Why Female Law Firm Leaders Are Changing the Business of Law
Norma Harris, Lawfuel writer
Women now lead an unprecedented slice of Big Law. The club is still small but it is richer, louder and far more important than most firms care to admit.
In 2014 a handful of women who ran some of the world’s largest law firms met for a quiet dinner at Per Se in New York. Over expensive food and frank talk they built something more durable than any tasting menu.
Morgan Lewis chair Jami McKeon had just taken the top job and wanted straight advice from others who knew what it meant to run a multi billion dollar machine while being a visible “first”. That informal group has grown as more women have become chairs and managing partners across the Am Law elite and it now operates as a private sounding board for some of the most powerful lawyers in the world.
From Rare Exception to $3 Billion Club
A decade ago the idea of a woman running a top ten US firm still felt like a curiosity. When the FT’s Innovative Lawyers project first looked hard at North American firms there were only a few women in charge of Am Law 200 giants.
Now five of the ten largest US firms by revenue are led by women and each of those firms posts more than $3 billion in annual revenue.
The list includes Barbara Becker at Gibson Dunn (above) around $3.6 billion, Julie Jones at Ropes & Gray and Yvette Ostolaza’s Sidley Austin both at about $3.4 billion, Heather McDevitt at White & Case at roughly $3.3 billion and Jami McKeon at Morgan Lewis just over $3.1 billion.
Why clients and partners now care
Big Law partners are not suddenly converts to social justice and diversity, but rather to protect their margins. Firms have worked out that clients who answer to their own boards on ESG and diversity want to see something similar in the firms that bill them seven figures a month.
There is also a stark fact, which is that in the increasing number of lawyers in the US, women make up the majority of US law students yet not even a quarter of equity partners are women. Firms have been shedding talent for years in a way that would horrify any other industry.
Senior women in charge are starting to break that pattern by treating diversity as a management problem rather than a marketing slogan, something LawFuel has tracked in coverage of the best Big Law firms for women and the firms lifting equity numbers for female partners.
The skills Big Law used to sneer at
What does this new leadership actually look like. It is not the old model of the remote rainmaker who appears once a quarter with a spreadsheet.
McKeon and others describe a style that leans hard into communication, empathy and a more rounded view of careers for people who have no interest in waiting twenty years for a shot at equity.
Ropes & Gray’s Julie Jones (above) went into the pandemic after asking former Goldman Sachs boss Lloyd Blankfein for crisis advice and then turned herself into what she calls “communicator in chief” for the partnership with regular, open briefings.
That approach plays directly into what younger cohorts want from firms and mirrors themes LawFuel has explored around Gen Alpha and value driven careers where culture and leadership matter as much as pay scales and bonuses.
The Politics of being a “First”
There is also a harder edge to all this. The women running these firms have had to navigate a noisy attack by President Donald Trump and an accompanying set of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission letters questioning Big Law diversity and inclusion practices.
None of them wants to be used as a political prop for or against DEI programmes yet they also know their appointments are read by many as a test of whether Big Law takes inclusion seriously.
Most of these leaders are wary of being reduced to “female chair” headlines.
White & Case chair Heather McDevitt (above) spent much of her early career as the only woman in the room and now runs a firm whose executive committee is half women even as the partnership still lags.
Gibson Dunn’s Barbara Becker is blunt that she does not frame her decisions through gender yet she also knows what it means when a staff member in Singapore shows his daughter the firm wide announcement of her election as proof of what might be possible.
Beyond New York and DC
For the wider profession the rise of these women should do more than provide talk in the large centers, but it also offers a model for mid market and regional firms watching their own associates drift away.
The firms that treat women’s advancement as a structural question of pipeline, pay and power will keep talent; the firms that keep treating it as an optics issue will keep losing it.
LawFuel has followed similar themes in pieces on female led firms, Big Law milestones for women and the power lists that now routinely feature women at the top of litigation, regulatory and corporate practices.
If your own management table still looks like it did in 1995 do not be surprised when the best lawyers in your firm decide their future belongs with someone else.
