August 2006
Early Exits
From her office in a curved-glass building in downtown Chicago, Tina Tchen has all the trappings of success: a view, positions in national bar associations and a partnership at one of the country’s most prestigious law firms—Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.
To those who know her, Tchen’s success is no surprise. A graduate of a top law school, she’s worked hard to earn her reputation as a bet-the-company trial lawyer.
What is surprising, though, is that Tchen decided to stick it out at a law firm at all.
According to a new study by the ABA’s Commission on Women in the Profession, few women of color ever get the kinds of equal opportunities that Tchen received to put them on the road to partnership. As a result, most choose to leave their firms rather than stay and fight for equality.
The study, Visible Invisibility: Women of Color in Law Firms, explores the experiences of these women. And what it shows is not pretty.
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Feature Section
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Making Rain on the Net
David Wochner’s day starts with a quick read of news reports on the liquefied natural gas industry. Then he writes news summaries and analyses of industry events. With the help of another colleague and an intern who is a recent journalism school graduate, he publishes a Web log, the LNG Law Blog.
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The HIV Conundrum
It was three months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and Lorenzo Taylor was looking forward to helping his country. Fluent in three languages and holding a foreign service degree from Georgetown University, Taylor had easily passed the tough exams for becoming a foreign service officer for the U.S. Department of State.
ABA Connection
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Preparing for the Worst
As reports continue to pour in offering critiques of what went wrong with the response to Hurricane Katrina, analysts say an important lesson is that reacting to widespread disasters is a private affair as well as a matter of government responsibility.
