This IBA Showcase session brought together a panel of top female leaders to discuss what qualities are needed, what female leadership brings to a firm and how diverse voices benefit everyone.

Almudena Arpón de Mendívil, IBA President: This showcase is really rating top on my Paris priorities. What we will be doing is discussing the new female leadership of law firms. We want to provide, with inspiration for both men and for women, the qualities that female leaders bring to the table. We want to consider whether those qualities have a different flavour to the traditional male leadership traits, whether we should even treat it separately and whether those qualities differ. We need to make female leadership really sustainable.

Franklin Vrede, INSEAD business school, Fontainebleau; Showcase moderator (FV): One of the key questions we’re asking is: are you a leader of today or are you a leader of tomorrow? This depends on whether you can deal with all the challenges that we’re facing right now. And these are exponential challenges, not just the political challenges, the conflicts between countries, the economic challenges. We’re also seeing generational challenges; millennials, Gen Z coming in, so organisations are changing. Your leadership responsibilities are changing in terms of being less about control, but responsibility and making things happen. It means we’re entering into a different reality, especially in law firms. We need different leadership and it seems that women have an advantage there because the new type of leadership we’re looking for is ‘feminine’ leadership. It’s not necessarily female leadership. It’s something that both male and female leaders in law firms could benefit from.

Read more at: https://www.ibanet.org/IBA-Showcase-The-new-female-leadership-of-law-firms