Through the glass ceiling

Russell McVeagh's Pip Greenwood (left) and Cathy Quinn of Minter Ellison Rudd Watts. Photo / Sarah Ivey

In the upper echelons of the law, it's been a good year for women. Cathy Quinn, chair of Minter Ellison Rudd Watts, won the Veuve Clicquot Businesswoman of the Year award.

And with rather less media hoopla, Pip Greenwood became chair of Russell McVeagh in February at the age of 43.

Could the fact that two major law firms are headed by women be a sign of real change in the conservative world of New Zealand law, where women still account for a paltry 17 per cent of partners in private practice?

Quinn and Greenwood's progress is a "watershed" and something to be celebrated, says high-profile public law specialist Mai Chen, of Chen Palmer.

"But let's not go hysterically overboard", she adds dryly.

The consensus seems to be that women are certainly making progress up the lower and middle rungs of the legal ladder, with a 50/50 male/female split all the way up to associate level, but the next couple of years will be crucial to see if those women can climb another rung to partnership level.

There will be legal equality by 2015 - in numbers at least - predicts Ron Pol, managing director of professional services consultancy Team Factors and author of The Business of Law 2009. But he says this does not necessarily mean more women at the top. According to Pol, women today make up 42 per cent of the legal profession, but account for a smaller proportion of those who make it into legal boardrooms.

The prominence of women lawyers in top roles speaks strongly of their dedication in a field where the most senior levels are still heavily male-dominated, says Pol. But while hard data are notoriously difficult to find, anecdotally it seems that substantial numbers of women choose to leave the profession every year, he says.

Barrister Jane Glover, author of the paper Women on the Bench says: "Women entering the profession now outnumber their male counterparts by a significant margin and the proportion of women continues to climb, both in New Zealand and other comparable jurisdictions.

"For example, in 2008 just under two-thirds of LLB graduates from the University of Auckland were female." But only 28.4 per cent of judges appointed over the past five years were women and just 26 per cent of the current judiciary are female.

Glover herself left a law firm to become a barrister because she could not see a path through juggling parenting. "Today there are still not standard paths that you can follow. Partnerships are mini-empires," she says. And only 17 per cent of those empires are headed by a woman, she adds.

Sarah Carstens, president of the Auckland Women Lawyers Association and general counsel at Fisher & Paykel Finance, says the association wants to see more women at the top.

But with the partnership pathway now taking 10 to 12 years, as opposed to the five to seven years typical in the 1990s, many women are starting to have families just when they are asked to consider stepping up to partner.

The association has identified several reasons for the lag in women's progress in private practice. "Women are not as good at self-promotion, they are not as good at networking," says Carstens. They are also not as good at applying for the role of partner, she adds. And one reason is that women believe being a partner will not give them the flexibility to have families as well.

Whatever does change, one constant is that law can be an extraordinarily tough environment for men and women. One private practice partner tells of several colleagues trying to steal a client from her while she was on maternity leave. She had to come back early to safeguard her territory. She outmanoeuvred her colleagues, but it wasn't an ideal situation for a mother coping with a newborn.

Tough the environment may be, but former Telecom CEO Theresa Gattung - a trained lawyer whose friend Victoria Heine became a partner at Chapman Tripp in Wellington last year - says she sees many law firms trying hard to make it work for women lawyers. "But you have to have a passion for the law, that's what my friends have," she says. And they also have to have a little bit of "mongrel in them" to be able to stand up for themselves against the men, especially in commercial law.

Former Momentum legal recruitment consultant Virginia Numans, who has returned to the law at DLA Phillips Fox after working in recruiting, says: "For women who have been out of the profession it can be really hard." She advises: "Being able to sell yourself is crucial - women are not great at interviewing. Men are much better at saying what they want."

As one who has gone back to practising law, she says: "I'd love to see more women come back to private practice who have gone out of law altogether. For women who have been out of it for a period, they can restart. We can still have long careers ahead of us."

In the cases of Quinn and Greenwood, both had managed to carve out brands for themselves before they had children. Another common denominator is that they have a clear passion for what they do, a loyal following of clients and are not averse to the networking needed to stay on top.

Quinn thinks she appealed to the judges of the Veuve Clicquot Businesswoman of the Year award because of her work in corporate governance. She ran a symposium on corporate governance after the Enron debacle and wrote a white paper on the subject which many New Zealand companies have used.

Quinn, who acted for Anchorage Capital Partners in its acquisition of Burger King last year, says: "There is a buzz about law; I really enjoy working with clients to achieve their commercial objectives. Ultimately it's about people, you get to work with a fantastic group of lawyers and some fantastic people in business. As chair last year I worked harder than ever in my life, with the additional responsibility of being chair. I'm proud of what I achieved, it was so worth it, we came out of financial recession stronger, we won new clients."

Throughout her career she has just been herself, says Quinn. One of eight children, she is highly competitive, hard working and has been with the same company since graduating.

One reason she joined Minter Ellison Rudd Watts was because of a female partner, Patsy Reddy, although she has had many excellent male mentors along the way. Quinn, who has been a partner since she was 29, has also done her share of mentoring over the years.

In her early days as partner, she noticed that some colleagues would choose male senior associates to work with rather than the female ones.

"Whenever I had a transaction, I would always pick the women. They had to be bloody good. I used to have all-women teams on a merger and acquisition deal and clients would say: 'Don't you have any men?' I don't need to do that any more.

"Some women have the 'pull up the ladder after them' syndrome," she says. "The 'I got here and it was really tough' attitude. I think it was unfortunate and it's not something I do."

Nowadays, says Quinn, she has some brilliant women lawyers on her team, some of them working flexibly while continuing their career at a high level.

"It's absolutely possible to become a partner having access to some flexibility, but ultimately I don't want to pretend anything other than that to succeed in this business, you have to work hard. Just as people in the corporate world are working hard."

Quinn's team includes Harriet Blackburn, who was a partner for two years, then asked to become a consultant instead as she started a family. She now works flexibly, four days a week, and Quinn hopes she will become a partner again.

"I don't think I've necessarily kissed goodbye to partnership or progressing up the ranks," says Blackburn. "There's enough working life ahead of me so the change in my career is not permanent."

Law, she insists, is family-friendly. "It has served me extraordinarily well."

Unsurprisingly, new Russell McVeagh chair Pip Greenwood is also very focused on success. A colleague called her a "deal junkie" and she agrees. Her ability to forge relationships with clients is legendary.

"I like meeting people, keeping in touch with people, that's something that comes naturally," says the relationships partner for Auckland International Airport, Telecom, ANZ National and Lion Nathan, among others.

Last week she won the 2010 New Zealand Dealmaker of the Year title at the Australasian Legal Business Law awards, a category she also won in 2008.

Greenwood aims to help the women associates the firm has coming through to partner status. Half the associates, who have typically been lawyers for 10 years, are women. She believes those women need some personal attention to make it to partner, as they take maternity leave to have their babies. Of the five women partners already at Russell McVeagh Auckland, four have children, and she wants to get them together to form a strategy to keep the associates progressing.

It's the little things that will really make a difference, says Greenwood.

She intends doing some personal mentoring with her women associates in line for partnership, but who are starting families at the same time. "It's really important and I never got it."

She says her secret in continuing a big career post-children has been her mother and mother-in-law, and an excellent nanny.

In her new position, she feels a great freedom to run her working life as she wants. "This is a fantastic job for a working mother, I don't have a boss, I've got a fantastic team. I feel so privileged."

Gary McDiarmid, the chief executive of Russell McVeagh, says Greenwood was a natural choice for chair.

She was elected by secret ballot. "She is trusted, respected, a natural leader, positive, engaging, a straight shooter, she focuses on the real issues, doesn't get lost in waffle and is excellent with clients. She's only been in the job a few months, and people internally just love it ... It's about merit, she got there on merit."

The CEO says the partnership has "four Pips" at associate level, earmarked for partner. Two are pregnant; the other two are considering their options.

Over the past few years, he says, the firm has been a true meritocracy.

"Half the people that join us at graduate level are women and at other levels - senior lawyers, associates - it's 50 per cent male/female; the board are 40 per cent women, 2:5, then at partnership it just drops away."

While Russell McVeagh doesn't have any formal policies on gender, Chapman Tripp does.

In 2006, with women accounting for just eight of its 53 partners, or 15 per cent, partner Brigid McArthur says the firm started the Women in Chapman Tripp project by commissioning a former partner to interview women lawyers on their career aspirations and steps the firm might take to further their advancement.

She is optimistic about the future. "By force of numbers there will be more women," she says.

The attitude to part-time work is one of the changes - as is the label the firm uses: "We don't call it part-time - we call it different work," says McArthur.

"I think the progress is gradual and very intangible. At Chapman Tripp, we are improving parental leave, we've got the different work policy, decisions are made on who gets BlackBerrys and computers at home, that's all bubbling under the radar. You never would have thought that once a partner could be part-time. Now it's quite accepted and no one questions it."

When Auckland lawyer Kathryn Beck worked in private practice, presentee-ism was alive and well, and she felt the need to explain her absences. In 2005 she set up her own boutique law firm, where she could create her own culture. That firm, Swarbrick Beck and Mackinnon, now has an excellent reputation in employment law.

Beck agrees law can be tough and sexist at times, although she progressed very well in private practice. "It's a hard life, we are horribly critical of each other and of ourselves, and we are not terribly supportive of each other."

As her own boss, Beck likes the fact that she has no one to answer to. When she hasn't got a big case on she arrives at 9am and leaves at 5.30pm. "I'm still up at 5am working before the kids get up, often working after 8.30 at night," she says.

The practice has three partners and three lawyers, and she relishes the lack of red tape.

"I'm the partner who does the administration, but I don't have that great huge machine you have to monitor with a large practice."

Another popular alternative for ambitious women lawyers is to go in-house at a corporate, says the executive director of the Corporate Lawyers Association (CLANZ), Helen MacKay.

A growing number of women are in top general counsel or chief counsel positions in large firms around the country - Debra Blackett at ANZ National, Mariette van Ryn at Westpac and Rebecca Cottrell, executive director and general counsel at Goldman Sachs JBWere NZ.

But the pressures of in-house law can also test women who want flexibility when starting their families. MacKay, the executive officer CLANZ, was general counsel at NZ Oil & Gas, but at the same time as having her third child, she was asked to go from four days a week to five and didn't want to make the change. She has taken the newly created job with the Law Society while her children are young and is on their school board.

While Minter Ellison Rudd Watts' Cathy Quinn has been in the media spotlight recently, a growing number of other women are holding important positions. Miriam Dean, QC, the first woman partner at Russell McVeagh in 1987, recently became a director of the Auckland Transition Agency and Crown Fibre Holdings.

The QC is good-humoured about it: "They kill two birds with one stone with me - they get their lawyer and their woman!"

She believes women are making progress in the legal profession, though not as quickly as they might like. Dean was the sole woman litigator at Russell McVeagh in the 1980s; now the firm's litigation team is dominated by women.

Dean says there is a growing recognition that the often understated, holistic approach sometimes favoured by women in law - as opposed to the aggressive male stereotype - can be far more effective in achieving the desired result. More and more cases are being resolved outside the court structure, she says.

Judge Susan Thomas, a former Minter Ellison Rudd Watts partner and District Court judge in Auckland, says it is important for the law to offer more flexibility to all lawyers.

However, having families at crucial times in their careers is not the only bar to women progressing, she says. "I think that the reality of the practice of law is very different from achieving at academic level for women law graduates."

When she was in private practice, many women left because they did not enjoy the practices of a big law firm, she says. They didn't have the need for status and money. Some of them really did not like the focus on billing. "And women will say: 'I'm not enjoying this, I'd rather go and do something different'," she says.

Meanwhile, the argument for women to gain positions of power so they can dictate their terms is a convincing one.

A former private practice lawyer who has now found success in another field of law concludes: "Large private practices are very different from what they were years ago.

"What is there now is far more subtle in terms of impeding women's progress. There are no glass ceilings.

"But when you have got structures put together by males, you have got to expect [their] values. It takes women getting to the top to change the structure."