Justice served: Judith McConnell and two other female attorneys asserted their right to dine at the ‘men only’ Grant Grill in 1971. Today, San Diego’s women lawyers bring a significant influence to the table - and the courts. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

The year was 1971, and all Judith McConnell and her two friends wanted was lunch. The three women lawyers stood at the entrance of the Grant Grill, one of Downtown’s most prestigious — and pricey — dining establishments. The problem was, the trio was not welcome. A small sign on the wall told the story: “Men only before 3 p.m.” McConnell and the other two women, Lynn Schenk and Elaine Alexander, literally got a cold shoulder from the restaurant staff.

“The maître d’ actually tried pushing me out the door, physically pushing me,” says McConnell, now a presiding justice of the California Court of Appeal.

The three stood their ground, and the maître d’ finally relented. The women kept coming back for lunch until eventually, the offensive sign came down. The restaurant’s male patrons were no more obliging than the employees. “They would come up to us and curse,” McConnell recalls.

The following year, McConnell, Schenk and a group of like-minded men and women formed the Lawyers Club of San Diego, an organization dedicated to “advancing the cause of women in the law and in society.” On May 11, the club will celebrate its achievements with a 35th anniversary banquet to be held — where else? — at the Grant Grill.

When the club was founded in 1972, San Diego had only 24 practicing women lawyers, recounts a historical report on the Lawyers Club Web site. Today, women head the federal, state appeals and superior courts in San Diego. Until recently, both the top federal and county prosecutors were women. Many of the city’s major law firms have female partners, and women are well-represented in the ranks of law school professors. Law school graduating classes are now made up nearly equally of men and women.

‘Doing it all’ for Lisa Weinreb includes prosecuting gangs, serving as the Lawyers Club president and caring for two young children. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

“It’s pretty great to see that,” says current Lawyers Club president Lisa Weinreb, a prosecutor with the San Diego County District Attorney’s gang division.

“Things have changed pretty dramatically since then. The advancements have been profound,” agrees McConnell. But neither she nor other prominent members of the San Diego legal community are ready to say that women have advanced to the point that a group such as the Lawyers Club is no longer needed.

“There’s so much further to go,” says Weinreb, pointing to today’s challenges, which she says revolve around balancing work and home life.

“It’s not over, of course,” says Hugh Friedman, a law professor at USD who originally suggested the name “Lawyers Club” as a way to attract both male and female members interested in issues of fairness and equality in the legal profession. (Friedman and Lawyers Club co-founder Lynn Schenk were married in 1972).

While women have broken through many of the traditional barriers in the legal profession, they continue to struggle with quality of life issues, such as taking care of both clients and kids, Friedman says.

Charles Bird, a partner with the San Diego law firm Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps and a long-time Lawyers Club member, agrees with Friedman that the battle is far from over. “I think organizations like Lawyers Club will remain important, at least until women hold a substantially equal share of real political and economic power,” Bird says.

Schenk, a former congresswoman and chief of staff for Gov. Gray Davis who is now in private practice, says, “There’s still relevance to Lawyers Club.”

The Lawyers Club — which today has about 1,000 members — has waged its battle for equality on several fronts, from encouraging local law firms to hire women, to lobbying the governor to appoint more women judges, to pushing for financial equality between the sexes. When the club was formed in the early ’70s, community property laws still allowed the husband to manage and control a household’s assets. Women could not get a bank loan or a credit card without their husband’s signature; single women had to get their fathers to sign.

USD law professor Hugh Friedman originally suggested the name ‘Lawyers Club’ as a way to attract both male and female members interested in issues of fairness and equality in the legal profession. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

Schenk recalls speaking at state bar conventions about the need for change, and being heckled by men who predicted the end of the family. By the late ’70s, however, “We began to change the law,” Schenk says.

Overt sexual discrimination in the law profession also was common. Women law students were treated poorly by professors, and law firms flat-out refused to hire women. When McConnell came to San Diego after graduating from UC Berkeley Law School, she sent resumes to law firms with 10 or more attorneys. One sent back a letter stating, “We’re not hiring women, we’re going to stick with the boys.”

“You wouldn’t see that today,” she says. “I thought that was terrible, it was upsetting.”

Times have definitely changed. Nationally, 30 percent of attorneys are women, reveals a 2006 report by the American Bar Association. Perhaps more tellingly, the study found that during the 2004-05 academic year, 49 percent of law school graduates were women.

In California, 34 percent of attorneys, and 27 percent of judges, are women. San Diego has 13,350 active attorneys. While the state bar could not provide the number of female attorneys practicing locally, the Lawyers Club 2006 Equality Survey sheds light on the issue.

The club surveyed both public agencies and large law firms, receiving responses from organizations employing some 4,000 lawyers. The results showed 34 percent of lawyers in San Diego’s private firms are women, while 49 percent of public sector attorneys are women. The survey also showed that 21 percent of partners in the responding firms are women, and 39 percent of top-level management positions in public agencies are held by women.

While pay comparison statistics for San Diego were not available, nationally, women still lag behind men in terms of pay. In 2005, the ABA study found women lawyers earned 77.5 percent of what their male counterparts earned.

The national statistics on pay probably hold true for San Diego, says Sue Hodges, managing partner for the San Diego offices of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman.

For one thing, she says, women lawyers are more likely to opt for a part-time schedule if one is offered by their employers. Also, she says, the majority of “rainmakers” at law firms — those who bring in and control client business, and therefore command top salaries — tend to be male, which stems from the relative scarcity of women in the boardrooms and general counsel positions at Fortune 500 companies. As women gain more access to the top levels of corporate decision-making, Hodges says, the pay gap should close further.

Another reason for the pay differential, says Bird, is the type of law practiced by women. In the past, women were discouraged from becoming trial lawyers, or entering high-end business practices such as mergers and acquisitions, because it was felt the level of aggressiveness required was unfeminine. Those areas of legal practice tend to be the most lucrative.

“We’re not entirely done with the days when some people think some kinds of practices are more appropriate for women than others,” Bird says.

The most pressing challenges facing today’s women lawyers, say those in the legal profession, are those related to work-life balance, the dilemma of how to raise children, keep a home, and excel in a legal career.

“The new generations are not willing to settle any more,” says Lawyers Club president Weinreb. Women want flexibility in their work schedules to allow them to be both great lawyers and great parents, she says, and those with jobs where such concerns are not addressed are walking away from their careers.

“You are losing women at an enormous rate out of the legal profession,” says Weinreb, who juggles both her career and caring for two young children. “It’s a huge problem.”

But that doesn’t mean women can’t have both a career and a family life.

“I truly believe, as women, we can do it all,” Weinreb says. “You sleep a lot less. You try to cram a lot more hours in the day than exist.”

Hodges agrees that law firms must deal with those competing desires held by their employees if they want to attract and retain top legal talent.

“What women strive for has become more complex. The whole question of work-life balance has come front and center with the new generation of women. They are looking for meaningful careers without making their families come second, which was the price paid by a lot of women in my generation,” Hodges says.