legal sanity

Some time back, I wrote about an ongoing cyber dialogue on gender gap issues in the law fueled by a New York Times article questioning Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big Law Firms? That article featured the opinion and work of Lauren Stiller Rikleen, a law firm partner and author of the book Ending the Gauntlet: Removing Barriers to Women’s Success in the Law.

I recently met Rikleen when we presented programs at the same ALM conference. She was gracious enough to forward me a copy of her book and I just started reading it. Even at first blush, it’s fair to say that Rikleen offers fresh, thorough and well-written commentary on a subject that’s critical to the future of our profession.

If you want some additional insight into Rikleen’s research and findings, she’s interviewed and otherwise profiled in the Spring 2006 issue of the Women Lawyers Journal (pdf).

Providing some more food for thought on this front is a washingtonpost.com piece called Working Mom Top Fears. It conveys some telling information culled from a recent AFL-CIO Ask A Working Woman survey (pdf). The steps companies are taking to prevent or allay such fears are set out in a CareerJournal.com article on The Mommy Drain. Completing this roundup is lawyer Karen Asner’s incisive take on Creating Win-Win Flexible Work Arrangements.