Digital Extra

By TOM MOONEY
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

Linda Buffardi is known by peers as a "rainmaker," a lawyer who brings in the clients, bills a lot of hours, makes a ton of money.

That she is a woman seems far less noteworthy than it once was.

Of the 4,560 lawyers in Rhode Island today, nearly 1,100 are women, according to the Rhode Island Bar Association, and the number is steadily rising.

Where once women lawyers concentrated in family law, today they flourish in every field: corporate, health care, constitutional, criminal and - Buffardi's specialty - appellate law.

"I think these are very good times to be a woman lawyer," says Buffardi, 44, who started her own Providence practice three years ago. "There are quite a number of us now who have enough years under our belts to have some expertise."

And to make good money.

Probably as much as their male counterparts, say several lawyers.

Unlike other professions, in which census figures show that Rhode Island women still earn about a third less than Rhode Island men, several women say that as lawyers they are on an equal footing with men.

Not because their male counterparts are any less discriminatory than in the past - studies have shown that gender bias is alive and well in Rhode Island's court system - but because of the nature of the business.

If you bring money into a law firm, you get respect.

"When you produce the work, you have a lot more power, and you have a lot more chances of making a lot of money," says Superior Court Judge Netti Vogel, 48, the first Rhode Island lawyer ever to try a case in a maternity dress. "Then it doesn't matter if you are a man or a woman."

It sure used to.

In 1920, when Ada Sawyer petitioned to become Rhode Island's first woman lawyer, the state Board of Bar Examiners questioned whether she qualified as a "person" eligible to take the examination.

"After consideration," wrote Supreme Court Justice William H. Sweetland, "we are of the opinion that the word 'person' contained in the rules regulating the admission of attorneys and counselors should be construed to include a woman as well as a man."

With that epiphany, Sawyer went on to maintain an active practice for 63 years, until 1983. She died two years later, at 1985.

She was, however, an exception. While the court's 1920 decision opened the door, many women's hopes of becoming lawyers crashed with the Great Depression. It would be a half-century before women began attending law schools in great numbers.

When they did, in the early 1970s, they met plenty of opposition, says Ronald Chester, a professor at the New England School of Law, in Boston, and author of Unequal Access: Women Lawyers in a Changing America (1985). Such opposition lingers on.

"The men from the old school," says Chester, "are afraid the women are going to go off and have a family, and not give their full commitment to the law firm."

When Judge Vogel first joined a firm, in 1975, she was one of two female junior associates. They noticed that all the cases were being assigned to two male associates.

When they asked why, the firm's partner in charge of assigning cases "expressed a concern the clients might react badly if they felt a woman was handling their cases as lead counsel." It wasn't until a senior managing partner stepped in and began assigning cases equally, says Vogel, that she received her share.

Vogel, who became a judge in 1994, says she worked hard to develop a reputation as a trial lawyer - not a woman trial lawyer - doing what it took to win.

Like the time during a trial when pregnancy had swollen her ring finger, making it impossible to wear her wedding band. A senior partner, worried that she might convey a wrong message to the jury, "suggested I go down to Woolworth's and buy a gold ring."

"I considered that suggestion as being a valid one," Vogel said.

Beverly Glenn Long, 73, was one of Rhode Island's pioneers in breaking into the male-dominated lawyers' club.

Long, who passed the Rhode Island Bar in 1951 and went on to become the first woman president of the state bar association, says she wasn't trying to trailblaze. Like Vogel, she says she just wanted to be a lawyer.

"If I screamed about every off-color joke that was perpetrated in my presence," says Long, she would never have gotten anything done. "I didn't consider it an attack against me. I just thought people didn't have any manners. The hell with them - I ignored it. I was focused on being a good lawyer."

For that reason, Long says, she chose not to join the Rhode Island Women's Bar Association, a networking and social group. "I'm not a woman lawyer," she says; "I'm a lawyer who is a woman, and I'm a lawyer first."

Gender bias in R.I.

Although Long says she was never a victim of sexism, a 1987 report on female court employees found gender bias to be a "serious problem" in Rhode Island's courtrooms.

The in-house study, conducted by Superior Court Judge Corinne P. Grande, found that more than 70 percent of the women lawyers polled had been the object of unwanted sexual comments or jokes, or condescendingly referred to as "honey" or "dearie" by other lawyers and even judges. About a third felt that such treatment had hurt the outcome of cases.

At the time, women made up about 14 percent of the bar. Today they represent nearly 25 percent.

In the last five years, as many women as men have taken the lawyer's exam, reports the state Board of Bar Examiners. At Suffolk University Law School, in Boston, a popular institution for Rhode Island law students, four out of the last five classes have had more women than men.

With the influx of women lawyers and a society more sensitive to sexism, there seem to be fewer complaints.

In a 1993 follow-up to the 1987 report, the overwhelming majority of women lawyers and judges polled said they believed that far less gender bias existed.

"In the early days," says Susan Leach DeBlasio, 47, a corporate lawyer with Tillinghast, Licht & Semonoff, "people weren't used to dealing with women on that level. . . . Today there is a much more willing acceptance of them as capable, dedicated attorneys. I think in most firms women are on an equal footing with men."

That doesn't mean the glass ceiling doesn't exist for some women lawyers.

Yet, says Linda Buffardi, the advances Rhode Island women lawyers have made in the last 25 years have allowed them to focus more on earning a living and less on their gender.

"The change is it's just not unusual anymore to see women lawyers."

More Women in R.I. history