Oy vey meshuganas!

 

Millbank, Tweed tapping Orthodox Jewish woman as partner

By Carlyn Kolker
Tuesday, January 3, 2012

'Tis the season for partner promotions, and Summary Judgments receives a lot -- repeat, a LOT -- of emails about the lucky men and women who have finally attained that brass ring of law firm life. But one such email really piqued our interest today.

Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, the 145-year-old New York firm, sent out a press release saying it had promoted four attorneys to partner. Included in the group is Atara Miller, identified with selected boldfaced as "likely the only Orthodox Jewish woman partner at a major Wall Street firm."

Summary Judgments called around, and quickly refuted the claim -- however hedged -- that Milbank made. Indeed, the first woman ever promoted to the partnership at Davis Polk & Wardwell, in 1971, was the Orthodox woman, Lydia Kess, according a Davis Polk spokesman. I'm told that there are high-powered Orthodox women at other so-called white shoe firms, too.

So, if Miller's promotion is hardly the first of Orthodox women, is it still anything for Milbank to crow about? After all, there are plenty of Orthodox Jewish men among the ranks of big firm partners these days. And while the overall rate of women partners at big firms is still low, it is hardly news when a law firm promotes a woman to the top ranks.

This is really the kind of press release that raises more questions than it answers. Summary Judgments doesn't have all the answers, but we will take a stab.

For sure, observant Jews, male and female, have work-schedule related issues that secular lawyers do not; according to Jewish law, they must not engage in any work (that includes phone calls, emails, BlackBerry checks, iPhone updates, and the like) during the Sabbath, from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, and they frequently observe other religious holidays (Sukkot, Simchat Torah, Shavuot to name a few) in which they are similarly offline.

When I spoke to Atara Miller, the Milbank litigation partner, by phone today, she pointed out that Orthodox women face societal pressures that make balancing a demanding career and family particularly tough. In her time with Milbank, Miller says she typically has billed between 2,100 and 2,500 hours a year, which is in line with the general floor of 2,000 billable hours for associates who want to make partner at a big New York firm. In Miller's case, the exceptions were the years when she took maternity leave -- at 33 she has three children and is expecting a fourth.

"I think there certainly are social and family expectations about who you should be," Miller told me. "There are a large number of stay-at-home-moms [in the Orthodox community]. That tends to be consistent with society's expectations of raising children, cooking, and hosting people generally."

Norman Siegel, the noted civil rights attorney who led the New York Civil Liberties Union for 15 years, says even an incremental step toward diversity is good news for the bar.

"Whenever a member of a minority group makes partner at a large New York law firm, that breaks the glass ceiling. That's good for the law firm, good for the law firm community, and good for the city generally," said Siegel. Even if Miller isn't the first Orthodox woman to make partner, Milbank has license to crow, he said. "It sends the message that the doors are opening."

Even so, in its press release Milbank may have tripped over itself to tout its own diversity. "Milbank has four other Orthodox partners who cope with the same issues, but each of them has a wife to run the household and children, while Ms. Miller takes on those duties at home," Milbank wrote in its press release. While perhaps true for these four partners, it hardly shatters gender roles to know that dinner is on the table every night for Milbank's male partners. (Incidentally, Miller told me her husband is a "fabulous" cook).

"That probably was not well thought out," said Allan Ripp, principal at Ripp Media/Public Relations who handles some of Milbank's outside press and who sent out this one. "In that life, in the Orthodox community, women take a more traditional role in the home. I'm sorry if that came out as inappropriate." Ripp said that he stands corrected on the claim that Miller's promotion may be the first among big law firms, although he notes it's "still a small group."

Meanwhile, I asked Miller if her life had changed now that she's an equity partner.

"It's another column on my to-do list: it means more business development, more marketing," she said. "But I get no more respect with my children."

Postscript

We're not Jewish but apparently "meshuganas" is an old Yiddish term meaning "crazy."