Vodafone GC Rosemary Martin is calling on her panel firms to provide better career support for women, writes Caroline Hill

Vodafone's general counsel Rosemary Martin (pictured) has long been in the vanguard of the in-house movement to slash private practice rates, but in a high-level meeting planned for the New Year, she will call for much more extensive and deep-rooted change to the culture of City law firms.

In a meeting provisionally arranged for 25 January 2012, Martin has asked for attendance from a male equity partner from each of Vodafone's 14 panel firms to debate what measures need to be taken to offer women a much more viable long-term career solution. The discussion, which a number of general counsel and other interested parties will attend, will centre on how City firms as a whole must embrace change, innovation and creativity.

City firms' seeming reluctance to make the wholesale changes needed to support women is regarded by Martin as an integral part of the service problem. She is challenging the existing, typically male, power bases in City law firms, to create an environment in which women can thrive and to increase the percentage of women in the senior management team.

"[Firms are] driven by profits and by male characteristics – they are just not balanced enough," she says. "Women tend to work collaboratively and innovatively, and should be part of the solution as law firms look at how their model needs to change in light of not only client pressure but the brave new world looming under the now fully enacted provisions of the Legal Services Act."

The debate does not purely centre on women in law. Martin points out that while law firms are very good at generating profit, they are less good at thinking about how they deliver client service. "Delighting clients is not a big tick, partly because they are rigid and unchanging," Martin observes.

There are a number of reasons why the timing of this latest initiative is right, and why it is likely to resonate with City firms. The very real prospect of competition from a growing breed of non-conventional, flexible and highly cost-effective service providers such as Axiom (which Martin notably appointed to Vodafone's panel earlier this year), together with more standard outsourcing outfits such as CPA Global and Integreon, is already seeing City firms undertaking strategic naval gazing.

Top 50 law firms are increasingly embracing outsourcing deals while firms including Berwin Leighton Paisner and Eversheds are offering clients once-inconceivable annual fixed-priced deals and managed legal services. Outside of costs and perhaps touching on culture, firms are increasingly exploring new ways to share their know-how and open up their systems to enable clients to directly access their precedents.

The timing is also right to take a fresh look at women in law. Law firms are – or should be, Martin says – cognisant that they are facing a demographic time bomb, in which the post-baby boom years will suffer a significant drop in young workforce numbers. Consequently, she argues, there will be more pressure on firms to better retain both sexes to keep up in the war for talent.

"Firms need some attrition and women leaving to have children can be a convenience while the numbers are on your side, but in future the numbers may no longer work in firms' favour – you may find that they are leaving when you don't want them to," Martin warns.

A growing band of female general counsel and senior in-house lawyers are also adding to the pressure on panel law firms to show they have adequate flexible working policies, although Martin adds: "I am trying to get beyond the practicalities of maternity leave and flexible working and address the culture itself."

For the time being Martin can exert pressure on her own panel – which includes Linklaters, Slaughter and May, Herbert Smith, Hogan Lovells and Norton Rose – and she is keen to 
stress that she is delighted 
with the efforts they are making. "I have really enjoyed talking to the lawyers in the law firms 
about innovating, what we could do and how we could use the technology available."

While Martin admits that so far there has been little concrete innovation within the panel (the final line-up was only confirmed in September this year), there are signs that progress will be made. "There are a lot of things we are looking at and haven't done yet," Martin says. It remains to be seen whether, come January, progress will be expedited.