestyle in which lawyers -- even younger associates -- aren't expected to spend long weekend hours at the office.

If Archer & Greiner is typical, the numbers of women associates joining firms can't help but lead to more women partners. Someday. Every one of the eight second-year law students who clerked at the firm over the past two summers was a woman, Rosen says.