August 4, 2010 — Since 2000, Vinson & Elkins has had a strong Women’s Initiative, focused on helping the firm recruit and retain talented women lawyers and on facilitating their advancement to assume leadership roles in the firm. Now, V&E’s Women’s Initiative is rolling out to its U.S. offices the “Just Add Women®” series of six seminars, designed for mid-level female associates to enhance and accelerate the development of leadership skills. Topics include “Building a Strategic Network,” “Managing Complicated Conversations,” and “Establishing Meaningful Mentoring Relationships.” The Just Add Women toolkit of content and methodology has been created by Carol Frohlinger, co-founder of Negotiating Women Inc. Carol invited Vinson & Elkins — just ranked in the top 20 Best Law Firms for Diversity overall and in the top 10 Law Firms in Diversity for Women by Vault 2011 — to be one of the select few early adopters for the program.
Says Carol, “With Just Add Women, we’ve created a program that provides a framework and real tools, and then teaches people within the firm the skills and context they’ll need to facilitate leadership workshops in-house. That way, professional development initiatives become more ongoing.”
This unique approach also offers information that’s more engaging and relevant, says Karen Hirschman, chair of V&E’s Women’s Initiative. “By utilizing a professional consultant to train our young women partners as facilitators for the Just Add Women workshops, we are able to customize the content to fit more closely with our practices and with the firm’s internal structure and culture.”
Now that the first workshop in the series — “Building a Strategic Network” — has been rolled out in four V&E offices, reviews have been positive from attendees. “Our women lawyers like the program; it’s sending the right message,” says Jennifer Poppe, a partner in V&E’s Commercial and Business Litigation practice and a facilitator for the program. “They say it’s nice that young women partners are facilitating the training and the program is more interactive than others they’ve been part of. We as facilitators can talk about what helped us to advance in our careers at the firm, and we can help the associates we’re training see how the information in Just Add Women can be applied specifically to their careers at V&E.”
Hilary Preston, an associate in V&E’s Securities Litigation and Enforcement practice, agrees. “It's a great program. It is structured in a way that really gets the participants involved and meets everyone at their own stage. We go through very practical exercises designed first to help evaluate where you are in your own professional development and then figure out steps you can take to move along in the process, recognizing that those steps aren't going to be the same for every attorney.”
The remaining five workshops in the series will be rolled out in the U.S. offices in the next twelve months, and plans are underway to launch similar workshops in V&E’s international offices in the near future.
“We expect our experience with these seminars will be used to design a general leadership development series for a broader population of associates,” says Karen Hirschman. “As is true with many other programs launched by V&E’s Women’s Initiative, they often provide the foundation for initiatives that benefit more than just the women.”