Author Michele Wheldon of The Huffington Post has published an in-depth personal profile and news report following her interview with Kelly Culhane. The article provides historical background for how and why Culhane, along and her co-founders Heather Haughian, Jim Meadows and Grant Walsh, originally launched the firm in 2013.
Her report also dives into how the firm’s management team (which also includes the firm’s newest equity partner, Kim Verska) has bucked the historically dismal trends of national law firm equality statistics by focusing on a business platform that creates real equality and opportunity for all attorneys, regardless of race, gender, or other personal circumstances. Here are some excerpts:
“From our very beginning we have sought to create an open and transparent platform where all lawyers can thrive regardless of gender, race, religion, age, or geography,” says Kelly Culhane.
At Culhane Meadows, four of the top 10 earners are women, and the top earner (in 2017) is a woman. At the firm, that is “cloud-based,” meaning attorneys can work virtually, 40 percent of its partners are women. Three of the five managing partners are women.
This is not the norm industry-wide where women non-equity partners account for 30 percent and women equity partners account for 19 percent, in spite of the reality that an almost equal number of women and men are hired at the associate level. Nearly half, or 47.6 percent of law school graduates in 2015 were women, according to the American Bar Association.
“For a lot of staff, associate and senior partners in large firms you’re forced to choose between being with your kids or being a successful equity partner with the firm. You shouldn’t have to choose,” Culhane says.
“I am so lucky at this firm to be able to practice law and I am also able to be very present in my children’s lives.”
Her ambition to expand the firm is balanced by the mission to offer an opportunity for men and women to have the law careers they want as well as the personal lives they intend to have.
Read the entire HuffPost article HERE.
