LCS Grad Fellow
Best Friends at the Bar by Susan Smith Blakely is a book designed for young women in law schools as well as women pursuing their undergraduate degree who are considering a career in the legal field. The author has worked in the legal field for 25 years and has experience in both the public and private sectors. She includes contributions from more than 60 legal professionals, including judges and legal career counselors. The focus of the book is to help women make well-informed choices regarding their legal careers because according to the author’s research over 40% of women leave the legal profession midcareer and nearly 80% of women in major law firms leave after just five years of work.
In addition to advice from her contributors and her own personal advice, the author provides her readers with article, book, and web resources within the text. This book is a quick and easy read but is still very well researched and packed with useful information and advice. Every chapter incorporates advice from people in the profession such as practitioners, authors, judges and also law school career counselors. The author addresses the impact of the current economy and the difficulty of balancing work and home life. She includes excerpts from women in the field of varying ages on how they have personally dealt with the work-home life balance. For specific research and resources on this critical topic, see the University of California Hastings’s Project for Attorney Retention.The author emphasizes the importance of choosing a specialty early on and finding a mentor (male or female). She explains with staggering statistics the reality of the legal profession still being male dominated and provides realistic information about pursuing a career in litigation or with a large firm. The new idea of flexible hours and part-time partnerships are discussed and, while technically possible, the author emphasizes that they are not always a reality in large firms and on the whole are extremely hard to come by. There is a section titled “critical lessons” which includes tips on dressing appropriately (which means different things in different legal settings as well as different areas of the country), office relationships, keeping emotionality to a minimum, and working with other women in the profession. The book concludes with profiles of women working in the legal profession and who struggled with a variety of work-life issues. She incorporates advice from 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60-somethings as well as a male perspective on women in the legal field.
[ This book is available for check-out at Law Career Services. ]
