Proskauer Rose LLP

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 necessari- ly 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- CAREER 350 LIBRARY © 2006 Vault Inc. View from the Top: Q&A with Legal Women Leaders Proskauer Rose LLP 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 Visit the Vault Law Channel, the complete online resource for law careers, featuring firm profiles, message boards, CAREER 351 the Vault Law Job Board, and more. www.vault.com/law LIBRARY View from the Top: Q&A with Legal Women Leaders Proskauer Rose LLP that needs to be looked at harder, not only from the point of view of supporting women professionals but all women in the workforce.

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