Handing Over the Lead Chair: Why First-Chair Opportunities Still Bypass Women Litigators

The Numbers Behind the Podium

Every year, the American Bar Association and allied researchers update a figure that has barely moved in a decade: women account for a small minority of lead counsel roles in civil jury trials, despite representing nearly 40 percent of practicing lawyers and an equal share of entering associates. In some federal districts, the percentage of trials with a woman as first chair falls into the single digits.

The gap is not explained by pipeline. Women litigators populate trial teams in abundance. What they lack is access to the deciding moment — the opportunity to stand before a jury and make the record that defines a trial lawyer's career.

The 'Tryout' Bottleneck

Becoming first chair requires a first-chair record, and building a first-chair record requires someone to hand you the chair. This circularity is the quiet engine of underrepresentation. Senior trial partners, often unconsciously, assign lead roles to lawyers who resemble the ones who succeeded before them. Clients, asked to approve lead counsel, default to familiar names. The 'tryout' — the mid-level witness examination, the solo motion argument, the second chair on a smaller trial — gets distributed unevenly, and the disparity compounds at every rung.

Women litigators who have broken through describe the pattern with striking consistency. One Texas commercial litigator recalled being offered 'every supporting role on the team' for six years before insisting, with a partner's eventual backing, on taking the lead deposition in a nine-figure dispute. That deposition became the foundation of her trial practice.

Confidence Is Not the Deficit

A persistent myth holds that women avoid trial work because they lack confidence or appetite for the courtroom. The research and the anecdotal record say otherwise. Surveys of women litigators repeatedly find high levels of interest in trial work and frustration at its scarcity. What the data does show is the corrosive effect of perceived authority: studies of juror perception find that assertive behavior is read differently depending on the lawyer's gender, a dynamic that punishes women for the very advocacy style the courtroom rewards in men.

The answer to that dynamic is not for women to soften. It is for firms to normalize their presence in the lead chair until the perception itself becomes an artifact.

What Firms Can Actually Do

Closing the gap requires structural intervention, not encouragement. Four practices stand out:

• Mandate rotation of trial roles. Require that examination assignments, opening statements, and closing arguments rotate across team members, with gender balance tracked and reported to firm leadership.
• Make first-chair succession explicit. On every matter, name the lawyer being developed toward first chair and the milestones that will get her there.
• Prepare clients for the ask. Partners should present women lawyers as lead counsel from the pitch stage, not after the client relationship is locked in.
• Sponsor, don't just mentor. A mentor offers advice; a sponsor spends capital putting a woman's name forward when the trial assignment list is drafted.

The Case for Urgency

Trial experience is career-defining capital in litigation. Every year the first-chair gap persists, firms lose the return on their investment in women litigators, and clients lose access to the deepest possible talent pool. The chair is not earned in the courtroom alone. It is given in a partner's office months earlier — which means the fix is entirely within firms' control.