Our Responses to Sexual Harassment

When will what we do in response ever really make a difference?

Lately there has been a lot of discussion about sexual harassment in the legal profession. Although I recently wrote an issue about this subject, because it’s been so front of mind I wanted to address it again, to talk about how we can change the culture that makes sexual harassment occur in so many legal spaces.

I previously wrote briefly about the harassment experienced by women who attended this year’s ALM Legalweek conference. Above the Law published an article that summarized allegations about that conference:

“Last night, I was propositioned in the most graphic way I’ve ever heard. When I turned him down, he tried to convince me to leave with him by telling me his pregnant wife was on bedrest and I was doing her a favor.”

“A leader at a firm showed me a video of 2 girls under 20 in his bedroom naked and and invited me and the other woman I was with to join him.”

“A man just wouldn’t leave me alone even when others tried to intervene. He threw a drink at one of the men trying to help me at which time he was finally escorted out.”

A young sales person was grabbed under the skirt by a coworker.

A woman went to the bathroom and was pulled into the men’s room by a man who then wouldn’t let her leave.

“I was roofied by a bartender at a conference event.”

“I was followed onto the elevator by a coworker who tried to follow me to my room.”

When Deeanna Fleener, Vice President of Solution Management at Deloitte, published some of these allegations on LinkedIn, many women commented to say that they, too, had experienced similar incidents at Legalweek and other conferences. I did too when I was younger.

Separately, this weekend, the Toronto Star published an article about how Canadian women are leaving the law because of the sexual harassment and gender discrimination they’ve experienced. Over the past twenty years, the Law Society of Ontarios’s Discrimination and Harassment Council (DHC) has logged more than 1,200 complaints, with sexual discrimination and harassment being the most common type. The women in the article describe a culture that is pervasive throughout the profession—a culture that hasn’t changed in decades. And they describe how isolated and alone they felt when they were harassed. Even in cases where it was widely known that a powerful partner was a predator, nothing was done about the behavior.

Unfortunately, none of this surprises any woman who’s practiced law in the last three decades—in Canada or the United States.

The “Good” News and the Bad News

The so-called good news about these events is that, more than ever, women are speaking out about them. There was a chorus of posts about what happened at Legalweek on LinkedIn, and there were good articles about what those women experienced in the legal press. It was particularly moving to me to see men posting about what happened to women they know, and calling for the offending men to be identified so that companies and other law firms could stop doing business with the offenders. There are men who are learning how to be true allies, and that is, oh-so-slowly, starting to make a difference.

The bad news is that—at least so far—the responses to unquestionably offensive behavior seem tepid and weak. Law360 Pulse published an article [paywall] that described some of them and attached conference organizers’ codes of conduct to the article. The vast majority of the codes of conduct—which conference organizers offered as evidence of their pledges to make things better—were vanilla “commitments” to providing harassment-free environments, and statements that organizers will require participants to acknowledge that they can’t harass conference attendees.

But commitments are meaningless without consequences. And making conference attendees acknowledge that they have to behave themselves only attempts to insulate conference organizations from liability: it does nothing to protect the women who are attending those conferences.

If you look at the Codes of Conduct attached to the Law360 article, they’re written in a tone that appears more to fear offending the men who engage in harassment than to make unequivocal statements about those organizations’ tolerance for—and punishment of—any harassment that occurs at their conferences:

• Relativity just finalized changes to its 2018 Code of Conduct. The Law360 article says that Relativity’s Code was amended to provide “a more detailed section on harassment and discrimination and tougher consequences for violating the policy, like being banned from future events.” While the Code contains so-called “hard rules” telling readers not to engage in harassment or discrimination at Relativity events, it only says that, after violators are asked to stop inappropriate behavior, they may be removed from the event “at the discretion of the event organizers.” And, if someone if removed from a Relativity event (after he has been asked to stop and continues to engage in the conduct), he “may be barred from future Relativity events.” I can’t imagine any women would feel safer at Relativity events after reading this watered-down policy, which also devotes space to “[e]ncourag[ing] and uphold[ing] professional attire standards, avoiding clothing that may be deemed inappropriate or potentially offensive within the workplace” and tells its readers to avoid engaging in conversations or conduct that “could be viewed” as harassment and/or discrimination.
• The Clio Code of Conduct for its 2024 Cloud Conference, first implemented in 2017, asks attendees to “respect others” and “bring your true and authentic self.” The section on respecting others states that harassment “will not be tolerated.” What does this mean? The “true and authentic self” section says that participants “may be asked to leave the conference at the discretion of the event organizers.” That doesn’t sound zero-tolerance to me.
• The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) has an Anti-Harassment Policy it asks attendees to acknowledge. It provides examples of sexual harassment and then says harassment of all types is “strictly prohibited” and “will be dealt with appropriately.” Dealing with it “may include but is not limited to expulsion from the event and/or expulsion from ILTA.” The Acknowledgement then says that signers are “bound” by the document, but it’s unclear what that means. Did ILTA think that it couldn’t expel harassers from its conferences unless participants agreed not to harass women?
• The Association of Corporation Counsel?(ACC) document defines “Unacceptable Conduct,” provides a website to report such conduct, and then says that Unacceptable Conduct “will not be tolerated.” Like Relativity, ACC apparently starts by asking someone to stop engaging in “unacceptable behavior” and then may remove an offender from an ACC event without further warning, ban an offender from future ACC events, revoke ACC membership, or refer an incident to local law enforcement. The Law360 Pulse article mentions that, in response to Deannna Fleener’s LinkedIn post, Veta Richardson, CEO of ACC, stated that its Chief Legal Officer investigates complaints of sexual harassment at its events, and that ACC has indeed banned people from participating in events and taken away their membership over sexual harassment.

In short, while some of the above documents are better than others, none of them contain statements that will make female attendees feel safer. Indeed, many of these codes have been in place for seven or eight years, when some of the alleged incidents happened. Because conference organizers know that they can most likely only be held liable for negligence, their “codes of conduct” mince words. They say they “may” exact consequences on attendees, they give discretion to conference organizers, and are otherwise filled with legalese.

Conference organizers can do more. In addition to more obvious solutions like training their employees to intervene and seek outside assistance in troubling circumstances, they can put pressure on the law firms and companies who attend those conferences. At a bare minimum, conference organizers should be reporting the conduct of offenders to employers. Employers both need to know that they have a problem employee, and may have policies in place that have consequences for behavior at conferences. What if, in addition to expelling an offender from a conference and barring his return to other conferences, the organizers suspended that offender’s employer from having off-site parties for a year during its conferences? There should be consequences with teeth that will make a firm think twice before sending a known offender to an event.

Of course, it’s not just conference organizers who must make changes, they need to occur throughout our profession. As several people said on LinkedIn, we must start saying the names of the men who engage in this conduct. Why should the “firm leader” who showed a woman conference attendee a video of girls under 20 in his bedroom naked and solicited other women to join him continue to get business from anyone? He shouldn’t even have a license to practice law.

I also didn’t see many employers who sent people to Legalweek expressing outrage at what occurred, or demanding that conference organizers make changes to protect the female employees they’re sending. If we are going to make meaningful changes, there needs to be a chorus of outrage every time one of these things happens.

Ultimately, however, nothing will meaningfully change until our profession takes a foundational look at what it values. Right now employers and conference organizers are more afraid that they’ll be sued than they are afraid that their workplaces or conferences have become unsafe for women. As Aneka Jiwaji recently said on LinkedIn: “The ‘whisper network’ is a real thing. We ALL know who the perpetrators are at various workplaces.” While it’s hard to say when true change will come to the women in our profession, we can certainly start by no longer protecting those men.

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