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Fifteen of this year's 60 Best Law Firms for Women chosen by Working Mother magazine have an Atlanta office—up from 10 last year.

Working Mother evaluated the firms, which averaged 661 lawyers, based on the percentage of women equity partners and women in leadership, career-advancement initiatives and family-friendly policies.

The magazine expanded the list from 50 firms last year. The firms self-select to apply and fill out a 300-question survey.

This year the 60 firms on the list reported an average of 22% women among their equity partners. That's up from an average of 20% in last year's Working Mother report—and an improvement over the average of 16% in 2007, the first year of the survey.

Of the 15 firms with Atlanta offices, virtual firm Culhane Meadows Haughian & Walsh reported that 60% of its equity partners are women—the highest percentage by far of the 60 firms on the list. The high percentage is due to the fact that Culhane Meadows only has five equity partners—of whom three are women. It is also the second-smallest firm on the list with only 62 lawyers.

The percentage of women equity partners at the other 14 firms in Atlanta ranged from 30% at Constangy and Littler Mendelson, to 15% at Baker & Hostetler. Ranked by that percentage, they are as follows:

Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete (30%), Littler (30%), Jackson Lewis (28%), Ballard Spahr (25%), Shook, Hardy & Bacon (25%), Squire Patton Boggs (24%), Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner (23%), DLA Piper (21%), Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart (21%), Seyfarth Shaw (21%), Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz (20%), Dentons (19%), Fish & Richardson (17%) and Baker & Hostetler (15%).

Unsurprisingly, the firms with some of the highest percentages of women equity partners, Constangy, Littler and Jackson Lewis, are labor and employment firms, which generally have higher proportions of women lawyers and lawyers of color.

Ballard Spahr, a Philadelphia-based general practice firm, is still a single-tier partnership, where all partners have equity in the firm.

This year, the 60 firms on the Working Mother list reported an average of 38% women lawyers overall and 30% women nonequity partners. Last year's 50 firms also averaged 30% nonequity partners.

While the overall percentage of women equity partners is inching up at a slow pace, firms on the list report that they are promoting a higher percentage of women to partner and to equity partner.

Constangy reported that women made up 60% of its internal partner promotions–both equity and nonequity—over the past five years.

At Baker Donelson, last year's new shareholder class was more than half female for the fourth year in a row, the firm said, and almost half of the new shareholders used its parental leave program.

In their survey submissions to Working Mother, the firms in Atlanta reported a variety of efforts to promote the advancement of women lawyers. Common themes were increasing the number of women in leadership, launching business development programs focused on women and offering flex-time and generous parental leave.

DLA Piper reported one of the more unique initiatives. Its practice group leaders have started comparing the average billable hours logged by diverse lawyers, versus nondiverse lawyers, for the firm's 50 highest revenue clients to check for inequities that it can resolve.

While women account for on average only 30% of firm leaders for the 60 firms on the list, at Constangy, women make up half the firm's practice and office leaders and half its governance committee.

In another sign of progress, Seyfarth Shaw said that half of its newly appointed national department chairs and newly elected executive committee members are women. The office managing partners for its three largest offices, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, are also women. (The firm has offices in 16 cities.)