Lawyer group targets female clients
Women at a S.L. firm band together to fill a niche
By Jenifer K. Nii
Deseret Morning News
It began with an idea and an e-mail.
After more than a decade at the Salt Lake law firm of Jones Waldo Holbrook & McDonough, Susan Peterson looked around and saw that the time had come. She sent an e-mail to a group of fellow female attorneys at the firm to set up a lunch meeting because finally there were enough women at the firm to make a "group."
In November, the firm officially announced its Women Lawyers Group. All 11 of Jones Waldo's female lawyers are participating, offering expertise in everything from corporate and real estate to environmental and employment law.
The purpose of the group, according to Peterson, was to find a way to lure the growing number of women business owners and to support the work of the firm's budding female attorneys.
"I think it was a way for us to look at the fact that there is a whole world of women in business out there that we haven't traditionally reached," she said. "I also just think that to some extent if women want to find a place in the professional world, they have to make it. Maybe this is just kind of a need to stake out some different ways of doing things that are more amenable to women."
Not that Jones Waldo was unique or backward. Peterson was pregnant with her first child when she joined the firm and was part-time for five years while she cared for her family. The firm never took her off partner track, which Peterson said is nearly unheard of. Then, when she approached the firm's directors requesting a budget for the group, she said they were supportive.
"I met with absolutely no resistance," she said.
Across the board in the legal profession, women continue making inroads. As recently as 2001, respondents told the Women Lawyers of Utah, opportunities for advancement, high salaries and balanced lives were worse for women lawyers than for their male counterparts.
Debra Moore, president of the Utah Bar Association, said, "Clearly, women have been advancing in the profession.
"But clearly, there's also room for improvement. The differences that are apparent are at the upper echelons of the profession: the positions that have the greatest status and influence. There, the number of women drops off dramatically."
When Moore was admitted to the bar 20 years ago, women made up 40 percent of her class. During the past two decades, the percentage of women has stayed between 30 percent and 50 percent.
"By the time women have been in practice 20 years, you'd expect them to be in positions of leadership — in the judiciary, in law firms, at law schools," she said. "And they are there. They're just not there in the same percentages as men."
There are reasons for that, Moore said. Some women have left the profession to care for families. Some have left the profession for other work. It isn't likely that intentional discrimination is rampant in the law profession, Moore said. There's something else going on.
"I think that there are very subtle, unintentional ways of evaluating attorneys' performance in the workplace," she said. "The same characteristic might be more accepted in a man than it is in a woman, for example. Or vice versa.
"But for women to make further progress, it will take more than just an absence of discrimination, and time. It will take a concerted effort to discern what these subtle differences are and to eliminate them; to bring them into the firm's consciousness and take specific steps to eliminate them."
Which makes Jones Waldo's group particularly smart, Moore said.
"I think it's a very smart marketing tactic they've put together," she said. "More and more corporations are interested in making sure that the people that work for them reflect their own customers. I think that in forming a women lawyer group, the lawyers at Jones Waldo have put the firm in an excellent position to work with clients who are concerned with gender-equity issues."
Lauren Barros, past president of Women Lawyers of Utah, said the growth of women-owned businesses — Utah ranked third in the nation according to one national poll — also suggests there are clients to be had, clients who may be more responsive to women attorneys — a growing, untapped market.
"This (Jones Waldo) group seems to be following the trend of other businesses that are focusing more toward women," Barros said. "Just like Patagonia or Black Diamond is making clothes for women now, businesses are finding, and market research is showing, that women respond."
Lucy Jenkins, chairwoman of the Jones Waldo group, said she hopes it will help clients and lawyers alike.
"I'd like it to generate business for our firm, including women," Jenkins said. "One of our objectives was just to support the women in our group. I'd like each of the women in our group to progress professionally, to be able to market, to be able to have their own clients."
But first things first, Peterson said.
"I'd like to see it contain more women, to start with."
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