Where have all the mid-career lawyers gone?

Alternate title: does anyone else feel like a unicorn?

It is January again and you know what that means: you cannot escape the wave of announcements on social media celebrating various career moves. It is an exciting time a year for many - particularly for those who are promoted to income partner, equity partner or a leadership position within a law firm or legal department. But what about everyone else? This post is for and about them.

A legal career can take many twists and turns. The time goes by both too slow (when you are dealing with a horrible file which will just not end) and to fast (when you discover people with less experience than you are now being appointed to the bench).

Lately I have started to feel a little bit lonely as a mid-career woman in private practice. Each and every year in recent years I have seen very strong woman lawyers veer off the path they once set for themselves - the path to partnership within a law firm - to do something else. Some lead not for profit organizations. Others fill in-house department positions, teach, move into business roles or, according to the Law Society’s 2022 Snap Shot Report, about 10% of women lawyers aged 35 to 54 do not practice law at all. One day you wake up and feel like you are the last one left.

I consulted both the Pirical database as well as the Law Society Snap Shot reports to try and get a sense of: who is moving, where are they going and whether the trend of women leaving private practice is accelerating or regressing. The data doesn’t have all the answers.

Who is Moving?

A comment that I heard early in my career is that many lawyers make moves in their 3rd to 5th year of practice. According to the Pirical data which was collected about Canadian law firms since January 2018, that observation is reasonably accurate. Most moves occur in years three through seven and gradually taper off from there:

It is also true that more women change employers/firms than men - with 3,301 women tracked in the Pirical database and only 2,996 men. This database focuses primarily on the largest of private sector law firms and so it is difficult to get an in-depth reading of where people are going. We have also had to exclude from analysis lawyers in the 15+ range as that dataset appears to include all retirements. The data is not perfect, but it is interesting.

A bit more can be learned from the Law Society of Ontario’s Snap Shot report. Below is a chart showing where Ontario lawyers are working based on their age and gender:

The Law Society data aligns well with my lived experience. As they get deeper into their careers, a higher percentage of women move out of private practice and into in-house, government and other roles. The reasons for this are obvious: there are often better benefits, better hours, better management and, frankly, the women in my network have just got fed up with the private practice work environment.

So, what is the overall trend. Are women leaving private practice at a slower rate than in the past? There is well documented and gradual improvement in terms of the representation of women in some law firms, with NALP recently reported that for the first time ever women outnumber men as law firm associates (in the US). The Law Society data is hard to track as each Snap Shot report is just a point in time analysis. However, looking back over past years, it does appear that improvements continue - slowly.

I used to feel badly for the women who choose to leave private practice. That is no longer the case. I am happy that they have decided to choose a path that is better for them. I now feel badly for private practice firms for what they are losing by not retaining exceptional legal talent.

The most surprising trend that I have seen in the Pirical data around this issue is how different offices of the same law firms can have significant differences in terms of their retention data (both in terms of retention of women and retention of lawyers generally). I have looked at the data for several large law firms (which I will be kind and not name here) and it is incredible how different the retention data can be between offices of the same law firm. Below is just one example. These numbers are from a large national law firm, with five offices across the country. The attrition rate for women lawyers ranges from 8% in one office to 36% in another.

Clearly local management and other local factors make a significant difference. The hourly expectations, type of work, promotion system and benefits would be the same in each of those offices.

I think that we can all do a better job learning from each other and sharing data. I wish that firms were more transparent about their data so that these numbers were more readily accessible. The law firm above could do better by having management talk between offices to discuss the differences in their retention data to find out what is working, what is not, and what needs to change. It is only by being transparent and working together that we can make mass improvements in the retention of women in private practice. Maybe, one day, I will feel less like a unicorn.

This post is free and available to everyone but I hope that it convinces some of you to sign up for a subscription. Access to Pirical, the main database I use for Canadian legal market insights, is through paid subscription only and we use the funds from this newsletter to pay for access to that database (and perhaps other databases in the future).