I thought I was the only one
"I quoted lower, but I could have quoted higher. Why did I never learn?" (said by a senior lawyer at a Female Lawyers' Club fees and billing session)
For years, saying my fees out loud made me want to apologise mid-sentence. I'd say the number and immediately look for ways to make it sound better, or justify it. I assumed this was a personal failing, something everyone else had grown out of.
It turns out it wasn't just me at all.
Nobody asked me why I was leaving
Nobody asked me why I was leaving.
Colleagues asked, plenty of them, out of real curiosity. But across six different law firms, over more than twenty years, after I’d announced I was leaving each firm, nobody ever sat me down properly - not once.
We already know women leave this profession in numbers that should worry every firm. Around a third of female solicitors leave between five and ten years after qualifying, and don't come back (Law Society, 2022). Women make up the majority of solicitors and a fraction of equity partners. None of that is news to anyone reading this.
The feedback you got wasn't about you. Here's the research that proves it.
A few weeks ago, I was running a leadership session for a law firm’s women’s network. Around 109 people joined, which was already impressive, but what really stood out was that around 20 of them were men.
At the start of the session, I put a question up on screen and asked everyone to answer it in the chat. The question was:
"Have you ever been penalised for being assertive, direct, ambitious, independent or confident - traits often praised in men but questioned in women?"
Confident or “difficult”? Depends who you ask
Last week I ran a session for Capsticks LLP on gendered leadership. 109 people attended, and around 20 of them were men. And at the end, the outgoing Managing Partner, Martin Hamilton, described it as "the best conversation on leadership we've had at Capsticks."
That’s going on the wall!
I would love to share the key messages from the session with you, because leadership in the legal profession is, in many ways, still catching up. When you find an example of it being done well, it’s worth talking about. Not just as proof of what is possible, but as a reminder to anyone working somewhere less enlightened that it does not have to be this way.
Is it you, or is it them?
If a post I shared on LinkedIn this week is anything to go by, I appear to have accidentally touched a nerve. Over 120,000 impressions and counting, on the subject of toxic high billers in law firms and why nothing ever seems to be done about them. If you haven't seen it, I'll include the link at the bottom.
It was, in no small part, inspired by a conversation with my friend and fellow Female Lawyers’ Club member Clare Chappell, whose masterclass on narcissism in the workplace we hosted within the membership last week.