When Jane Dalton became a summer associate at Duane Morris in 1970, she was seven months pregnant and there were no other women lawyers in the firm.

For many other women attorneys of her generation, the story might not have ended with Dalton spending the next 42 years at the firm.

But Duane Morris was different, said Dalton, who became the first female partner at the firm, which now has more than 200 attorneys in Pennsylvania.

When Dalton was interviewing for summer associate positions as a University of Pennsylvania Law School student, she was asked if she was using birth control and if she was planning on having children. "The nice thing was Duane Morris didn't ask any questions" like that, Dalton said.

And when Dalton started the summer expecting a child, "I came in feeling like Hester Prynne," but David Sykes, the head of the firm's hiring program at the time, was expecting a child himself with his wife and he helped persuade the rest of the firm, Dalton said.

Dalton sat down with The Legal to recount her experience as one of the women attorneys who has been a trailblazer in the Philadelphia legal community on the occasion of receiving the Philadelphia Bar Association's Sandra Day O'Connor Award. The award, named after the first female U.S. Supreme Court justice, is given to a female attorney who is accomplished in her practice, advocates for the equal treatment of women in the profession and mentors other women in the profession.

When Dalton joined the firm, she worked with Henry Reath, who Dalton said was a mentor to her.

For Reath, it "didn't matter whether you were a man, woman, green, blue or purple. What mattered was getting the work done," Dalton said.

"My mentors were all men for the most part. They were the ones who were here," Dalton said.

Phyllis Beck, a former state Superior Court judge who was the second woman to work at Duane Morris, recalled that when the firm had meetings at the Union League, the league had a rule that women were not permitted to enter the front door and they had to enter through a side entrance. Judge Marjorie Rendell of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and Judge Gene E.K. Pratter of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania were the third and fourth women to join the firm.

"I complained first and they thought it was a cute concern," Beck said. "When we were three women complaining, Duane Morris moved its firm lunches from the Union League to the Racquet Club."

"I thought she was just an excellent, excellent attorney," Beck said of Dalton. "Henry Reath and she made an excellent pairing."

Dalton said that, despite the progress of women in the profession, it is discouraging that the number of women equity partners has remained static over the last 10 years.

Dalton attributes the static state of women in the profession to, as a "gross generalization," women tending to be less self-promoting and having more responsibilities at home, in addition to the difference in what it takes to become partner from what it took when she became partner.

There was less expectation that you had to develop your own book of business, Dalton said.

"Sometimes women say it's just not worth it," Dalton said. "I don't want to be like Jane. I don't have to go my own route."

Amy Wilkinson, who is now the associate executive director of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity Enforcement for the Baltimore Housing Authority, said that Dalton was a great mentor for her when she worked at Duane Morris from 1985 until 1996.

"I remember her telling me early on in my career, 'You're not a yeller or screamer but you need to learn how to be assertive in a way that is comfortable for you' ... I believe there's a lot of people who would say I'm good at being assertive" without being a yeller or screamer, Wilkinson said.

Wilkinson said she second-chaired a lot of cases that Dalton first-chaired.

One time, when Wilkinson was trying a case on her own, a plaintiff testified she was lured into working for the firm's client, Wilkinson said. The client remembered that the plaintiff had given a newspaper interview in which she stated she was looking forward to working for the firm's client, and Dalton "step-by-step told me how to set up" the article for fodder for cross-examination, Wilkinson said. The case was won on appeal, she said.

Dalton is a good litigator because she never got frazzled by clients unhappy to be fighting litigation, she is good at strategy and she could anticipate what position would be taken by the other side, Wilkinson said.

Dalton started in Duane Morris' litigation group, then moved to Duane Morris' administrative law department, focusing on employment litigation. Now Dalton is in a separate employment section.

When Dalton started with the firm working on commercial litigation, including class actions, there were many employee class actions filed in the early 1970s on the theory that race discrimination and gender discrimination could be prosecuted on a classwide basis, Dalton said.

Dalton's first job was to work on motions objecting to class certification. One class action involved Swarthmore College, and because of that work Dalton ended up doing a lot of other work for colleges and universities, she said. She also has done work in the arena of insurance and workers' compensation.

When the role of gender was challenged in automobile insurance rate-making, because insurance policies for young men had higher premiums than insurance policies for young women, Dalton spent 10 years working on that issue in various iterations before the Pennsylvania Department of Insurance.

Dalton said that when a class action was filed by men saying they wanted the portion of their premiums back, "we were able to successfully defend that."

Dalton, who is originally from Cleveland, attended Smith College for her undergraduate education.

Dalton was chancellor of the bar association in 2007.

Dalton is in the process of retiring, but she plans to stay involved in issues involving female attorneys in the profession, including co-chairing the Pennsylvania Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession.

Even though Dalton's four children are grown and raising their own families, Dalton is still thinking about work-life balance as a grandmother.

Dalton has several grandchildren and two more on the way. She said she doesn't want her grandchildren to say, "'Nana was really nice but she was always working.'"

Reprinted with permission from The Legal Intelligencer, © ALM Media Properties LLC. All rights reserved.