Joan M. Hall retired as a partner from Jenner & Block in Chicago in 1999, but she has never stopped working for the advancement of women.

“Since her retirement, she has continued to be a real presence here,” said Terri Mascherin, a Chicago partner in Jenner & Block who joined the firm when Hall was a senior partner. Mascherin said Hall has kept an office at Jenner & Block and does all sorts of work, including continuing to support the Young Women's Leadership Charter School, which she helped to found. YWLCS, which opened in 1999, is the only all-girl public school in Chicago and has helped hundreds of economically disadvantaged girls achieve their dreams of going to college. The school currently provides an education to girls in grades 9–12.

“Probably, that was the most significant thing that I have done in my life,” Hall said of her work with YWLCS. “Young women who came through our school learned to believe in themselves, learned the value of hard work,” she said.

As a result of her leadership position with YWLCS, Hall served as an advisor to the Oprah Winfrey Foundation when Winfrey started a similar school in South Africa, Mascherin said. Hall, who grew up in Bassett, Nebraska, the daughter of two teachers who she said “valued education very highly,” was one of only seven women in her class at Yale Law School, where she received her J.D. in 1965. She joined Jenner & Block as an associate after graduation, becoming the second woman lawyer at the firm. She went on to achieve many firsts.

“I was the firm's first pregnant lawyer,” Hall said in an interview published in 2012 in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin. Hall said maternity leave had not been heard of in 1970 when she gave birth to her first son, and she had only a week off after giving birth. She also took off just a week following the birth of her second son. Her experience motivated the firm's leadership to implement the part-time, parental leave policies that lawyers at Jenner benefit from today. Hall, a trial lawyer who primarily represented large corporations in federal securities cases, was the second woman to be promoted to partner in Jenner & Block and the firm's first female litigation partner. In the mid-1970s, Hall became the first woman to chair Jenner's hiring committee and was named to the firm's executive committee in 1978. When she was Jenner's hiring chair, more than 50 percent of new hires were women, Hall said.

As a result of Hall's efforts, an average of 55 percent of the elected partners at Jenner & Block have been women and 64 percent of lawyers elevated to partners in 2018 are women. In 1982, Hall became the first woman to chair the ABA Section of Litigation. As chair, Hall appointed a number of women to committee chair positions and also began diversifying the section's leadership and membership. Her term as chair brought her into contact with lawyers from all over the country.

“I would meet people, get them interested in working for the section if I saw they were willing,” she said.

Hall also was one of the first women to be inducted into the American College of Trial Lawyers. Mascherin said ACTL once sent Hall a plague that used masculine pronouns when it referred to her. Hall's response to that pronoun faux pas, Mascherin said, was “How long, Oh God, how long?” (ACTL sent her a new plaque.)

Hall also started a tradition of having regular luncheon meetings with women lawyers at Jenner & Block, and part of each meeting focused on how women lawyers can develop business. Those luncheons have become the Women's Forum at the firm.