Women lawyers appear to be doing well according to a recent American Bar Association (ABA) Population Survey. Specific examples include information that, in 2023, 39 percent of all lawyers were women, up from 31 percent in 2010. Going back further, from 1950 to 1970, only 3 percent of all lawyers were women, which increased to 8 percent in 1980, and eventually to 39% in 2023.
Sounds good, right? Shows real progress for women lawyers, right?
However, digging down deeper, although approximately 24 percent of all equity partners at U. S. firms were women in 2023, in that same year the percentage of women in senior leadership roles at U.S. firms was much less.
Why is that? Why are there so relatively few women lawyers in senior leadership roles?
For the answer to that, you must think about money, specifically money that comes to the firm through the efforts of individual lawyers. It is known as making it rain money or, for short, rainmaking. Any young lawyer who does not understand the importance of rainmaking and its impact on careers, is missing the boat in terms of upward mobility.
The nexus between rainmaking and senior leadership is very simple: Make it rain, and you will be considered for senior leadership roles. Make it rain a lot, and you could find yourself as a managing partner. Forget the childhood mantra, “rain, rain, go away.” It does not apply to lawyers. For lawyers, rain is good.
Making it rain is particularly important for women lawyers, who often also are the primary caretakers of children and/or elderly parents and are constantly trying to strike the right balance between personal life and professional life. It is very complicated, and it gets more complicated when you add “making rain” to the mix. In short, who has time to put in the work to make rain, when all of the waking hours are taken up with personal life responsibilities and servicing law firm clients?
I don’t have all the answers, but I know that young women lawyers, who wish to advance in the business, need to keep rainmaking on their minds. Although they may not have time to dedicate a lot of effort to the concept at a time when their families are young, they cannot dismiss it in their career planning. They cannot afford to miss opportunities to tell people in social as well as business settings what they do and what their firms do in hope of making connections they can turn into rainmaking.
“What their firms do” is particularly important and may seem confusing. But it is critical to the future of women lawyers in terms of understanding how they can benefit from work of other lawyers in their firms. Here’s the concept: Law firms love money and will reward those who bring it to them. If you bring a new client to your firm, even if you do not have the expertise to perform the work, you will get a certain amount of credit for the work that other lawyers do on behalf of that client. More specifically, if you are a healthcare lawyer, and you are responsible for bringing an estate and trust client to your firm, you will get credit for making that connection and be financially rewarded.
So, the next time you are out socially or at a professional event, don’t forget to include information about your law practice and your firm in your conversations. It might be a lot more fun to talk about kids or vacations or the new family dog, but don’t overlook your professional future. Remember that every new client you bring to your firm can make your journey to senior leadership a lot easier.
For more information from the ABA about the current state of women in the legal profession, see this article.
