Proskauer Rose LLP

Lois D. Thompson – Partner Lois D. Thompson’s experience includes securities, antitrust, complex real estate, and intellectual property matters, as well as employment law litigation. She has defended and prosecuted claims of unfair competition for businesses in a wide range of areas, including the automotive industry, direct marketing and video distribution.

Ms. Thompson also has handled many trademark and copyright matters, as well as cases alleging infringement of design patents and theft of trade secret and other confidential and proprietary information. She has obtained tempo- rary restraining orders and injunctions to protect such information and has been specially retained to represent clients who have had occasion to appeal from lower court decisions affecting use of their intellectual property. She also has tried to jury verdict cases involving claims of Lanham Act violations and unfair competition. For the last three years she has been involved in proceed- ings to determine the amount of the property and income losses sustained as a consequence of the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Ms. Thompson is a graduate of Smith College and Columbia Law School. Before joining Proskauer, she held a clerkship with United States District Court Judge Milton Pollack and served as assistant general counsel of Suburban Action Institute where she litigated federal and state lawsuits relating to suburban land development and environmental issues.

Q&A with Lois D. Thompson

What advice would you give a young woman considering a career in the law today? There are a number of different directions from which advice should come. I’m concerned (be it a man or woman) that you really have to have a commitment to the law. I think there are a lot of people who go to law school by default, and a lot of those people end up ultimately not being happy in the practice. I think the other piece of advice, which again is gender-neu- tral, is that you really have to recognize that you’re going into a service profession, and that means you’ve got to be respon- sive to clients when they need you and as they need you. I think people are not always sufficiently appreciative of that.

When we talk specifically about young women considering a career in the law today, I think it is still the fact that notwith- standing the enormous progress that has been made in the last 15 to 25 years; that the profession is still perceived as a male- dominated profession. I think that there is still some tipping of the profession where women are concerned toward the public service aspect of the profession, so if you’re talking about a woman who’s thinking about going into a major law firm, and I would encourage women to do so, you have to recognize that you are still in a world in which you are part of a minority and you have to be prepared to deal with that in all kinds of ways. From walking into a room in which you suddenly see that there are — I’ll make up a number — 10 faces, eight of them male, two of them female, to having clients assume you are going to be male until they actually see you, you just have to be prepared for that. And I think again, young women are not necessarily prepared for that experience.

Certainly the opportunities to succeed are much greater than they were 15 and 20 years ago, but I think it’s still not an even playing field. Women may be the majority of people graduating from law school, but they are not the majority of people run-

ning law firms, running corporations, and running in-house legal staff. It’s changing, and there are obviously some very important and very significant examples of women who are running law firms. Certainly there are women who are heads of all sorts of legal organizations, presidents of bar associations, but it’s still not even and it won’t be for a long time. The other issue that’s not covered by your questions, except maybe implicitly, where you get to the question about work/life balance, is that certainly my perception is that we are continuing to see more women of childbearing age, when they find themselves in the role of mothers, dropping out of law firms, sometimes for a short period of time and sometimes not for a short period of time, than we’re seeing men of comparable age. So what will actually happen to the cohorts of men and women who are leaving law school now I think remains to be seen. I would hope that in fact in the end it will even out, but I think it’s a real challenge. We’ve all seen the recent articles which have indicated that there [are] at least a significant number of women in college who are talking about anticipating more traditional lifestyles, even if they go to law school. So it’s going to be an interesting time ahead.

Have you personally experienced any advantages or disadvantages in your legal career because of your gender? The answer is I’ve experienced both advantages and disadvantages, and particularly early in my career. I found a combination of real advantages. One of the things we used to joke about, but, in fact, it was the case, was that, particularly when I began, because we’re talking about more than 30 years ago, essentially all judges were men. And these judges tended to be older than the young women who were starting to appear in their courtrooms. I think that attractive women — and I don’t mean beauti- ful, but just somebody who comes into court looking young and vita — did very well, often, in that circumstance, to a much greater extent than I might have anticipated. It really was not an issue of older men on the bench being upset and negative about young women showing up in their courtrooms, but older men on the bench enjoying young women in their courtrooms. So I think more often than not, the initial visceral reaction of the judge was a positive one to having a young woman in court.

Certainly it is the case that there were instances in which the presence of a woman was not well-received. I can remember, rel- atively early in my career, when I was in a court in a county in New York, not Manhattan County, where the D.A.—and I was not doing criminal work, but he and I were talking and I was there for another proceeding — he expressly said, “I don’t like women in my courtroom and I don’t think you have any role here.” People were much more open about that, I suspect, 20 or 30 years ago, than they are now.

In terms of the work that I’ve done as a lawyer, I’ve not particularly perceived any disadvantages at all, in terms of the work that I was assigned or the clients that I had exposure to. I can remember, and again this was quite a number of years ago, a discussion — I was an associate — with a partner in the firm with respect to the fact that we had a series of Japanese clients who were not used to dealing with women professionals and how I would be introduced to them, but there was no question that I was going to be introduced to them and I was going to play a role in their case and they were going to be encouraged to, and eventually did, accept me as their lawyer. But it was something that we talked about.

What kind of steps have law firms and other legal employers taken in the last few years to create a better working environment for women? What else do you think needs to happen in this area? Certainly law firms have been much more articulate about the fact that it is an issue that needs to be dealt with. So step one is saying we’ve got an issue and we need to address it. Step two, which Proskauer did early on, was a combination of two things. One was taking a much harder look at the parental leave policies of the firm and making sure that they made sense in terms of encouraging young men and young women, but particularly young women, to have their children and feel comfortable that they were being taken care of and then go back to work. And then the flex-time policies, which more and more firms are imple- menting and which are very important. The thing not all firms are doing, and it’s hard because of the size of firms and the structure of firms, is variations on the theme of child care arrangements: either nurseries that are affiliated with the firm or cir- cumstances where you have at least some support available if you have children who are sick. That seems to be something

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that needs to be looked at harder, not only from the point of view of supporting women professionals but all women in the workforce. There are lots of mothers who are not lawyers, but legal assistants, secretaries, whatever, and they also have children who get sick, and who also need care. But it does seem to me that the firms are moving increasingly in those directions.

What sort of structures do you think need to be in place to increase the number of women leaders at top law firms and in corporate counsel capac- ities? Certainly some of what we just talked about. I think firms need to be, and in fact increasingly are, attentive to the need to bring women and obviously others who have been excluded to greater or lesser degrees in the past, to committee roles so that they’re in position to have some natural kind of ascent within a firm organization.

The mentoring process is extremely important. The problem with structure is that it’s hard to say to somebody, “Today, Lois, you’re going to be the mentor of Joan,” or, “Today, Lois, you’re going to be the mentor of Jim,” because in fact if mentoring is going to work there really has to be some natural rapport between the mentor and the mentee. But certainly firms need to have a structure in which they really encourage [mentoring]. Our firm actually does have a formal mentoring program. I think having mentors as someone who really advocates for and facilitates the upward mobility of women within a firm is terribly important.

Some women assume that once they have children they won’t be able to have a full-time career. Have you encountered this at Proskauer? The vast majority of the women who are at the firm are committed to continuing their professions and wanting to make it all work. I think it is the case for certain women that they conclude rightly or wrongly — and I guess that’s another issue that we ought to talk about — that it’s harder to do in a law firm environment. One of the concerns I have is finding ways [to make] women comfortable [with] expressing their issues. I have the sense that some women have decided that it won’t work at the firm without really talking through. It does seem to me that when we talk about women leaders in law firms, one thing women have to do if they are leaders in law firms is make it very clear that these are issues that are of concern to the law firm and that they are appropriately talked about, so that people don’t just close their doors and just sort of worry about what should I do and not talk to anyone about it.

What impact has a career in law had on your personal and family life? Do you have any special techniques, methods and philosophies that help you maintain a work/life balance and be a successful lawyer? I think it’s very important to have a mindset that says, when I am away from work, I am away from work. If I am at my child’s first birthday party, that’s what I’m doing. It’s very hard to turn your mind off, and in this life when you’ve got your BlackBerry with you 24 hours a day, I think it’s even harder. But I think you really have to train yourself to say, when I’m working, I’m working. When I’ve decided that I’m not working, when I’m off to the conference with the teacher or I’m off to the soccer game, that I’m going to get 100 percent out of that. If I’m chewing my nails about the brief that I have due, I’m ruining my life.

It’s very difficult to say, but when you’re talking about family life, you have to make very sure that you have the right significant other. I’m using the word significant other purposely, because there are all kinds of relationships. But if you don’t have a supportive significant other, it makes it much harder. So my first piece of advice would be: choose the right partner. And that’s hard to do. But certainly my own experience is one in which I’ve had a tremendously supportive husband and that makes a difference. I think it’s also true that — and here you have more influence, sometimes you don’t know these things when you pick your partner — is that certainly the message that was conveyed to my children from day one was that I was a working mother. My sense has always been that children are very accepting of virtually everything. I can remember when my son was in nursery school, he made some comment about how there were mommies who worked, and mommies who shopped. I thought that’s a pretty good judgment for me to have to live with.

What other careers and life choices did you consider before deciding on a career in the law? If you were not practicing law and you could not be a lawyer, what would your dream career be now? I did not intend to become a lawyer. I was going to go into the Foreign Service, and in fact picked Columbia Law School because it had a connection with a lot of Latin American organizations. I was going to do a joint program where I was going to do law and also a degree in economics and I was going to go into the Foreign Service. The reason I was going to law school was for one reason and one reason only: when I went into the Foreign Service, I didn’t want to end up typing. I thought if I had a professional degree that wouldn’t happen. When I got to law school, I discovered that I loved law school and the whole idea of going into the Foreign Service dropped by the wayside. And I became a lawyer. That in some ways leads me to your next question, which is — and it’s really one I’ve been thinking — I can’t think of anything else I would do that isn’t related to the law. That doesn’t mean I would necessarily say that my ideal job would be to forever be a partner in a law firm. But certainly anything I would ever want to do would have the law involved with it. I think the ideal job would be taking all of this knowledge and experience that I’ve now had the opportunity to have and use it in a way that would advance the public interest. I don’t want to sound Polyanna-ish, but that’s really what I would like to do if I had the ideal job. I’m not going to write the Great American Novel and I’m not going to paint the Great American Painting.

How do you expect the practice of law will change in the next ten years? As I think about it, 10 years is actually not such a long period of time. But I think that there are two contradictory phenome- na that are occurring. One is that we are increasingly electronic, so that our ability to work at locations other than our offices is greater and will continue to be greater. That in some ways is a facilitator because it’s possible to work at home at odd hours and on the weekends and be productive. We’re going to see more and more of that, the capacity to work at home, the capacity to work on vacation. Again, this is a mixed blessing. In many respects, I think it’s good, because it allows the lawyer to have control of the work environment, but it also makes it harder to separate from work. The other piece of it is that we are increasingly global, and law firms are increasingly international, and legal work is increasingly international, and as electronic and as networked and connected as we are, I think there’s going to be more movement of people in service of the practice of law than we see today.

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