In 2006, I started blogging on negotiation for lawyers with the LexBlog Network which has grown and prospered during the six years I’ve had my lawyer-blog home there. Yesterday, the son of LexBlog founder Kevin O’Keefe, Colin O’Keefe, conducted an interview on my view of the state of women in the law.

If someone had given me this advice when I graduated from law school in 1980, I have to admit that I probably wouldn’t have followed it. But that’s because I was always ambivalent about my legal practice. It was great, don’t get me wrong. But it wasn’t my bliss. My bliss lay elsewhere and I didn’t want to spend my entire living breath doing nothing but legal work, legal networking, legal writing, legal thinking, legal talking.

Today. It’s impossible to go back and make major life decisions all over again. But if you want the law to be your career and if you want to practice the most sophisticated and complex law with the brightest people in the world, here’s some good advice for you – the young female lawyer.

Here is Colin's introduction, then the video.

Here’s what I’ve learned in 30+ years in the legal market, 25 of them in litigation firms of all sizes and reputations and eight of them facilitating the resolution of litigated disputes.

The women in your firm may mentor you (teach you the ropes) but not sponsor you (put their skin in your game).

Or the women in your firm may do nothing for you.

Or, worse, the women in your firm may sabotage you.

Men will too so don’t think this is about women hating other women.

This is about the accumulation of wealth and power and no gender owns avarice.

It may seem at first as if the men are more friendly and helpful to you than the women.

That’s often true.

The men like you because you tend to work 22% longer and 10% faster than your male colleagues do before you feel that you’ve earned your yearly salary. That means you’re diligently doing your male mentor’s work for him and don’t expect enough compensation for it.

You’re not a threat.

Yet.

You don’t ask for raises or negotiate bonuses.

Sure, you get a raise every year, but you don’t ask for more even though you’re making somewhere between 20 and 30% less than your male colleagues of the same year or the same book of business or the same talent, skill, dedication and hard work (billable hours).

When I was at the annual gala for the 100+ year old Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles (WLALA) recently, the Mayor said from the podium that he loved his women lawyers because “they never asked for a raise!”

The nearly 300 attendees dropped their jaws pretty much at once.

Really?

Really!

Those helpful, loyal men?

Don’t count on them when you ask for compensation that’s the same as theirs.

When you begin to be a threat, they’re not nearly as loyal as they’ve been while you were turning out dynamite work for them at 2 in the morning.

Continue at Forbes Woman

McKinsey & Co. has shed more light than most on this issue, including its recent release of the fifth report in its Women Matter series. This one analyzes the reasons why these initiatives so often often break down and what to do about it.

McKinsey’s first prescription is to get “top down, visible commitment from the CEO “in setting up the program for success.

The second is for the company to have

a good measurement of where the women are (and aren’t) in the company, and what the challenges for advancement are.

Next, it has to implement an initiative designed to “influence the mindsets that halt women’s progress.”

And finally, it needs to put in place targeted programs to address weak points that are specific to the company itself.

via Attitude Adjustment: Making Gender Initiatives Stick » The Glass Hammer.

In answering the question what a successful women’s initiative might look like , the linked Glass Hammer article describes a successful program at Ernst and Young.

The firm noticed that while many women were being suggested for positions, they were still getting passed over for promotion. Because sponsor relationships are key to advancement, the firm designed a 3-year program, in which 30 high performing women were paired up with an executive board member and a coach, so that they could gain access to decision makers.

The program didn’t fly women to the moon, but it did move the needle on promotion, from 6 percent in 1999 to 15 percent in 2004 and to 21% today, breaking past the place most companies and law firms are stuck, somewhere in the teens.

Continue at Forbes Woman

It only took a few months mediating all types of litigated disputes – fights over intellectual property rights, unfair competition, collection, personal injury, professional malpractice and breaches of contract – to conclude that no dispute is “only about money.”

Money is a Subjective Measure of Value

As I wrote in an academic article on the many subjective meanings of money

Although contemporary money seems to have shed all of its qualities except its quantity, ‘its oneness or fiveness or fiftyness,’ we do not in fact use money as if it were fungible. We experience the value of a dollar earned differently from the way we experience one that is stolen or given to us as a gift and we spent it differently as well.

Even money’s form exerts some control over the way in which we are willing to deploy it. Credit card companies have recently seen the benefit in selling ‘debit’ cards as a means of making the gift of money (rather than carefully chosen things) appropriate in settings where cash would seem gauche or even insulting.

Gifts of money are generally meant to be expended on a single item or experience and are typically delivered with injunctions that the recipient buy something ‘frivolous’ or do something ‘luxurious.’The recipients of ‘cash’ gifts are expected to report back on the special use to which the gift was put.

If the beneficiary of the largesse were to spend the money on rent or groceries, it would surely be taken as an insult to the donor and embarrassment to the donee, or else cause for general alarm at the donee’s unacknowledged impoverished state.

When we respond to our friend’s needs rather than their desires, we tend not to give monetary gifts but to (often reluctantly) make loans. And where we might happily and without serious thought spend $50 on a gift, we might well wring our hands at the prospect of lending such a sum for necessities.

A dollar is not simply a dollar.

In helping attorneys negotiate the resolution of litigation, mediators aid them in resolving the non-monetary justice issues – issues capable of resolution primarily through a process that begins with accountability and ends with apology.

Continue at Forbes Woman