Welcome back to the Big Law Business column. I’m Roy Strom, and today we look at a new paper that studied women’s roles on law firm deal teams. Sign up to receive this column in your Inbox on Thursday mornings. Programming Note: Big Law Business will be off next week.
A trio of legal academics have optimistic news about the state of women in Big Law: Their research suggests women are on track to match men’s roles on large deals over the next decade.
That’s one takeaway from a new paper that studied law firm press releases on 10,000 deals from 2013 to 2023 to analyze the number of women announced on deal teams. While women still lag men in how frequently they lead deals (19% of the time), they show up in more significant and growing numbers on the broader deal teams.
The study reports 78% of deal leadership teams announced in 2023 included at least one woman, up from 42% in 2013. Overall, women made up 31% of deal teams in 2023 compared to 19% a decade earlier.
The numbers don’t show women are close to men in deal team representation, but they indicate women are getting an equal or better shot at working on deal teams relative to their representation inside law firms.
The deal team figures roughly match the progress women have made in partnership ranks at law firms over the same period — increasing from 20% in 2013 to nearly 28% last year, according to the National Association for Law Placement.
“My big takeaway is that women are succeeding and the next generation of women lawyers is going to significantly surpass the current generation,” said Tracey George, a co-author of the paper, who is vice provost for faculty affairs and professional education at Vanderbilt University Law School. “We should expect to see women in equal numbers to men at the top of deals within 10 years.”
The math from the paper works like this: Women’s representation on deal leadership teams increased by 63% over the decade from 2013 to 2023. If that same trajectory holds through 2033, women would account for just over 50% of deal leadership teams.
George said it’s possible that progress slows as women get closer to parity, meaning it could take 15 years to reach that level.
Women no doubt still face challenges in Big Law. A report from the American Bar Association last fall said there was an “urgent need” to better support women with children in the legal profession. In that study, mothers were more than twice as likely as fathers to report feeling that having children had a negative impact on their legal career.
The new paper, and its optimistic tone, represents a change of tune from the academics, who include University of Virginia School of Law’s Mitu Gulati and Albert Yoon from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.
The trio in 2021 analyzed US Securities and Exchange filings to report women accounted for less than 10% of lead lawyers on major corporate transactions. The study was portrayed in news articles as another data point to a familiar story: Women were not being given chances to progress inside elite law firms.
The authors heard pushback from women inside those firms, Gulati said in an interview. The SEC data they relied upon was telling a very small story since it only included one or two top lawyers and only included M&A deals. Leading a deal team was not the only barometer of success inside law firms, and women were making progress being part of deal teams.
To broaden their view, they chose to look at press releases from six law firms: Cravath, Swaine & Moore; Hunton Andrews Kurth; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Shearman & Sterling; Sullivan & Cromwell; and White & Case.
The firms were chosen in part because their press releases were available for the reporting period and the firms listed deal teams in a hierarchical manner. The data includes four primary types of announcements: Capital markets, M&A, litigation, and pro bono work. The vast majority (75%) of the releases were for capital markets and M&A deals.
The new paper is the first to look at where women stand in the hierarchy of deal teams. The data show women are more likely to appear as the third, fourth or fifth lawyer mentioned on a deal team.
The authors question whether that is evidence of a “glass ceiling” for women — they can get positions on the team, but they can’t progress to the top. But they argue that’s not the case. Instead, the data suggest women are climbing the hierarchy ladder and are likely to lead more deal teams in the future as women partners become more senior.
That’s because women who did lead deals were not a small handful of “exceptional” women. Instead, they are represented in roughly equal numbers to their positions at the firm. For instance, 25% of the 1,447 lawyers who appeared as deal leaders were women, roughly in line with their ranks in law firm partnerships.
“There is a superstar effect for men and there is a superstar effect for women, and it doesn’t seem to be that different for either category,” Gulati said.
Women also did not make up a disproportionate number of the lawyers listed in the third through fifth slots — something the authors would expect to see if women were being “shunted down” to lower positions. Instead, they found women associates were more likely than men associates to land a spot on deal teams.
The authors concluded that women are making progress in their status at law firms commensurate with their titles. Combined with the increases women have made as law firm associates and partners, George sees evidence they will continue to make strides at firms even as diversity, equity and inclusion programs face legal challenges.
“I’m not a Pollyanna. We came into this thinking we’d find more data for the negative story in our last piece,” George said. “But we had to acknowledge that’s not what’s happening. And indeed, I’d say at this point we found evidence that the motion is such that without the support from DEI programs, this progress will continue. We’ve reached the point where it is self-sustaining progress.”
While the report on women was optimistic, the authors also provided a preliminary analysis of Black lawyers’ representation on deal teams. The results were “dismal,” they said. Black lawyers made up less than 3% of deal team leaders, and their representation decreased in spots two through five.
“There is no indication of climbing up the ladder,” the paper says.
The authors plan to continue research into Black lawyers’ roles on deal teams and are also analyzing similar data from six English firms for their next project.
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