Sharon Cook is the only female managing partner among Australia’s top 30 law firms. She talks to Justin Whealing about her career and why there should be more women in senior positions

For someone who has long agitated for change in the legal profession, Sharon Cook’s legal career has been remarkably stable.

Cook, the managing partner of Henry Davis York, has been with the firm for 15 years and had only worked at two firms prior to that (Stephen Jaques Stone James and Herbert Smith), during the first 15 years of her legal career.

Cook, whose parents ran two newsagencies in Sydney’s Kings Cross, became the only person in her family to go to university when she enrolled in an arts law degree at the University of Sydney in 1977. She is also the only female managing partner of a top 30 Australian law firm (by revenue), and while she is proud of her first achievement, she bemoans the fact that the latter is the case in 2012.

“There are clearly many other competent women out there who could do the job very well at other firms, so I think it is a sad indictment of the profession that I am currently the only one,” says Cook.  “It is indicative of the fact that there are obstacles to women succeeding in the profession.”

Cook is passionate about diversity and was involved in the Advancement of Women in the Legal Profession report released by the NSW Law Society in December 2011.

She has been personally involved in many of the developments in the private practice legal sphere that have chipped away at the glass ceiling in the upper echelons of Australian law firms.

In 1993 she was the first part-time senior associate at a top or mid-tier law firm when she assumed that role at Stephen Jaques Stone James (now King & Wood Mallesons). In 1997 she became the first part-time partner at a major law firm when she moved to Henry Davis York.

Despite the fact that in New South Wales the number of solicitors has increased from around 20 per cent in 1998 to 46 per cent in 2010, Cook believes that attitudes towards women in the profession have not moved with the numbers.

“I am still staggered that over my 30 years as a lawyer, nothing much has changed,” she says. “When I studied law, around half the people that studied law were women, and I fully expected that by now you would have had a 50-50 ratio of women to men in partnership [at private practice law firms], but it is far from that and I don’t think things have changed very much at all.”

At Henry Davis York, the firm Cook has led since July 2008, 28 per cent of its 54 partners are female, placing it slightly above the average of 23 per cent of female partners in law firms with 40 or more partners, according to the Advancement of Women report.

Five of the firm’s 15 female partners work part time, and Cook believes that making provisions for flexible-work arrangements, and having “male champions” of diversity within law firms, is one of the most important components of policies to increase the numbers of women in senior positions.

“The key thing is to have a truly, genuine commitment from the leaders of law firms to the advancement of women and flexible work practices,” she says. “What I think women need is that support at a leadership level – and it is not just the CEO, supervising partner and head of HR; it is all of the partners that have to support it.”

Dealing with tragedy

Cook is unequivocal in stating that the most difficult thing she has dealt with in the nearly four years she has been the managing partner at HDY is the suicide of young lawyer James Plummer in August 2010.

It is clear that Cook and those at the firm who knew Plummer have been deeply affected by his death. Since that time the firm has overhauled its health and wellbeing policies and created a foundation to provide for an outward-bound scholarship in Plummer’s name.

“We have always had a friendly and collegiate workplace, so the problems and stresses that people have experienced at other firms, I don’t think we have experienced to the same degree,” says Cook. “Yet despite all of that, we lost James, and that taught us a lesson that you always need to be working on this and be sure you are doing the right thing by your staff.”

HDY now has an Employee Assistance Scheme where the firm will foot the bill if staff need to speak to psychologists at the Sydney-based Centre for Corporate Health. The firm’s induction program includes a 30-minute one-on-one session with Cook, who addresses work/life balance, and junior lawyers share an office with a senior lawyer, typically a senior associate, in an attempt to lessen that feeling of “isolation” that can come with the practice of law.

One thing Cook hasn’t done is get rid of timesheets or reduce billable-hour targets.

Some managing partners, such as Marque Lawyers managing partner Michael Bradley, believe the high incidence of depression amongst lawyers is linked to timesheets.  “It's just a horrible way to work and an awful way to think about yourself and measure your own value,” Bradley told Lawyers Weekly in 2010.

However, Cook believes the high rates of depression amongst lawyers might be due to something more intrinsic in the psyche of lawyers.

“The fact that young people are starting to be less happy at university where it doesn’t exist [timesheets and billable hours] would be evidence that it is not related to that,” she says. “There would be a myriad of reasons as to what is giving rise to it in the profession.

 “It is clearly a stressful environment, working in any law firm. Timesheets are a real part of that, I suppose. It is a tough place to work and some places are tougher than others.”

Cook doesn’t apologise for installing an ethos within the firm where the client is the “number one priority”. However, she points out that while there will be times when lawyers work late nights and weekends, “if it happens every night and every weekend, we or the person involved have a problem”.

Not being all things to all people

During her time as managing partner, the firm has consolidated its position on the panels of the big four banks in Australia and has established a reputation as one of the top insolvency and restructuring practices.

The firm continued to achieve revenue growth during the GFC and beyond, and exceeded the $100 million revenue figure in the 2010-11 financial year. Last year the once proudly Sydney-only firm headed north and established an office in Brisbane.

Given the firm’s expertise in insolvency and restructuring, Cook concedes that part of the firm’s success is dependent on the economic cycle, with foreclosures for some companies meaning the cash register continues to chime for lawyers and external administrators.

However, Cook is also focused on ensuring the firm can also reap the benefits from the sunnier economic times.

“As part of our vision to be a tier-one firm practising nationally, we are focusing on two sectors, and those two sectors are the financial services sector and the government sector,” she says.
“When I look at some of the most successful firms in the world, I look at Slaughter & May in London, or Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York. They have really strong, good business models that are absolutely client focused and they are centres of excellence where they provide the best service possible to their clients.

“That is what I want us to be for the time being and into the foreseeable future.”