Among the biggest hindrances to women advancing in the legal profession in Asia is the challenge of maintaining a balance between raising children and focusing on their careers. Luckily, a number of forward-thinking Asian law firms are stepping up their support by providing family-friendly workplace initiatives.

What are some of the key parental-leave, work-life balance and other career-advancement initiatives your firm has in place to assist working mothers?

Mikiko Soga and Yuri Sugano
Partners, Nishimura & Asahi

Besides our baseline parental-leave system that allows temporary leave during working mothers’ or their partners’ childbearing and child-rearing, Nishimura & Asahi also provides a Temporary Working Arrangements System for lawyers who need to temporarily reduce their workload for personal reasons, such as childbearing and child-rearing, to continue to maintain opportunities for their career advancement. Colleagues are also very supportive of working mothers. Our “Lawyers Moms Manual,” produced voluntarily and informally by some female lawyers and updated regularly over the past decade, is useful for us as working mothers to make a pleasant working environment, providing guidance and tips about childbearing, child-rearing and returning to work based on actual experiences of our firm’s working mother lawyers. Also, our Associate Care Committee has recently started a new networking event for female lawyers, regularly hosting dinner for female lawyers from different practices to share information that helps them to balance work and life. Our firm has been developing a comfortable working environment and promoting a well-defined working style while fostering diversity and inclusion-oriented mindset. While the working environment for mothers has changed drastically in the past number of years in Japan, Nishimura & Asahi is committed to promoting concrete and substantive measures that support women and enhance diversity.

Foo Yuet Min 
Director, Drew & Napier

At Drew & Napier, we ensure that the environment we have is one that is optimal for our lawyers to build lasting careers in. We consciously look into grooming promising lawyers and ensuring equal opportunities in the route to partnership, regardless of gender or life choices.

One of the major obstacles that working mothers and lawyers in general face is the difficulty of maintaining work-life balance. Due to the demanding nature of our work, most lawyers have to work late hours and remain accessible almost 24/7. It can be challenging for a working mother to practise law in such circumstances. To assist working mothers, as well as fathers in Drew to juggle professional and personal commitments, we have flexible arrangements to help our lawyers do that. These range from sabbaticals, the flexibility to work from home fortnightly, and part-time working arrangements, among others. All these are made possible by today’s technological advancements and our connectedness with each other, including our clients.

Drew & Napier recognises the need that all individuals (whether mothers, fathers or other caregivers) may, from time to time in their career, require flexi-work arrangements and are fully supportive of it. Lawyers in Drew are encouraged to propose alternative work arrangements to their team leaders, if they require. At the end of the day, the structure of the arrangements should be beneficial for both the employee and the firm. I am a working mother, and there are many others in Drew. While juggling practice and family commitments is never a breeze, with some creativity, supportive colleagues and an ability to adapt, work-life balance is entirely achievable.

Yvonne Sin
Head of Human Resources, Asia,
Norton Rose Fulbright

As a global law firm, we work in very diverse markets and having a diverse workforce allows us to better understand and advise our clients on their business needs. The attraction, selection and retention of diverse talent is therefore critical to our success. Our diversity and inclusion strategy is centred on three core pillars: our clients, our people and our culture. Many of our partners joined the firm as trainees and many of our female leaders on the board and management committee have risen through the ranks. These women act as role models for our rising talent, over half of whom are women.

To improve the number of women reaching partnership, we are focusing our efforts on active career development though our talent management programmes. Success on the gender diversity front is measured by the retention, development and promotion of female talent, the recruitment of female employees and partners, the success of our flexible and agile working programmes and our maternity retention statistics. We constantly measure and monitor the results achieved.

We are committed to creating and sustaining a working environment and culture which is supportive, respectful and values difference. In this regard, one of our priorities is “life stages”. We understand that being a working parent is one of the challenging stages in life and have introduced our Agile Working Programme in Asia which offers every employee and partner choice and empowerment around where and when they work.