Forging a Legacy: Stoel Rives' First 24 Female Partners

Stoel Rives’ early female partners transformed firm culture, advanced gender diversity, and established a lasting commitment to inclusion and progress in the firm and the legal profession.

Transcript

Susan Hammer

I think it was a really unusual time for us because people didn't quite know what to do. Some of the men were very welcoming in terms of working with women. Others were not so sure we should even be here.

Sidebar:  In the mid-1970s, women were less than 5% of U.S. attorneys and faced barriers to challenging casework, leadership roles, and flexible schedules.

There were clients that didn't want to have women lawyers. And there were wives that weren't very comfortable having their husbands work with women lawyers. So, we did a lot of juggling to keep a lot of different people happy and to try to get them on our side.

Chris Kitchel

Sidebar:  Before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, banks required male co-signers for women applying for credit, even if they had their own incomes.

We were talking about being trial lawyers and he said he just didn't think women really had it in them to be good trial lawyers. He said, you guys just aren't ferocious or aggressive enough to really be good trial lawyers.

Lois Rosenbaum

At almost every interview I was asked what are you going to do when you have children? Aren't you just going to quit?

Sidebar:  These barriers mirrored the career challenges women faced.

Are you just going to follow your husband around? I had an interview that lasted three full days and at the end of the third day, they told me the problem is we already have a woman in your department. So, they therefore couldn't offer me a job.

Barbara Nay

Sidebar:  Before the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act, women faced steep obstacles when applying for home loans.

I started law school in ‘76 and a couple of the male faculty were overheard discussing the remarkable fact that of the 11 top students in the class, 10 were women. And what was even more surprising was some of them weren't too bad looking.

Sidebar:  Many banks required proof of non-pregnancy, viewing women as financial “risks” based on biased assumptions.

Nancy Cowgill

Some lawyers in the firm that I think didn't quite understand the challenge of either being a young woman or a working mom. I remember one lawyer in particular came in and asked me how my weekend was and I said, well, all day Saturday I had to run my errands and clean my house and then I worked all day Sunday here so it really wasn't that much fun. And he kind of looked at me and said, “Oh.”

Jill Bowman

I do remember one of the directors came up to me and asked me how I liked the secretarial stations. A lot of people I think were surprised that I was a practicing lawyer.

Peggy Noto

Early in my career, mainly with publicly held companies, the executives were all men. Occasionally, there would a woman in HR, but the people that I dealt with, the finance people and the others, they were all men.

Margaret Kushner

You know, you were aware that you were the only one in the room and so you kind of had to be on your toes to make the appropriate impression.

Saskia de Boer

And what was it like? Did you have clients who would greet you with some bit of apprehension, or did you have bad experiences?

Susan Hammer

Once we had a client who we're told this is who you're going to work with and if they didn't like it, they could go someplace else and people held the line on that. So, I ended up trying a case for this guy and I think he was sort of skeptical and about halfway into the trial he said to me with a smile on his face he said, “You're not nearly as nice as you look.”

Margaret Kushner

I was a summer associate meeting with Jim Rogers, who was a senior litigator. He said to me, “You know, Karen Creason, she's just amazing. When people talked about having a woman lawyer, they thought women lawyers could never be litigators, and Karen can do everything.”

Nancy Cowgill

She did a lot of litigation in the timber industry, meeting with businessmen, for the most part, who didn't usually have a woman lawyer sitting at the table, and I think many of them were reluctant, and she did a phenomenal job.

Margaret Kirkpatrick

The years between when Susan started and the years that I started, a lot more women came into the firm and a lot more women came into the legal profession.

Susan Hammer

There were only a few women lawyers. There was Lois Rosenbaum, Karen Creason, VJ, Nancy Cowgill. In the group of women that became partners with me in 1984, we were the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth.

So, you know, there weren't many women around to be mentors. Women were scarce, and it was a new era around here, and it really was a result of the promotion that Henry and Barnes did, I think, to get more women here.

Margaret Kirkpatrick

This probably isn't entirely accurate, but it feels like the minute I walked in the door at Stoel Rives, Gail grabbed me and brought me into her world and started giving me assignments. She really set the gold standard for a natural resources environmental lawyer in this state and so I had the benefit of learning from her. She was a tremendous mentor.

Barbara Nay

One of the great things about Stoel was that there were women who were mentors. So, Susan Graber had the best training in writing I've ever had in my career from her. Karen Creason, who kind of started the healthcare practice at Stoel Rives.

Peggy Noto

Besides the people we worked with and the mentors we had, there was a whole group of partners in their 40s and 50s who were extremely supportive…

Sidebar: Stoel Rives sets a high standard for diversity in top-tier management.

…of having women in the firm. Part of it might have been that they had daughters who were…

Sidebar:  Women comprise 57% of its executive committee and 38% of its leadership teams (as of September 2024)

…in college and maybe in graduate school and were working…

Sidebar:  The firm helped lead the industry in promoting women to be Firm Managing Partner.

…and they were very invested in it becoming an integrated diverse place to work.

Margaret Kirkpatrick

Suffice it to say that my day of interviewing blew my stereotypes about Stoel Rives. I thought it was a cookie cutter kind of suit sort of place. And then back-to-back, Norby, Nikolai, Pam Jacklin, Ernie Bonyhadi, it was like, oh, this is quite a diverse group of interesting people.

Barbara Nay

You know, we all have a little bit of this unspoken camaraderie thing going, and I think that there might be a slight tendency to feel a little more comfortable or just happy to see another woman professional sitting across the table.

Nancy Cowgill

How lucky I was to sort of be able to come to the firm at this time where people would support the advancement of women in the profession.

Saskia de Boer

What types of advice would you give your 3L daughter or your new partner Saskia about how to move forward and to succeed as a woman in law?

Nancy Cowgill

Some of the best advice I ever heard, and I'll never forget it, which is basically, act like a partner from day one. Act like a partner with your client, take on that responsibility, and act like an owner of this business, how you can make it better.

Lois Rosenbaum

If you want to succeed you are going to have to make your presence known, women then and today have to be concerned to sound confident without sounding belligerent, or sounding strident and that's something that I don’t think men don't have to worry about so much.

Jill Bowman

The legal practice and private practice are not easy. There are times when the whole work/life balance thing is tricky to navigate.

Barbara Sherland

Part of the advice to seek mentors in a gender-neutral way because men can be some of your biggest helpers in moving you along. My experience was they were receptive to that.

Barbara Nay

Just thinking about getting ready for this interview it really brings home how far we've actually come. When I went to college, you know, there probably were very few women in law schools. And now, you know, it's more than half.

Sidebar:  Despite continuing pay gaps across the legal industry, Stoel Rives is committed to fostering equity.

With 42% of its Compensation Committee comprised of women, the firm practices transparency, consistency, and fairness in compensation (as of September 2024)

Nancy Cowgill

We would give a lot of thanks to people like Velma Jeremiah and Karen Creason who blazed some trails before us because I think if it had not been a litigator like Karen, a lot of those back doors would still be used.

Margaret Kushner

There was a lot of critical mass by the time we actually started at the firm as lawyers and that made a big difference too.

Saskia de Boer 

Thank you so much for your leadership and blazing the trail for not only me but for more women and generations to come.