Woman Lawyer Sues Partners, Charges Bias

A 65-year-old attorney, the first woman partner in the gargantuan firm Baker & McKenzie, filed suit Monday against several of her fellow partners, claiming that because she wasn’t “one of the boys,” she was cut out of the inner circle of assignments and firm management and her income plummeted 64%.

The complaint by Ingrid L. Beall, filed in Chicago’s Cook County Circuit Court, brings a new dimension to the growing examination of the so-called glass ceiling in professional corporations. So far, the major lawsuits challenging the male-based partnership culture in law firms and accounting practices have been brought by younger women who feel that they have been denied partnership because of their gender.

However, other cases are coming to the fore, said Ann Ronce, co-editor of a newsletter called “The Glass Ceiling,” which examines hurdles facing women in business. “The main reason we haven’t seen a lot of it before,” Ronce said, “is because there just aren’t a lot of women in that position--who have made it past the glass ceiling into a visible position and (who) then experience discrimination.”

Attorneys who have been dealing with the problems of women in law partnerships agree. “It’s just so unusual to have a woman partner so senior in a firm,” said Cory M. Amron, a Washington attorney who chairs the American Bar Assn.’s Commission on Women in the Profession.

Beall (pronounced bell ) joined Baker & McKenzie in 1958, when the law firm had roughly 30 attorneys. She was made partner in 1961, a relatively uncommon occurrence then. In those early days, she said that being made partner “didn’t seem unusual. We were building something. It was new and different. . . . Sex discrimination just didn’t seem to be part of my universe.”

Since then, the firm, which specializes in international law, has grown to more than 1,500 attorneys in 50 offices around the world.

But Beall said there are still relatively few women partners throughout the firm--35 out of a total 479--and in the home office in Chicago, it was not until 1987 that a second woman was elected to join the partnership ranks.

Beall claims that in the mid-1980s, after a change in management, she began to be excluded from important firm committees and was not given the quality and quantity of work assignments that would generate income for the firm and for her. Beall is a member of Baker & McKenzie’s tax department--a service area of law practice where much of the work derives from other, more visible departments.

In 1988, Beall brought in fees of nearly $500,000; this year, only $74,000, according to the complaint. The suit asks compensation for lost income.

During the same period, the complaint said, the firm provided generous monetary benefits, including income guarantees, to younger, less qualified male partners.

Beall said that some of the firm’s partners tried to force her out last year and that lengthy negotiations for a settlement broke down last month. Baker & McKenzie officials are in Europe for the firm’s annual meeting and were not available for comment.

Although Beall said she believes that sex and age discrimination is to blame for her exclusion, her suit is filed under Illinois statutes pertaining to partnerships. That’s because, she said, the federal Title VII statute relating to sex discrimination in employment does not pertain to partners.

In a famous sex discrimination suit, the U.S. Supreme Court did apply that statute to an employee of a partnership. In 1989, it upheld lower court rulings in favor of Ann Hopkins, a former accountant at Price Waterhouse who claimed the company used different criteria when evaluating men and women for election to partner.

After that ruling, a lower court ordered Price Waterhouse to make Hopkins a partner. That was also the result of a case brought by Philadelphia attorney Nancy Ezold, who sued the firm Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen in what has become a landmark case for treatment of women in law firms.