Women’s History Month is a time to celebrate the vital contributions of women around the world. Our theme this year, Breaking Through, pays tribute to the many trailblazing women in the legal profession and beyond who have shattered countless glass ceilings and held their hands out to pull up future generations.
We asked Atara Miller, a member of Milbank’s Global Executive Committee and a New York-based partner in the firm’s Litigation & Arbitration Group, to share some thoughts.
What are the challenges of being a woman practicing law in your area of expertise?
I’m often asked this question, and I always pause, because substantively I don’t think being a woman has negatively impacted me at all. That said, there were certainly instances (especially early in my career) where people said or did things that were inappropriate. It was a different world then. The workplace culture and the degree of sensitivity and awareness of these issues are much better now.
This question also always makes me think about the benefits of being a woman in BigLaw. When I was a junior associate there was a sense of competition among many of the women attorneys and clients, each striving to be the one woman who was going to make it to the top. I remember going to conferences on women in the profession that would each open with a slide depicting one candle lighting another, emphasizing that “a candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.” The idea of women helping women has certainly taken hold across the industry. On a personal level, I am deeply invested in positioning the women around me to succeed and I take great pride in their accomplishments. I’ve noticed the same among opposing counsel, judges, and clients – there’s a sense of mutual respect and understanding.
How do you believe female leadership/management makes a difference in business? Did you have female references/role models throughout your career?
Diversity of experience and perspective is important in management. Whether that’s gender, race, age, geography, practice group – all of it matters and the best management is one that has a full complement. One of the most valuable ideas that I learned early in my career was that women need to create their own personal “board of directors,” rather than looking for a single mentor who was just like them. The very idea of a board of directors is that it includes people who are different from you and different from each other, people with both complementary and different perspectives, expertise and experience. The same is true for an organization’s management. Groupthink may make decision making easier but is unlikely to lead to the best outcome.
I certainly have had female role models over the years. Stacey Rappaport and Linda Dakin-Grimm probably stand out as people who really pushed, supported and sponsored me. We can and should be inspired by other women, but there are still too few of us. Some of my biggest champions and many of the people I looked up to and learned from over the years have been men. It would be a mistake to limit your role models to only women.
Name a Woman you admire and leave a message for future generations of female lawyers.
My mother ranks high on the list of women I admire. She wanted to go to law school but couldn’t because she needed to start working to support her Holocaust-survivor parents. As a kid, she was one of the few working mothers that I knew. She took great pride in being smart, well educated, independent, polished and outspoken. There was also literally no limit to how hard she would work or what she would do for her parents or children.
In terms of a message for the next generation, I think it’s critical to define what success means for you. It’ll be a lot harder to put in the effort and make the necessary sacrifices to meet someone else’s definition of success. As I learned from my mother, nothing in life comes without hard work and commitment. It will be a bit easier, though, if you create and nurture a network of people with whom you can celebrate your achievements and commiserate over your failures. There will be setbacks, but don’t give up, learn from them and keep moving forward.
