Mareile Cusack, General Counsel, Ariel Investments

Mareile Cusack, General Counsel at Chicago investment firm, Ariel Investments, recently selected for The Glass Hammer's Voice of Experience series, has a few words of advice for young women entering the legal profession:

[Ms. Cusack] believes that young women first entering the industry should focus on obtaining the building blocks they need for the future. “When I first started practicing law,” she said, “I had some high expectations and a certain amount of arrogance…I thought that people would simply come to me. What I found pretty early on was that people didn’t. Unless I was willing to do the grunt work, regardless of whether I thought it was at my level, I simply wouldn’t get good work. I learned that very quickly that if you wait around for the perfect situation or perfect assignment, it is never going to come. You have to go and work as hard as you can and do whatever is needed to get the job done and to treat every assignment as an opportunity to show your competence and show the extent to which you can be additive to the process.”

Read more here.

"Opt Out" or Pushed Out: Are Women Choosing to Leave the Legal Profession?

In our first major conference since we helped launch Ms. JD, Yale Law Women is excited to announce our spring conference, "Opt Out" or Pushed Out: Are Women Choosing to Leave the Legal Profession?. The conference will be held March 27-28 in New Haven, CT. We would like to invite Ms. JD readers personally.

We invite you to participate in this thought-provoking and timely discussion of the institutional and social forces behind what some have called the "opting out" of female professionals.

Jacqueline Harounian on Work-Life Balance

Jacqueline Harounian, Esquire of Wisselman, Harounian & Associates, P.C. penned a great piece at The Glass Hammer. Her article, Raising the Bar: Balancing Professional and Personal Choices, includes some "inspirational anecdotes and advice related to the challenges of balancing professional and personal choices."

Shortly after being admitted to the Bar, my daughter was born.  As I continued to work as an associate in the firm, my third and fourth children were born.  After eleven years of practice, when my youngest child was two, one of my career goals was realized when I was offered a partnership in the firm.  I am currently the only female attorney out of seven attorneys in the law firm of Wisselman, Harounian & Associates, P.C., which is recognized as one of the largest matrimonial firms in Long Island, New York.

The rest of the article can be found here.

Minority Women Partners: Some Cities Fare Better Than Others

Recent analysis by NALP reports that minority women continue to be dramatically underrepresented at the partnership level, making up less than 2% of partners in the nation's major law firms. The findings also reveal that, nationally, women and minorities continue to be much better represented in associate and summer associate ranks than in the partnership ranks. The analysis goes on to report that some cities fare better than others in the represetation of women in both partnerships and associateships nationwide:

Analyses for the 46 cities with the most attorneys represented in the directory reveal considerable variations in these demographic measures. Among the largest of these cities (those with more than 1,000 partners represented), Los Angeles and San Francisco show the highest representation of women, minorities, and minority women among both partners and associates. Minorities account for 12.03% and 12.59% of partners in these cities, respectively, and women account for 19.42% and 23.17% of partners, respectively. About 4% of partners are minority women. Firms in Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, New York, Seattle, and Washington, DC, also are close to or exceed national averages on most measures.

NAWL’s National Survey on Retention and Promotion of Women in Law Firms, Part I

NAWL released the results of their survey two weeks ago, albeit to less fanfare that other less-involved reports. While those of us who are familiar with the topic may find that much of what the survey reports is old news, there were some things reported that were surprising to me.

First, I was surprised to learn that the drop off in the number of women attorneys at firms happens between the senior associate level and the partner level. I was previously aware that women comprise somewhere between 45-50% of junior associates (actually 49% according to this survey) and somewhere around 17% of equity partners (actually 16%). I assumed that the lower representation of women was gradual with the percentages getting less and less with each year of associate-ship. However, the survey shows something much more striking. NAWL found that women make up 43% of 7th year associates, 30% of of-counsels, 26% of non-equity partners, and 16% of equity partners. Here’s what the report says about these numbers...