The National Jurist on-line magazine is a friend to Best Friends at the Bar.  The magazine has featured Best Friends at the Bar before, and now it has included a reprint of a portion of the third book, Best Friends at the Bar:  Top-Down Leadership for Women Lawyers (Wolters Kluwer Law & Business/Aspen Publishers, 2015) in its recent publication Lawyer and Statesman.  You can read that feature here.  Take a look and forward it to your network.  The National Jurist wants young women lawyers and law firm leaders to benefit from this information, and so should you.

Lawyer and Statesman chose to quote from the portion of the book that addresses what law firm leaders should tell young women lawyers about how to succeed in the law profession — and how they should be delivering those messages.  It is not enough to say it; effective leaders also needs to believe it.  As leaders, they need to stand behind what they say and act as role models for the younger lawyers.

We all can agree that there is much work to be done to bring about true parity in leadership in our profession.  We will not get there until we deal effectively with gender bias and discrimination, hostile work environments, increased flexibility in scheduling and telecommuting, the pay gap, and the list goes on.  The young women starting out in our business MUST do their part by working hard to become the best lawyers they can be and creating value for their law firms or organizations.  But, there is a limit to how much they can do —  for a very simple reason:  They do not have the power.

Young lawyers lack authority and power to make the real changes that are necessary for our profession to survive and prosper.  It is up to the law firm leaders to foster the changes in attitudes and policies that will bring our profession into the 21st Century and make the workplace work for the lawyers of today and the stresses and new age challenges they face.

Thank you to the National Jurist for helping to spread the messages of Best Friends at the Bar and hope for the future.

To read other coverage of Best Friends at the Bar by the National Jurist, click here.