Seems like ages ago that I worked at a large firm where I earned an impressive salary serving prestigious clients. Although time has flown by, it’s only been six years since I made the decision to walk away from my plush law firm job to focus on my three children. I would like to say the decision was a tough one, but it was not. It was an easy one to make since I wanted some sort of work/life balance.
When I resigned, I couldn’t hope to supplement my lack of income with paid blogging gigs as I had yet to enter the world of social media. I left on a prayer that we would not run out of money before I (eventually) re-entered the work force.
I left the firm because I was tired of the numbers game. The more I worked, the more I billed. The higher my billable number, the more “influence” I had over my fellow young attorneys. It was like my firm Klout score. High numbers usually meant that an associate received a lot of work from partners. The more work an associate did, the more impressed the senior partners would be. At my firm, if an associate reached a certain number of hours above his or her minimum requirement, my firm would distribute an email to the entire firm congratulating those associates that surpassed the billing goals for the previous month. Those numbers, and that email, gave you Klout.
If your numbers were below the minimum, two assumptions would be made about you. Either you were not a hard worker or the senior partners didn’t want to assign you cases to work on because your work wasn’t good. To avoid the slightest appearance of either of these two situations we often worked 60-80 hour weeks. With those demands, there was no such thing as taking time off to tend to a sick child or go to the school field trip. There also wasn’t any time to train for half-marathons, write about my life as a working mom, or practice yoga. Any extra time I had was used to focus on my two year old son and husband that were always at home – without me.
I remember wanting a second child but being afraid of what my work/life schedule would look like as a lawyer mom of two. My husband and I decided to go for our second anyway and when it happened I was quietly panicking about returning to work after my maternity leave. I was already rushing to get home from work before my two year old went to bed at 7:30 pm and there were many nights where I didn’t get home on time. The plan in place was to hire a nanny when the baby was born. After all, I was making enough money to afford one.
I went into labor six weeks early and ended up having to take almost five months maternity leave due to health complications of my own and my daughter’s. I returned to the firm with my breast pump in hand and a determined focus to balance work and life. I remember finding an article that advocated the pros of law firms that adopted a flexible schedule for their working moms. The article summarized a “new trend” that several large firms throughout the country were adopting. The options offered by those firms varied but usually included anything from a flexible schedule to reduced hourly requirements or sharing case loads with other attorneys. My firm had a few working moms in senior positions but there was no such thing as staying home two days a week to work. That wasn’t going to deter me from advocating for it. I gave that article to the managing partner at my firm in hopes that he would be receptive to my next request – a “slight” adjustment to my billable hours for the year so that I could have more time at home but still practice law.
My request wasn’t shot down, per se. Instead I was told that the firm would be “understanding” of my hours if I didn’t meet my yearly goal. Back then, I considered this a small victory at my quest of being a working mom. The idea of working even a 9 to 5 schedule seemed fabulous.
I never had a chance to request a flexible schedule because a month after I returned from my extended maternity leave, I found out I was pregnant with number three. At my initial ob/GYN visit my doctor informed me that I would be on full bedrest around my 16th week. He also told me that I was already nine weeks pregnant.
I went on bedrest already knowing that I would not return to work. I could not fathom the idea of balancing three small children and an “understanding” between myself and the firm about my hours. After my short-term disability ran out I gave the firm my resignation.
Now six years later, I wonder what life would have been like for me if I would have returned to the firm. Would I have been successful on a reduced hour schedule? Statistics show that I would. Today, more firms are offering support to their working moms so that they can still work their way up the career ladder while achieving a balance between work and home. Yesterday, the National Association for Female Executives (NAFE) and Flex-Time Lawyers announced the 2011 50 Best Law Firms for Women. All of the firms identified in the top 50 have written reduced hour policies for their moms, with 44% having written full-time flex-time policies and 78% offering full-time telecommuting.
As a former litigator and mom of three, it’s great to see the number of large national firms adopting a flexible and supporting environment for their working moms. The challenges I faced when I decided to leave my firm seem to have dicipitated for some women. I eventually returned to the work force not as a practicing attorney, but as a law professor that gets summers off, winter and spring breaks, and one to two days a week to work from home. Over the years, I found myself mentoring some of my female law students on how to achieve work/life balance as a law student and eventually a practicing attorney. Initially, I struggled on how to accurately guide them without scaring them away from the profession. Today, I feel like I have more answers for them. I can point them to lists and articles like the Top 50 and give them new hope on the possibilities. They can go into the profession not feeling defeated before they start to track their first month of billing.
My hat goes off to those firms offering flexibility and support for their female attorneys. Who knows, maybe one day I will find myself back in a law firm achieving work/life balance.
* Source – Working Mother.com and NAFE.
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