Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP has been named the Ohio Women’s Bar Association’s (OWBA) 2019 Family Friendly Award recipient. Announced at the OWBA’s Annual Meeting, the award was accepted on the firm’s behalf by Taft Columbus partner-in-charge David Butler and Taft attorneys Carolyn Davis, Rosina Caponi, Janica Pierce Tucker and Devin Spencer.

The Family Friendly Award, established by the OWBA in 2003, is given each year to a legal employer who demonstrates a commitment to work-life balance and promoting a family-friendly workplace for lawyers in Ohio. “Taft has made great strides in acknowledging barriers for women and working parents in the legal field, from our adoption of a one-class partnership to providing paid benefits geared towards improving work-life balance for parents,” says Taft’s Chief Human Resources Officer Pam Krivda. “We’re honored to receive this recognition from the OWBA and are committed to keeping this momentum going by actively seeking ways to enhance our initiatives and firm’s culture to support women and parents in the workplace.”

With five offices and 240 lawyers throughout Ohio, Taft has introduced significant initiatives over the past several years to promote a family-friendly workplace. These include adopting a one-class partnership structure, creating Taft’s Gender Advancement Committee, providing lawyers with family-centered paid benefits such as a 16-week paid parental leave, introducing implicit bias training programs and hosting an annual Women’s Symposium to recognize Taft’s trailblazers and to elevate leadership opportunities for female lawyers. New benefits that have been introduced in the past year alone include Milk Stork, a service that provides overnight breast milk delivery for working mothers, and Care@Work, an emergency family care service.

Taft’s one-class partnership structure and Gender Advancement Committee initiatives have resulted in significant increases of women in leadership roles at the firm. The one-class partnership structure—adopted to provide more leadership opportunities for women, lawyers of color and younger attorneys at Taft—has led to greater transparency and more inclusion at the firm, with the percentage of female equity partners at Taft nearly doubling from 2017 to 2019. As of 2019, women comprise 50% of Taft’s executive committee, 45% of Taft’s compensation committee and 37% of Taft’s practice chair or co-chair positions.

The OWBA’s Family Friendly Award marks Taft’s second recognition for its gender advancement strides in just over six months. In November 2018, Taft was ranked one of the top 10 law firms in the “Inclusion Blueprint” survey conducted by Diversity Lab, which assesses workplace policies to advance women in leadership positions.