GENDER EQUALITY
Top five offices San Francisco Hq | New York | Los Angeles | Palo Alto, Ca | Washington, D.C.
Total attorneys 984
Major departments/practices Corporate | Litigation | Environmental Intellectual Property
First-year salary $125,000
2001 summer associates 130
2001 fall first-years 89
Who to call Jane Cooperman, Senior Recruiting Manager, 415-268-7665
Web site mofo.com
Gender equality is a long-term goal at most law firms. At San Francisco-based Morrison & Foerster, it’s an established reality.
Fact: Two of Morrison & Foerster’s three firmwide managing partners are women. Fact: The managing partner of its largest office (San Francisco) is a woman. Fact: The co-heads of two of the firm’s major departments are women. Fact: 350 of the firm’s 984 lawyers are women, including 63 of the 303 partners.
How has MoFo achieved such impressive numbers? Step one is judging people by the quality of their work, not by their gender. “I’m in litigation, and I was given opportunities to argue motions and take depositions at the same stage as my male colleagues,” says partner Lori Schechter. Adds partner Jamie Levitt: “From the start, most of my mentors were men. And it didn’t matter to them that I was a woman; I was given access to their clients, cases, and responsibilities.” Schechter notes that five of the women she first befriended as associates in the mid-eighties are now partners.
The firm also employs policies supporting a woman’s role in the firm-generous maternity and child-care leave, reduced-time schedule options, and a postnatal lactation program. “And we don’t penalize people for availing themselves of these policies,” says firm chair Keith Wetmore. MoFo’s commitment to equality dates back to the firm’s founding, says managing partner Pamela Reed. The senior managers were “broad-minded people with respect for people of talent.”
Today’s associates still appreciate that. Fourth-year Sarah Weinstein Grisso went to a women’s college and was used to a woman-centered environment. At MoFo, she says, “I never feel like I’ll get to a point where I can’t go any further. That’s the feeling you get-that the firm makes every attempt to give women the same opportunities as men.”
Also Consider
Chicago’s 504-lawyer Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal (sonnenschein.com) counts 52 women among its 237 partners.
