Op-Docs: ‘Great Expectations for Female Lawyers’

By Florence Martin-Kessler

Great Expectations for Female Lawyers: Twelve years after being interviewed by The New York Times Magazine, five women, who all started their law careers at Debevoise & Plimpton, reflect on ambition, leadership and success.

On the bright summer morning of Sept. 9, 2001, I picked up the newspaper from my Brooklyn doorstep, just as I did every Sunday. I was 29, newly wed and relocated from Paris.

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One of the headlines in the magazine caught my eye: "Great Expectations."

The article presented a series of portraits: 21 women, most just out of law school (where women graduate in roughly equal numbers as men) who were recruited to a big New York law firm. The article asked them to elaborate on the gender gap and on their life and work prospects. Yet the underlying premise of "Great Expectations" was concise and blunt: Men ruled the world. I tore out and saved the article.

I could relate to these women, many of whom, like me, were in their 20s, had graduated from elite schools and had landed a first job in a big corporate firm (I had spent a year as a junior consultant before walking away).

The women's quotes — optimistic, supremely confident, even arrogant — could have been my own: "I don't think there are things I can't do" ... "I don't see any obstacles, so if I don't get to the top it will be because of my own personal choices." The picture at Debevoise & Plimpton seemed a microcosm of women everywhere (well, in many economic sectors in most of the industrialized world).

Earlier this year, as I followed the debates sparked by Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg, I started wondering what had happened to the lawyers of "Great Expectations." Surely they had forged an opinion about whether women could "have it all." I found my old copy of the magazine. Soon, I picked up my phone and arranged meetings to interview them for this Op-Doc video.

I learned that, of the original women profiled in the article, only a handful of the young recruits of 2001 remained with the firm. (Of course, the attrition rate is high for men, too — but not nearly as high; in American law firms, the overwhelming majority of partners are men.) From the original 21, around half are in private practice, some are in powerful positions at corporations, others are working in public interest law and several became full-time parents. But what I found most interesting was that their lives were often far more complex than they had predicted. Even the greatest of expectations, it seems, eventually encounter reality.

Florence Martin-Kessler is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Paris. She was a Nieman fellow at Harvard University in 2011. Her previous Op-Doc, co-directed with Anne Poiret, is "How to Build a Country From Scratch."

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