Years ago a young woman would graduate law school, pass the bar and take a job at a prestigious firm, all in the full knowledge that her career would likely have a defined stopping point several doors down from the corner offices. There were some seats around the table for female lawyers, but very few at the head.
During the past few decades, the numbers of female general counsel at Fortune 500 companies and women in law firm leadership positions has significantly risen. Still, when one examines the raw numbers of women in leadership positions at the Am Law 100, it’s clear that there is still plenty of room for improvement: only 14 percent of the leading law firms had one governing committee in which female partners accounted for more than a quarter of the membership.
The DLA Piper Global Women’s Leadership Summit serves as a venue for advancing the conversation about how we can accelerate the pace of diversification. This discussion is bipartite: what can the legal community do to provide leadership opportunities for women, and what can women do to groom themselves for leadership? Many women — especially those early in their careers — need encouragement and mentorship to realize their capacity to develop these skills. And the best place to get that advice is from those who have fought – and won— the same battles that they’ll be undertaking.
“This is not gender takeover talk—far from it,” DLA Piper Co-Managing Partner Stasia Kelly wrote in a 2012 column in InsideCounsel about the topic. “It’s about women finally taking their rightful equal seat in the firm, at the company and the paymaster’s window. Helping each other at this critical tipping point is one part of the equation.”