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5 things that need to be done to close the gender wage gap”, with Bridget Deiters and Candice Georgiadis

…Disproportionate focus on recruitment rather than retention. In law, admirable efforts have been made to recruit more women into the profession, but we are learning that retention may be even more important than recruitment for narrowing the gender pay gap. April 2018 numbers showed that 54% of legal professionals in the U.K. were women, but despite this proportion in favour of female lawyers, there is a gender pay gap of over 16 percent. This indicates that there are plenty of women recruited into the legal profession, but that few of them are retained to reach the highest pay levels.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Bridget Deiters. Bridget is a London-based managing director at InCloudCounsel, a legal technology company that frees large companies from high-volume legal work. Prior to InCloudCounsel, Deiters practiced corporate and capital markets law at the law firms Kirkland & Ellis in London and Chicago and Cravath, Swaine & Moore in London and New York.

Thank you so much for joining us Bridget! Can you tell us the “backstory” that brought you to this career path?

I started my career as a corporate attorney at large international law firms, working for them in both the United States and London. While I planned for my career to take me away from private practice eventually, working at those firms provided access to the legal training and professional network that constitute the foundation of my career.

Technology always fascinated me, and in fact I worked on firmwide projects while I was in private practice to create databases and online resources for lawyers at the firm to increase efficiency. Toward the end of my years as a law firm associate, I worked with career coaches to build a plan for my future focused on leveraging my strengths and interests and moving toward my personal definition of success. I am grateful I had the opportunity to set aside that time and energy for that self-reflection, as it was invaluable as I assessed my options before leaving the firm, as it wasn’t long after that exercise when I received the opportunity to join InCloudCounsel, a legal technology company focused on driving efficiency for routine legal work, where I am able to leverage my law firm experience while embracing my interest in technology.

My work with respect to the gender pay gap in law arose as a result of the enactment of laws in the U.K. (where I was practicing at the time) mandating the disclosure of the gender pay gap at companies with over 250 employees from 2018. It was shocking to see in black and white what had always been a hunch: men were making far more than women at most law firms, despite earnest gender diversity programming. As I considered my next role, eager to be part of the solution for this inequality, I made it a priority to join a company that was taking a different approach to the legal profession, and InCloudCounsel is doing just that.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began this career?

Since moving from a law firm to a legal tech company, I’ve been fascinated by how our software engineers can convert nuanced legal concepts into software systems. I recently worked with them to create a piece of software that helps with legal compliance. While doing so, I realized that engineers and lawyers have more in common than you might think. Just like engineers coding a new piece of software, corporate lawyers drafting a contract parse through all the scenarios that could arise from each decision that is made, then they proactively incorporate the necessary workarounds to achieve the desired result. Both disciplines require extreme attention to detail and strategic planning. It was interesting (and humbling) to see firsthand how the legal profession can benefit from non-lawyers!

Can you share a story about the funniest or most interesting mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

As a junior attorney at large law firms, I thought it was inappropriate to ask clients and others in the working group outside the firm to connect with me on LinkedIn or AngelList. I feared doing so would come across as too self-promotional, overly familiar or “salesy,” and I was conscious that there were delicate client relationships involved at the partner level. I was careful to save contact details, but I never connected with them outside of whatever project we were working on.

I realized later as I became more senior what a mistake this had been for many reasons. First of all, no matter how diligent I was about saving contact details, they were useless once the person changed jobs, which happens quite regularly. Secondly, I shouldn’t have been afraid of coming across as self-promotional, overly familiar or transactional. If someone makes themselves available on a professional networking site, they are actively building a network, and you may be able to contribute just as much to their network as they can to yours. Third, I was foolish to think a LinkedIn invitation would incite backlash at the partner level — in the event the contact didn’t want to connect with me, they could simply reject my invitation or ignore me. Finally, rather than merely saving contact details, I should have been actively nurturing connections even as a junior lawyer. Making contact with someone outside the normal work context is the first step in that kind of relationship building, even if it just starts with an invitation to your online network.

Ok let’s jump to the main focus of our interview. Even in 2019, women still earn about 80 cents for every dollar a man makes. Can you explain three of the main factors that are causing the wage gap?

  • Disproportionate focus on recruitment rather than retention. In law, admirable efforts have been made to recruit more women into the profession, but we are learning that retention may be even more important than recruitment for narrowing the gender pay gap. April 2018 numbers showed that 54% of legal professionals in the U.K. were women, but despite this proportion in favour of female lawyers, there is a gender pay gap of over 16 percent. This indicates that there are plenty of women recruited into the legal profession, but that few of them are retained to reach the highest pay levels. On average, women outnumber men in all four pay quartiles of U.K. law firms. For U.S. and international firms reporting in the U.K., women outnumber men in all but the top pay quartile of those firms on average. Gender pay gap reporting for U.K. law firms indicates that on average the lowest quartile of employees was comprised of 26.5 percent men and 73.5 percent women. The highest quartile was comprised of 47.8 percent men and 52.2 percent women. It should be mentioned that the U.K. reporting requirements do not allow for a distinction between legal professionals and non-professionals employed at law firms. That being said, assuming fee-generating legal professionals comprise the highest quartile of law firm employees, in U.K. firms, there are actually more women in that echelon than men, but the women in that quartile are being compensated less than their male counterparts.
  • Traditional gender roles with respect to dependent care. Despite an increase in parental leave regardless of gender, and despite the frequency with which families have two working parents, traditional gender roles with respect to dependent care persist. For example, according to the American Bar Association, almost half of women identified caretaking commitments as important or very important factors in why they left their law firm jobs, whereas only 20 percent of men cited caretaking as a reason for departure. In that statistic, traditional gender norms are probably at work in ways: women may do more caretaking than men as a result of those norms, but also as a result of those gender norms women probably feel more comfortable than their male counterparts when it comes to reporting dependent care as a reason for leaving a job.
  • Inflexible partner tracks and corporate ladders that ignore social trends. Studies show that women with college degrees tend to start having children an average of 7 years later than women who do not have a college degree. The reason for this is thought to be the time it takes to establish a career and generate income following college or university. Following that logic, it can be assumed that women with professional degrees probably start having children even later. The average age of women in New York City with college degrees to have their first child is 32.9; in San Francisco, it’s 33.4. With partner tracks generally ranging from 7 to 10 years, the time most female lawyers are having children coincides with the time when they are under consideration for partnership in law or when many people are tapped for leadership positions in corporate roles. The timing of these decisions being when someone is getting close to mid-career (often in their 30s) can leave some women feeling that they have to choose between having a family and reaching the highest rung on the ladder, and many women leave high-paying professional roles as they choose the former.

Can you share with our readers what your work is doing to help close the gender wage gap?

InCloudCounsel offers lawyers an entirely new way to work that takes into consideration many of the challenges faced in the gender pay gap battle. As a result, InCloudCounsel has outstanding retention rates for men and women alike, and female solo practitioners on our platform actually earn more than their male counterparts on average. There are several aspects of our legal process outsourcing model that allow us to maintain this balance. For one, attorneys who work on our platform work entirely remotely, which means there is no “face-time” expectation. This flexibility with respect to location allows men and women alike to meet obligations outside of work without negatively impacting their career trajectories, an important option when so many attorneys who leave law firms cite dependent care as a reason for their departure.

As discussed above, rigid career tracks can leave some women feeling that they have to choose between having a family and professional success. At InCloudCounsel, there is no looming deadline for career development, as our lawyers are allowed to moderate their capacity as needed to balance competing priorities. This allows men and women alike to plan their career trajectory around their personal lives.

InCloudCounsel also has a fixed compensation model that gives lawyers total transparency with respect to their income. Law firm compensation can be affected by market conditions, deal flow and case flow, performance relative to peers, and team size, but it often isn’t until an annual review or a year-end bonus that lawyers know whether those factors had an impact on their earnings. Even then, it isn’t entirely clear whether earnings are performance-based, hours-based, or some combination. This lack of transparency combined with reported statistics showing that men are paid more than women in law firms often leaves female lawyers feeling disenchanted and unmotivated. With the fixed InCloudCounsel compensation model, the only variable with respect to compensation is how many documents the lawyer has worked on, which is a function of that lawyer’s self-reported availability and desire to take on work.

Finally, InCloudCounsel allows its lawyers to moderate their capacity to work on our platform in a way that traditional law firms have not. Many women indicate that the challenges to ramping off and ramping back on for parental leave in the law firm setting affect their decision to stay at the firm. At InCloudCounsel, our teams are easily scalable to accommodate instances of parental leave, health issues, and other personal time. Our lawyers can increase or decrease their capacity as needed during hectic or quiet times in their lives.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

This should come as no surprise, but it would be closing the gender pay gap. This is a worldwide issue, and while it may seem like a gender-specific issue, the economic discrepancy between men and women has macro-effects on everything from human rights to big business.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

As I thought about where my career would take me after I left the well-beaten path of the law firm, I came across the English saying “Different horses for different courses,” which they often shorten to “horses for courses.” It’s a reference to horse racing, where it isn’t always the horse that can run the fastest who wins the race, but rather the horse that can run the course the best. Some horses excel on dry courses, others do best in the mud; some are sprinters, others are distance runners. At work, in school, and in life generally, I was prone, as many are, to spending more time focused on improving my weaknesses than on wielding my strengths. Thus, the phrase “horses for courses” inspired me to focus on finding a course that lets me leverage my strengths rather than spending my energy on a course defined by my weaknesses.

Thank you for all of these great insights!


“5 things that need to be done to close the gender wage gap”, with Bridget Deiters and Candice… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.