Pressure from the bottom line will make firms female-friendly
A COUPLE of weeks ago I was told a story about a law firm Christmas party. The senior partners took part in a game where pictures of their children were projected onto a screen, and they were asked to identify the cute faces. Presumably this was meant to show them to be rounded human beings, and not just the fee-obsessed slave-drivers their subordinates might think. It all backfired, though, when only one of the senior partners was able to identify any of the little darlings.
For City lawyers, anti-social hours which mean you never see your children come with the territory. But big firms increasingly talk about flexible family-friendly work patterns. The latest to get in on the act is Magic Circle firm Freshfields, which announced a new programme last week. From the autumn, employees will be able to ask to take advantage of job-sharing, a buddy system, or off-site working. The firm will also help out female workers who are pregnant or who recently had a baby, allowing them to move to doing more non time-critical, such as drafting documents.
Of course, the issue of flexible working is mostly about women, and despite years of talk about glass ceilings, it’s still hard to get to the top if you lack a Y chromosome. Although 60 per cent of new recruits into City law firms are female, fewer than 25 per cent of partners are women. At Allen & Overy, which introduced a flexible working scheme for female partners last year (a whole five of them) just 16 per cent of partners are women. A lot of talent is being lost somewhere along the career path. Given that the cost of recruiting a new lawyer is said to be £125,000, a lot of money is too.
So this new, flexible working future is good, then, isn’t it? Well, maybe. If you introduce these sorts of working practices, you also have to change the way you evaluate people so that you don’t judge them on the number of hours they spent in the office, or the amount of time spent with clients. Time will tell if working from home damages your prospects.
One City lawyer who recently had a baby told me that she found the idea of being given special compensation when you are pregnant as “patronising” and “unnecessary”. Allowing flexibility for just six months after the birth is just not enough. “Try five years,” she suggests. Plus, she points out, the law says that you have the right to ask for flexible working from your employer. That firms are complying with employment legislation is not really something to crow about.
One reason that law firms are so bad at flexibility is that they are terrified that it will damage the bottom line. But that’s to misunderstand what flexibility is. Family-friendly working conditions don’t mean that you can drop vital, time-sensitive work to run home every time your child grazes a knee. “Flexible working has to exist in the context of running a business,” says Clare McConnell, partner and head of projects at Stephenson Harwood and until recently chair of the Association of Women Solicitors. “There has to be some give and take as to what is achievable, and you all have to agree what the structure will be.” As long as you talk to clients about how you work, they usually accept it, she says. Clients can be upset when they call and find that somebody is not in the office but the traditional solution – to keep people in the office all the time – results in partners who can’t recognise their own children.
But change could be on the horizon, and the pressure is coming from two directions. Firstly, clients are demanding more family-friendly working practices. Corporate and social responsibility is increasingly important, and businesses only want to work with firms which have good, family-friendly working practices. In many cases this is not ideological, but pragmatic. They are not happy about vital contracts being drawn up by frazzled lawyers who have worked five consecutive 16-hour days, and are keener to get home for bath-time than double-checking the small print. Lawyers will have to change if they don’t want to see business vanish to cuddlier firms.
Secondly, alternative business structures are forcing change. Next year the part of the Legal Services Act that allows outside investors to invest in or partner with law firms comes into force. A number of firms are in talks with accountants, insurers and banks to enter into partnerships. These firms are apparently horrified by the working practices that they have seen, and are demanding that if they are to combine in any way then the law firms will have to change their ways. Which means that if they want to flourish, law firms will have to come kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Where decades of changing social mores and campaigning have failed to change things, the market may well succeed. In the law, for all the fine words, money talks.