Image: Shutterstock

Is it possible that the key to achieving greater gender parity among law firm partners is to ditch the traditional law office and have everyone work remotely? That seemed like a potential takeaway from Working Mother magazine's latest “Best Law Firms for Women” list, where one firm, Culhane Meadows Haughian & Walsh, blew the others away in its percentage of female equity partners.

As with so many things, alas, the reality is more complicated.

Working Mother's list, released this month, reported that 60% of the equity partners are women at Culhane, a “cloud-based” firm with 70 partners spread across seven states. In comparison, the next highest percentages on the list, which was dominated by traditional Big Law firms, were Hanson Bridgett (38%), Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz (37%) and Fredrikson & Byron (33%). The average of the firms was 22%.

The survey took into consideration work-life benefits, time off allotted, flexibility to work from home, percentage of women in equity or high-paying roles, and even those that offered financial compensation for egg-freezing or fertility treatment. The magazine's unranked tally included 60 firms based on those criteria.

(The list also highlighted 17 “Hall of Famers”—firms that have remained on the list for at least 10 years. They are: Gibbons; Hanson Bridgett ; Katten Muchin Rosenman; Latham & Watkins; Littler Mendelson; Manatt, Phelps & Phillips; Morrison & Foerster; Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe; Perkins Coie; Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman; Sidley Austin; Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr; Baker McKenzie; Chapman and Cutler; Debevoise & Plimpton; Dorsey & Whitney; and Faegre Baker Daniels.)

Culhane Meadows, which only hires at the partner level, had nearly double the percentage of female equity partners compared to the next closest firm this year. So what's the secret?

For starters, the firm has just five equity partners, out of a total of 70 total partners. Kelly Rittenberry Culhane, co-general counsel and managing partner of Culhane Meadows, said the 60% number is a bit confusing because of how it is defined.

While three of the five partners in leadership roles at Culhane (60%) are women, the total partnership percentage is closer to 33% using a broader (and accepted) definition of “equity partner.” For our purposes, we are defining equity partner as someone who gets paid based on total firm profit and not just from the revenue they bring in.

But Culhane still has a high percentage of female partners. Rittenberry Culhane says that the firm's ability to attract women partners is in part due to their its payment formula, in part due to three of its managing partners being women, and in part due to their its dedication to giving women reentering the workforce a chance.

“We were all partners at big, international firms,” Rittenberry Culhane said of the women in leadership roles at the firm. “We are the people we are looking to hire.”

This mindset, and the flexibility to work from home, are two of the reasons that she believes the firm stands out when it comes to gender equity. But even with those attractions in tow, Culhane Meadows is still a ways from achieving true gender parity.

Benjamin Lieber, founder and managing partner of virtual firm Potomac Law Group, was formerly an associate at Covington & Burling and knows how the Big Law machine works.

He started Potomac eight years ago in part as a way for working women to still practice at a high level without the hourly demand that larger firms can mandate. While it does hire at the counsel level, it has a much higher percentage of women in the partner position than any firm on the Working Mother list.

“I thought someone would recognize we have all this brain power sitting at home because they don't want to work 2,700 hours a year, but they will work 1,400,” he said. “But no one did. So I did.”

Lieber was the only male during the founding the firm, which consisted of him and solely women partners. It is now about a 50/50 split between men and women for their 86 attorneys. But he also said that four of the five attorneys in management are female, Lieber being the lone exception.

Potomac comes in ahead of the curve with regard to percentage of women who are partners (41%). He said that 20-25% of the lawyers there fit the “working mom” description, and he believes that the work and payment structure they set up there leads more capable women to want to join his firm rather than a traditional Big Law firm.

“We are a kinder, gentler version of the big firms,” he said.

The largest of the distributed law firms is FisherBroyles, started 17 years ago by Kevin Broyles and James Fisher. The firm has over 230 partners and is poised to break into the Am Law 200 next year. It also employs a similar eat-what-you-kill model to Potomac's, using a formula that ties compensation directly to individual partner revenue.

“People know when they work here that they never have to be concerned with not getting paid equally based on their sex, color of their skin or sexual orientation,” he said.

Nevertheless, FisherBroyle's equity partnership percentage hovers around 28% female, or 65 of the firm's 234 partners.

Broyles said that FisherBroyle is contending with forces that are go beyond a firm partnership model or work-from-home capability.

“We can't fix the institutional biases that traditional law firms have,” he said. “We are fishing from a pond where those biases have existed for a long time.”

Still, Culhane, FisherBroyles and Potomac all have at least slightly higher ratios of female to male partners than the average in the latest Working Mother report. Perhaps not coincidentally, all three firms stated a commitment to not just hiring women, but providing an environment, standard or virtual, that gives them greater opportunity for advancement. But even with those efforts, parity seems a long way away.

Read More

Stay-at-Home-Rainmakers: A Growing Threat to Big Law

What Ever Happened to 'Virtual' Lawyering?