Eckert Seamans encourages and supports our women by offering opportunities for advancement, promoting them to leadership roles throughout all our offices and practice groups, creating opportunities to achieve professional success and encouraging them to be voices of authority in the communities in which they live and work.

This is not a new direction for Eckert Seamans.  It has been a part of the firm’s culture.  Recently, the firm has reinvigorated its commitment to the advancement of women within the legal profession by formalizing its efforts through “WIE, ” Women’s Initiative at Eckert.  WIE is headed by Dorothy Davis, a member of the Litigation Group in the firm’s Pittsburgh office.  WIE is a firm-wide program designed to foster an energetic and supportive atmosphere for women at our firm.  WIE provides a platform for our women to market their professional skills and leadership competencies to others in a manner consistent with the high professional standards and business ethos of Eckert Seamans, while continuing the firm’s legacy of excellent service and community prominence.

Eckert Seamans was recently named one of the top 50 law firms for women by Working Mother magazine.  The rankings recognize those law firms that have demonstrated a commitment to work-life balance and retaining and promoting women, and the rankings are based on six measured areas of firm management: workforce profile, benefits and compensation, parental leave, childcare, flexibility, and retention and advancement of women.  The firm’s goal is to build on this achievement and to continue to work to make our firm even more women-friendly with increased attention to work-life balance, mentoring and women’s leadership development programs.

The mission of WIE is to support, mentor and showcase women’s achievements within the firm and the communities where we have offices.  This is a mission supported by the entire firm.

To accomplish this mission, WIE endorses the following strategies to meet the challenge of identifying and retaining quality and aspiring women lawyers:

• Create and facilitate opportunities for professional women to excel, achieve and influence each other.
• Promote the skills and experience of our women lawyers inside and outside the firm.
• Showcase the exceptional women leaders in our firm and foster new generations of leaders.
• Develop effective mentoring relationships with senior lawyers in the firm to ensure quality training and institutional integration.
• Partner with local, regional and national organizations with similar missions.
• Encourage our women to be agents of change.
• Support responsible life-work balancing with creative and flexible accommodation.
• Integrate women into firm management and leadership.
• Provide diversity sensitive access to business development and training opportunities.

WIE embraces the following women-centered practices as ways of implementing these strategies:

• Creating women-centered marketing materials including a separate platform within the firm website and print materials.
• Producing a women-centered firm-wide directory.
• Affiliating with gender diversity initiatives within bar associations.
• Developing a library of women-centered practice and marketing secondary source materials.
• Identifying and underwriting business development training.
• Creating mentoring relationships between members and associates and encouraging shadowing experiences.
• Encouraging women to develop their own business plans and providing coaching to assist in implementation and accountability.
• Actively promoting diversity in newbusiness calls, including women in RFP responses and introducing and integrating women into institutional client relationships.
• Developing firm-wide regional and local programs for client and potential client development.
• Encouraging women to attend and sponsor community events and participate in activities which highlight the profile of the firm’s women.
• Underwriting efforts to promote women’s participation within local, regional andnational professional, business, trade and bar associations.
• Creating networking opportunities with similar women-centered initiatives sponsored for and with service related organizations, clients, bar associations and professional schools in the cities in which we have offices.
• Networking with similar initiatives with other law firms, as appropriate.
• Providing instruction on a cost-effective basis for women to develop life-long, athletic skills and knowledge which help to promote business.
• Affirming firm support by giving administrative billing credit to women-centered activities.
• Sharing information about women-focused events on a local, regional and firm basis, as appropriate.
• Identifying women-owned and women-centered client and business opportunities with which to network and to cross-sell.
• Identifying and promoting women-centered government relations opportunities and election related activities.
• Encouraging non-profit, community, school, family-oriented activities as a means of enhancing business development opportunities.
• Optimizing women-centered public relations opportunities.
• Organizing efforts to promote our women in local, regional and national lists of professional achievement and recognition, i.e., Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers in .
• Fostering team building as a platform for success within the firm and as we outreach in the communities where we live and to the clients with whom we provide service.
• Building bridges with male colleagues to promote and to enhance collective achievement and success.

 WIE Members are:

 WIE Members in the news:

Boston WIE Update

Washington DC WIE Update

Philadelphia WIE Update

 WIE 2009 Year in Review