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Cultivating Clients in the Competition for Partnership: Gender and the Organizational Restructuring of Law Firms in the 1990s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Fiona M. Kay  and
John Hagan
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Abstract

In recent years, the legal profession has undergone significant organizational restructuring with the dramatic growth of firms and a rapid increase in the number of female lawyers. We argue that big firms actively recruited female lawyers during a period when women were needed to fill roles of cultivating and serving increasing numbers of institutional or corporate clients. Yet despite women's contribution of legal talent to the development of clientele, a glass ceiling has restricted their opportunities to advance in law firm hierarchies. We examine two approaches to gender inequities in law firm hierarchy: disparity as economic efficiency and disparity as structural discrimination. Both approaches neglect aspects of social relations within law firms as well as social resources lawyers bring to their work. We therefore introduce a social capital perspective to unpack how human capital is enhanced and how exclusionary practices are reinforced in law firms. Using a longitudinal study of male and female lawyers conducted from 1990 to 1996, we specify several different forms of social capital. The findings from our study reveal that female lawyers participate fully in the accumulation of social capital in law firms, through service to valued institutional clientele and high billings, yet their efforts result in reduced probabilities of partnership.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 33 , Issue 3: Changing Employment Statuses in the Practice of Law , 1999 , pp. 517 - 555
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

We thank Joëlle Frigon and Carolyn Yule for their valuable research assistance. We also thank Joan Brockman and Bruce Carruthers for helpful comments on an early draft. This paper was presented at the Working Group on the Comparative Study of the Legal Professions, Fifth Biennial Meeting, July 1998, Oñati, Spain. The research reported here was supported by a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant #816-96-003), which we gratefully acknowledge. We also appreciate the assistance provided by the Law Society of Upper Canada in the collection of these data. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Law Society of Upper Canada.

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