“Nothing comes to mind” was the anonymous response of one of Australia’s most influential managing partners when asked about the one thing they would change about the legal profession.
Thankfully, the comment noted in the Eaton Capital Partners Managing Partner Survey released today, comes in stark contrast to other suggestions from the 34 law firm heads that participated.
However, it does show that the idea of change for some leaders is not always considered a top priority, no matter how dire the situation.
The Eaton Capital report finds law firms are currently up against some challenging people problems. The managing partners (who were named as participating in the survey but offered their responses anonymously) collectively found the three biggest issues facing the profession today are legal ill-health (especially high rates of profession in practitioners), graduate recruitment and diversity.
It’s the latter that many female lawyers might be particularly relieved to see is, for the most part, being noted as problematic and challenging by the leaders of their profession.
Women have been graduating from law in Australia in at least equal numbers to men since the early 1980s. While women continue to take the majority of graduate positions in large law firms, they also continue to drop out of the profession at much higher rates than men.
Recent analysis by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency found almost 70% of the legal profession’s employees are female, but just 6.5% of ‘CEO/Head of business’ level positions are occupied by women. Many larger law firms are still struggling to break the 20% barrier for female partnership representation.
Meanwhile, WGEA also found women working full-time in law are earning an average 35.6% less than their male counterparts.
But quotas and targets, it seems, are not considered a great solution for solving the legal profession’s gender diversity challenge.
When asked by Eaton Capital how law firms could achieve a higher percentage of female partners, 70% opted for ‘ensuring policies below partner level retain the best female talent’ over the remaining three options provided: including providing unconscious bias training (10%), setting aspirational targets (13.3%) and setting quotas (6.7%).
As for the anonymous comments offered on the issue, one leader helpfully said, “Promotion should be entirely merit based.” Another said the issue is “difficult, so difficult”, while others made suggestions including reserving quotas for very senior positions, teaching men about “the great joy of having children”, and engaging female staff to develop programs and support structures that can address why women leave.
Aside from the “nothing comes to mind” comment, most of the managing partners offered some telling comments about the one thing they would change about their profession. Suggestions ranged from,”increased diversity – the real catalyst for innovation”, to ending the “arrogance that can come with being a lawyer”, to “better recognition of mental health issues”, removing the “pomposity and self-refard” and shifting from the current mentality that measures success by hours worked rather than outputs.
One leader noted the profession is, “Too conservative, too cautious and too retrospective in its outlook”.
Plenty of things spring to mind when thinking about how the legal profession could improve itself. But many such things will be seriously uncomfortable.