Kate said it’s not just demographic changes; it’s about technological changes. Starting to practice in the days of snail mail, hand delivery, faxes, FedEx, and no email, where responses were not expected to be instantaneous, is so different than the starting experience of today’s first-year associates. “So this isn’t the stereotype of baby boomers willing to work all the time and a new generation full of slackers,?” I ask.

“No; we may think we worked all the time, but 24/7 access was not really the reality it is today. Law firms behave as if these changes are merely on the margins but they haven’t asked what the real impact is on lawyers and others. We need some pretty fundamental adjustments.”

Look, she explains, technology has transformed our lives and our businesses in miraculous ways.  It has freed us geographically, and in many ways freed us from the constraints of time. This is a tremendous tool but we need to manage it to serve everyone’s ends and we’re not all the way there yet.

“But there has to be something about demographics, right? And I gather you’re talking about more than the fact that women have babies and men don’t?,” I ask.

Absolutely, she agrees, and turns to diversity in general. The talent pool, if not the workforce within law firms itself, is truly diverse. But you may have to change your institution, your firm, to make it a place where diversity is welcome. “Why diversity? Why does it matter?,” I ask. Diversity makes the firm a stronger, more resilient institution, better able to serve clients. If that’s a core goal, you need to do more than bring a group of diverse people in through recruitment and then watch them leave.

“Women are the canary in the coal mine for all the diversity issues.” They’re in the crosshairs of work/life (im)balance because the critical years to partnership overlap with critical family formation years in ways not remotely as conflicting for men. To take a first step in alleviating that, Fenwick got rid of lockstep promotion for associates a long time ago; Kate called it a crazy idea that makes no sense and has never been used outside Law Land.

She suggested we get more comfortable about thinking of career progression as a “lattice” (or a “jungle gym,” as Sheryl Sandberg called it in Lean In), and not a linear ladder. The path to advancement needs to be divorced from law school graduation anniversaries and needs to more closely match what people are capable of doing. Follow people’s accomplishments, in other words, not an arbitrary measure of time passing.

Law firms also need to experiment more not just with “time in grade” but with the role. A lot of associates don’t want to be partners, but would still rather stay at a law firm than to go in-house; for others, the ultimate plan is to go in-house; and still others have different plans altogether. Law firms need to be far more candid—to themselves—about acknowledging that and acknowledging that firms don’t just train associates to be partners but to be corporate clients, knowledge managers, judges, legal product developers, entrepreneurs, client relationship executives, practice managers, community leaders, and much more.

Kate observes that corporations and in-house departments have done a much better job at diversifying their legal departments, so the problem has to be laid at the door of law firms and not the legal profession. And if law firms can’t solve it, we’re excluding a huge part of the talent pool.

I change the subject to lawyers’ psychology.