A bit of hope is coming to the business travel industry through the clouds of stringent airport security and the sky-high costs of corporate jets.

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a mini-jet.

With interiors the size of minivans, itsy-bitsy planes are taking off. The Washington Post reported that Albuquerque-based Eclipse Aviation Corp., the first company to provide the jets for customers, had taken 2,500 orders.

The company is tapping businesses' need for a more cost-effective and efficient means of air travel. The so-called "air-taxi" industry that's fueled by mini-jets allows business travelers to avoid long waits in hub airports. Instead, they can jet from one small airport to another.

Compared with corporate jet airfare, which can cost each passenger about $10 a mile, air taxiing is affordable. A one-way, 400-mile journey can cost as little as $1 a mile. The typical plane carries a pilot, plus five to seven passengers. Depending on the load, they can go between 900 and 1,400 miles and travel at about 425 mph.

Marion C. Blakey, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, said she expects as many as 5,000 little jets to be in the air by 2017.

"This is a market that shows a lot of promise," Blakey said.

Helen Reddy, who more than three decades ago sang about women roaring in "numbers to big too ignore," might be surprised at what she'd see in today's law firms.

In August, the New York Times cited statistics from the National Association for Law Placement showing that the percentage of female partners in firms has grown only 4 percent in a decade, from 13 percent in 1995 to 17 percent in 2005.

Though firms now realize that retaining women amounts to good business practice, the trouble is finding ways to keep them. Most women don't benefit from the mentoring or networking that often happens from one male to another in firms, the Times reports. Women also have a different style of self-promotion than men, who tend to do so aggressively.

That's without mentioning the challenge of finding time for family while keeping up billable hours, an increasingly relevant issue for men in the profession, too.

The good news is that conditions in the legal realm have improved for women since the 1970s. And if law firms can take cues from the accounting firms who've retained women by offering such incentives as flexible schedules and leadership development, there's hope for more progress.

Now there's something to sing about.

Female minority lawyers thinking of teeing off with their white male colleagues should think again.

An ABA report released at the Annual Meeting in August showed that law firms neglect their women of color when it comes to networking. The study, "Visible Invisibility: Women of Color in Law Firms," reported that almost two-thirds of women in law firms feel excluded from events like golf outings or post-work drinks. Questionnaires for the survey were sent to about 1,300 lawyers of both sexes, and about 920 participated.

The inferior treatment takes place inside the office, too. The report showed that minority women often receive assignments such as reviewing briefs, which makes it harder for them to meet clients and build billable hours. While 44 percent of minority women in the study said they were denied desirable assignments, only 2 percent of men had the same complaint.

In some cases, the problem isn't racism but a lack of common ground among the women of color and the predominantly white male partners and senior lawyers.

But that doesn't seem to be making a difference to the women affected. The National Association of Law Placement's 2005 study reported that 81 percent of minority women leave their associate positions within the first five years they're hired. That's up from 75 percent in the late 1990s.

If those rates keep up, golf courses won't be the only place where white male lawyers find themselves playing alone.

We don't typically think of shady behavior and success as complementary. But what happens when the boss asks you to carry out a task that's, well, illegal?

Before you refuse (and potentially jeopardize your job), make sure you understand the request. About 10 percent of employees who initially thought a task corrupt later deemed it ethical, Money magazine reports. Discuss the situation with your boss or a trustworthy co-worker, then reassess.

If your instinct was on-target, keep the dialogue with your superior going. Offer alternatives for getting the job done. Voice concerns diplomatically. If that doesn't work, take it to your boss' boss, or someone in human resources.

Above all, keep it clean. The unemployment line may be long, but the road to perdition is longer.