Gender Diversity

McDermott Will & Emery’s commitment to gender diversity is reflected in our traditions.  In 1957, we were the second major U.S. law firm to elect a woman partner.  Since then, we have hired and promoted women to leadership roles within our Firm.

Our Gender Diversity Committee (GDC) develops policies and initiatives to ensure that all of our colleagues understand the value of a diverse firm; to formalize the Firm’s long-standing commitment to acceptance of gender differences; and to hire, promote and retain the most talented lawyers regardless of gender.

SUBCOMMITTEES
To carry out its ambitious agenda, the GDC meets monthly and has established a number of working subcommittees to study relevant gender issues and to make policy recommendations to the full GDC.  Each subcommittee has its own chair and its members are drawn from the full GDC, with other interested colleagues invited to participate.  One notable success from our GDC subcommittee structure is the formation of McDermott’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Committee.  In early 2005, the GDC chair identified the need to address issues of our LGBT colleagues.  To begin to address those issues, the GDC established an LGBT subcommittee, and in 2006—after a year of groundbreaking and successful subcommittee operation—the LGBT Committee became the third Firm-wide standing diversity committee.

Current GDC subcommittees and brief descriptions of their operations follow:

Compensation and Advancement Subcommittee
This subcommittee evaluates, reports on, and makes recommendations relating to compensation, billing credit allocations and promotion issues with respect to our women colleagues.

Training and Mentoring Subcommittee
This subcommittee evaluates, reports on, and makes recommendations about our Firm’s assignment system and efforts at mentoring and training our women colleagues.

Rainmaker Development Subcommittee
This subcommittee evaluates, reports on, and makes recommendations to assist our women colleagues with their internal and external business development, marketing and networking efforts.

Women of Color Subcommittee
This subcommittee addresses the issues faced by our women colleagues of color.

Road Warrior Subcommittee
This subcommittee works with our Firm’s Information Technology Department, evaluating and recommending remote working technology solutions and policies as they relate to the needs of our women colleagues.

Management Report Diversity Data Subcommittee
This subcommittee is responsible for working with our administrative departments to better track our diversity data and to provide information to our partners in regular management reports.

Diversity Information Subcommittee
This subcommittee is responsible for approving all responses to client and third party requests for diversity data.

Re-Entry Subcommittee
This subcommittee is responsible with identifying, understanding and addressing obstacles to the successful reintegration of our women colleagues upon return from maternity leave.

ACTION ITEMS
The GDC has worked tirelessly to improve the Firm’s environment for everyone’s benefit.  It identified important issues faced by our women colleagues and proposed Women’s Action Items to address these issues.  These Action Items were unanimously adopted by the Management Committee.  Although initially proposed to assist our women colleagues, Firm management is now working with all of our diversity committees to expand appropriate action items to advance all of our diversity initiatives.

The Women’s Action Items identify specific goals and benchmarks aimed to further the advancement and promotion of our women lawyers and are divided into two groups.  The first group of action items reflect our Firm’s commitment to diversify our mission and to enhance and sustain a welcoming, inclusive, nurturing and productive climate for all of our colleagues.  The second group of action items reflect our Firm’s commitment to improve the retention and promotion rates of women lawyers in our Firm.  Specific items include more active support of our reduced time and maternity, paternity and family leave policies; effective communication of our diversity commitments; and developing objective ways to measure our progress and impose accountability for results. 
The Action Items include:

• Requiring and conducting diversity training for all lawyers;
• Improving gender balance in Firm leadership;
• Supporting the use of maternity and paternity policies, family leave and reduced time policies that provide opportunity for promotion to the highest level of partnership;
• Holding partners accountable for promoting diversity, including formal and informal mentoring of women; and
• Reviewing the Firm’s assignment system to provide for gender diversity in high visibility assignments, projects for key clients, projects to develop substantive legal skill, client service team participation and client development skills.

WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP SERIES
Our GDC has established our Women’s Leadership Series, which regularly hosts women’s leadership and mentoring events, giving McDermott’s women opportunities to network with one another and a forum to discuss the unique challenges faced by women in the legal profession.  One of these challenges is understanding that women lawyers are often confronted with a choice between two career paths.  One path is for women who choose to forge ahead in their legal career with no diversions, and the other path is for those who need to make periodic accommodations for personal, family or other issues during their careers.  McDermott strives to allow women to choose the opportunities they seek on both career paths.  We have established an extensive gender diversity and women’s professional development library that has relevant resources available to all of our colleagues.

OUR COMMITMENT
In our effort to improve gender diversity in the legal profession, we are members of gender diversity organizations, and we sponsor professional development programs.  A key tenet of our GDC and our Women’s Initiative is to collaborate with other professional service firms and women’s organizations to create networks and to provide leadership opportunities for our women at all practice levels.  To that end, and through the efforts of the GDC, we have entered into formal and informal alliances with a number of professional and women’s organizations, some on the local office level and some with a national scope.

As an example of an alliance in which we are involved, McDermott is a lead signatory of the Chicago Bar Association’s Alliance for Women’s “Call to Action on Women’s Leadership in the Legal Profession.”  As an original signatory, we promised to increase the percentage of our women partners, to have women represented on every Firm committee, to increase the number of women practice group leaders and to review our compensation process for any gender disparities.

Many of our local offices sponsor local women’s bar association events and initiatives.  We sponsor and participate in programs for the Women’s Bar Association of the District of Columbia, the Black Women Lawyers’ Association of Greater Chicago’s National Summit of Black Women Lawyers, the Boston Women’s Bar Association, the Women’s Lawyers Association of Los Angeles, the Greater Washington Area Chapter Women’s Lawyers Division National Bar Association, various women’s state bar associations and foundations, and the American Bar Association.

We are a visible and consistent sponsor and supporter of the National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL). Our alliance with NAWL provides women colleagues from all of our offices with opportunities to take leadership roles on NAWL committees, to develop and participate in local and national programs, and to meet and network with other women lawyers from around the country.  Our women have served, for example, as panelists on a variety of NAWL programs.  These programs are very popular and provide our colleagues with excellent opportunities on a national scale.

In 2006, under the leadership of our GDC chair, our Women’s Initiative co-founded a Chicago group named Women’s Leadership & Mentoring Alliance (WLMA).  WLMA’s mission is to cultivate networking, mentoring and career development opportunities for women, while encouraging seasoned women professionals to build alliances with younger women professionals as the younger women develop their networking and leadership skills.  To date, WLMA has presented programs on generational differences, financial planning, new trends in collaborations between businesses and art communities, gender communication differences and world-wide charitable giving considerations.  We have provided the WLMA formation model to other McDermott offices in the hopes that they will form their own WLMA groups.

As a result of our various women’s initiatives we were honored in 2007 among the Best Law Firms for Women by Working Mother magazine and Flex-Time Lawyers LLC.  This recognition illustrates our success in creating a work environment that is hospitable and encouraging to the advancement of women.  We believe we have taken great strides to develop our GDC and Women’s Initiative.  We not only provide our women with policies, programs, alliances and opportunities to succeed, but we also create an awareness among all of our lawyers of the potential barriers to such success.