Halting the Profession's Female Brain Drain While Increasing the Provision of Legal Services to the Poor: A Proposal to Revamp and Expand Emeritus Attorney Programs

Abstract

This article is currently in the editorial process and will be made public soon: Claudine V. Pease-Wingenter, Halting the Profession’s Female Brain Drain While Increasing the Provision of Legal Services to the Poor: A Proposal to Revamp and Expand Emeritus Attorney Programs, 37 OKLA. CITY. U.L. REV. 433 (2012). The article describes the current female brain drain in the legal profession. Despite years of gender parity in law school, women currently comprise only about a third of practitioners. A number of factors lead to this situation, but a significant cause is the frequent “perfect storm” of simultaneously establishing oneself in a demanding new profession while also meeting significant caregiving responsibilities at home. Women often take time off from paid employment for family reasons, but find it difficult to return to the legal profession after the isolation of such a hiatus. The article advocates reforms to the licensure rules to empower lawyers on such a hiatus to do pro bono work. Not only could the provision of such pro bono services make a huge dent on the “justice gap” that currently plagues our nation and undermines our legal system, but it could also alleviate the trend of women who drift away from the legal profession permanently. To explain the underrepresentation of women in the legal profession, as well as the disincentives attorneys face in doing pro bono when they are not engaged in the paid practice of law, a significant amount of research was done. This document contains several unpublished appendices to the above-titled article, which contain the fruits of that research: • Appendix I provides gender statistics of attorneys from a sampling of thirty-nine law firms of varying sizes from diverse communities around the United States. • Appendix II is a state-by-state summary of the direct costs imposed on attorneys to maintain a law license. • Appendix III is an index of the various states’ MCLE requirements. • Appendix IV is a description of the emeritus attorney and other programs whereby non-practicing attorneys are permitted by certain jurisdictions under certain circumstances to practice law only on a pro bono basis without incurring the financial costs associated with maintaining bar licensure.