But the issues that have been brought up by the case continue to haunt the profession. The retention and promotion of women is “an institutional challenge, and I think everyone is working sincerely, but not hard enough, to deal with it,” says Julie Hannaford, a family law practitioner who was an equity partner with Borden Ladner Gervais LLP for 12 years before launching her own firm, J.K. Hannaford Barristers, in July 2006.

Female lawyers are still not given the same opportunity to shine as their male colleagues, Hannaford contends. At BLG, “I was practising in an area that wasn’t a core area, [and] combined with fact that I was a woman,” she says she felt she was losing rather than gaining respect over time. “When you start to feel marginalized, you begin to act the way you feel people perceive you.”

Law firm programs designed to retain women will fail unless female lawyers are consistently mentored by senior practitioners, either male or female, says Hannaford. “Women are . . . not trained to interact well with each other . . . to reach out and form networks and teams, the way men are trained to do. We only have our own selves as references to evaluate ourselves against,” which can lead to a lack of confidence and of trust in oneself.

Hannaford points south of the border to “far more progressive” dialogue on the promotion of women and minorities in the workplace. Affirmative action legislation in the United States is requiring firms to hire more from underrepresented groups, resulting in an expected demographic shift over the next 25 years within the management of banks and other large organizations that are the clients of law firms.

“That’s putting a lot more pressure on private law firms to boost women” and minorities, in part in order to present a more progressive image that will appeal to clients.

Laurie Pawlitza, a litigator with Torkin Manes Cohen Arbus LLP in Toronto, is co-chairwoman of the retention of women in private practice task force at the Law Society of Upper Canada. The project, which has surveyed nearly 900 lawyers in Ontario, released its final report in May.

Women lawyers still leave private practice two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half times more frequently than do men, the task force found; however, this has more to do with women’s competing personal and professional roles than with a sexist work environment.

“We found, almost overwhelmingly, that women had a great deal of difficulty maintaining all the roles they had to maintain during those critical years” following the call to the bar, which now takes place in Ontario at an average age of 31, says Pawlitza. “Women will be having children at the same stage as they move through the initial years of private practice,” and still bear a far greater responsibility for the household and childcare, even if they are working at the same jobs as their spouses. “It’s this confluence of events that the retention project concentrated on,” says Pawlitza.

LSUC’s newly launched Justicia Think Tank will see the society working across the province with a group of large and medium-sized firms committed to implementing programs aimed at improving the retention of women. One firm that particularly impressed Pawlitza was McCarthy Tétrault.

“We spent a lot of time with a lot of different firms” during the course of the consultations, she says. “There’s no question that McCarthys has been, by far and away, the most thoughtful and progressive on these issues. They have done lots of things we’ve adopted for our project.”

In her office on the 53rd floor of Toronto’s TD Tower, Kirby Chown, the Ontario regional managing partner of McCarthy Tétrault, is happy to talk about what her firm is doing for its female lawyers, though she declines to discuss the LaCalamita case while it’s before the courts.

Chown articled at McCarthys and returned to work there following her call to the bar in 1981. “When I became managing regional partner in 1992 . . . one of the things we looked at was the issue of the advancement and retention of women,” she says. “I was interested in having our firm take some steps.”

Chown, who recently won the Women’s Law Association President’s Award for the advancement of women in the legal profession, and has also won the LSUC award for the same work, points first to the “strong women’s network” that has been developed in her firm’s offices to promote female lawyers’ practices.