Flexible Service at Skadden Arps
from
July/August 2007
by Dan Kaplan
Six years ago Stephanie Poliseno was working in some of New York City’s most depressing courts—the ones that deal with drug addicts and abused women and people on probation—and her job involved referring the people who came through these courts to institutions that are supposed to function as beacons of hope. It takes real grit to keep coming back to a job like that, and even more grit to do it during the day while attending Fordham Law School at night, squeezing in the hours of study necessary to place so high in her class that a law firm like Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom would come knocking at her door.
Stephanie Poliseno has grit. And today, at 31, she is an attorney at Skadden Arps, honored for the seventh straight year as America’s No. 1 corporate law firm in the annual rankings by Corporate Board Member and FTI Consulting. What’s more, as the mother of a 10-month-old son, Alexander, Poliseno is a pioneer beneficiary of Skadden’s new Flexible Return From Maternity and Sidebar policies.
Why the new initiatives? “We were concerned about the statistics that show that women who go on maternity leave very often don’t want to come back to where they worked,” says Sally Thurston, a partner who sits on Skadden’s policy committee. One result: Although approximately 40% of the new associates annually hired by the firm are female, only 15% to 17% of Skadden’s 422 partners are women. In this, Skadden is hardly alone; a March 2006 article in the New York Times asked, “Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big Law Firms?” As the Times noted, “Although women certainly leave firms to become more actively involved in child-rearing, recent detailed studies indicate that female lawyers often feel pushed into that choice and would prefer to maintain their careers and a family if a structure existed that allowed them to do so.” Skadden’s new programs, as well as some being started at other law firms, aim to create such a structure.
Flexible Return From Maternity, also known as FRM, lets new mothers (or fathers, but mostly mothers) take a year to phase the Skadden workweek back into their lives. In addition to four and a half months of maternity leave, associates can return part time, perhaps working Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and a little bit at home. Associates arrange with their presiding partners to put in a certain number of hours, and can continue at that pace for as long as 12 months, ramping up toward a full-time schedule. Since January, Poliseno, who is a third-year associate in the labor and employment department, has chosen to work Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, which gives her more time to spend with her son. “FRM helps you feel your way through the balance of the demands on your life,” she says.
Skadden’s Sidebar program enables people to take a full three years’ leave to tend to their children or elderly parents, provided they don’t accept work elsewhere, even in another field. During their leave, Skadden will pay for the attorneys’ bar fees and any continuing legal education, and at the end of the three years they’ll be welcomed back to the firm.
Like FRM, Sidebar is an effort to protect Skadden’s significant investments in its associates. “We spend a lot of time hiring and recruiting the best we can find,” says Thurston, “and we have a pool of talent that we don’t want to dissipate.” Thurston, 46, has two children, a 6-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son. She says she has been able to juggle her work and personal life because of “an understanding department, a great nanny, and a husband with a very flexible work schedule.” He’s an entrepreneur in what she calls “the technology trading-systems area,” declining to elaborate. Thurston says she hopes the new Skadden Arps policies will help others find successful solutions too.
But some legal insiders believe policies like these don’t go to the heart of the problem. “The reality is that if you want women to come back to the law, you have to change the whole way law is practiced,” says an attorney who left her job at a major New York law firm because she “didn’t want to drop dead” from the workload. Another former big-firm associate, blogger Melissa “Opinionista” Lafsky, contends that women leave because “it sucks to be an associate at a large law firm. It sucks to become a dehumanized commodity in a business where your value as an employee is based primarily on how much of your life you bill in six-minute increments.”
Poliseno, for her part, is somewhat conflicted. Coming back to work “is a little difficult at first. I think you feel a little bad in some ways. But I do think it’s good to do something for yourself, rather than spending all your time taking care of a baby.” And when the time comes to plunge back into a full workweek, she’ll have the Sidebar option to consider too. Those are more choices than lawyers have had in the past.
