Jennifer Cervenka didn’t step away from a traditional career path as a partner in a large law firm to launch a women-owned firm by design.
The gender of the founding partners was a byproduct of who came together out of mutual respect, and a shared vision to operate a small, nimble company.
“We’re peers,” Cervenka said. “I think we were all looking and ready at the same point in time to step away from a more traditional law firm structure, and into something more entrepreneurial.”
Nevertheless, the four women who are equal partners in Cervenka Green Ducharme Antonelli LLC have started something unusual. Cervenka thinks it is the first women-owned law firm in Rhode Island with a focus on business law.
The Rhode Island Bar Association does not track such statistics.
Cervenka Green Ducharme Antonelli launched in March and is located at The Foundry complex in Providence. It will provide services in 12 areas of business law, including commercial real estate, environmental law, workplace health and safety and creditors’ rights and bankruptcy.
The founding partners are: Cervenka, most recently a partner at Partridge Snow & Hahn LLP; Rachelle Green, a former partner at Duffy & Sweeney Ltd.; Diana Ducharme, a former partner at Hinckley, Allen & Snyder LLP; and Patricia Antonelli, previously of Partridge Snow & Hahn.
The firm’s first associate, Emily Migliaccio, was a litigation associate at Partridge Snow & Hahn.
Nationally, women remain underrepresented in law.
The most recent accounting by the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates 34.5 percent of lawyers were female in 2015. Another survey, by the American Bar Association, put the percentage at 36 percent in 2016.
The number of women who achieve partner status is smaller still. Only 21.5 percent of partners at U.S. law firms were women in 2015, according to a national survey.
And nationally, fewer women are entering the profession, according to a new report by the Institute for Inclusion in the Legal Profession. The percentage of women at U.S. law schools dropped to 47 percent beginning in 2006, down from a peak of 49 percent in 2002.
Joel Stern, executive director of the National Association of Minority and Women Owned Law Firms, said at a national level, women attorneys are leaving established, large law firms at much higher percentages than male colleagues, and forming their own companies or becoming in-house attorneys at corporations. Retention of women and minority attorneys has become a national issue in the legal profession, he said.
The NAMWOLF association brings its 170 member firms together with Fortune 500 and other large corporations, which are actively seeking more women and minority legal representation.
National statistics reveal that a small percentage of women partners are equity partners, or ownership partners, in law firms. This, even though they are graduating from law schools in near-even numbers with male counterparts, he said.
While he does not know the Rhode Island partners, Stern said their formation of their own firm reflects a national trend. Business law, in particular, is a field in which women attorneys have to debunk some myths.
“One of the myths that you have to debunk is that women make great labor lawyers, or great family lawyers,” he said. “That’s a myth. A woman can come in and do a billion-dollar transaction as [well] as a male can. Women-owned law firms are increasing as they see the benefit of going off on their own.”
One of the biggest changes at five-attorney Cervenka Green Ducharme Antonelli is their ability to set flat-fee prices for services, and have more personal contact with the clients upfront. “We came from firms that have the model that most firms do, of hourly billing,” Cervenka said. “In a bigger firm, that’s generally the rule.”
The chief advantage in opting for more-flexible-payment models is, quite simply, more business, since many clients prefer it. There is no surprise billing.
Each attorney brings a different expertise to the firm.
Cervenka has a background in environmental and land-use law. Green has focused on business disputes in a variety of subjects, including employment, trade secrets and contracts.
Ducharme has a background in commercial real estate law, while Antonelli has focused on financial services.
Migliaccio worked closely with Cervenka at Partridge Snow & Hahn on environmental cases.
“We wanted to have different areas of expertise that we brought to the table,” Cervenka said. “We wanted to be able to serve business generally and be able to cover enough practice areas where we could handle most things that would come up in a business setting.”
