Photo: Prostock-studio/Shutterstock

Whether, when and how to balance starting a family with advancing a career in the legal profession are difficult questions attorneys—especially women attorneys—have wrestled with for decades. And while it's clear there are no one-size-fits-all answers, there is a common view among many women who have juggled building their careers with building their families: It's very difficult to do without a flexible work environment—and no one should have to.

“You are going to lose such a vital and vibrant part of your workforce,” said Ashley Senary Dahlberg, a mother of two young children and a commercial litigation senior associate in the San Antonio office of an Am Law 50 law firm. (She asked that the firm's name not be used in this article.)

Ironically, said Dahlberg, women who leave firms because the demands of raising kids and running a Big Law practice become untenable often go in-house—becoming lost business opportunities for the inflexible firms they left.

Even those attorneys who started their careers and their families well before “work-life balance” became a concept every firm claimed to care about said they benefited greatly from working for employers who allowed some measure of flexibility for parents.

Michelle Schaap, New Jersey Women Lawyers Association president and a partner at Chiesa Shahinian & Giantomasi in West Orange, N.J., had her first child while living in Tokyo, where she and her husband had moved in the late 1980s because of a work opportunity for him. She practiced with a predecessor firm of Mori Hamada & Matsumoto, and after leaving work for a time to have her first son, went back to work at the firm part time.

“They put a fax machine in my house, which they did not abuse,” and paid her 80% of her salary, plus bonuses. “It was truly extraordinary,” she said.

A Dedicated Employee in Spades

Schaap had her second child after the family had moved back to the United States, while she was in-house counsel with Toys “R” Us. She was out of work for two months. First she returned to work two days a week for four months, and then returned full time. Schaap said she wanted to work with management on the arrangement because a prior maternity leave arrangement with a different lawyer had ended badly.

“I was committed to make it work … because I wanted other people to be able to do what I did,” Schaap said.

While she readily admits her “own experience was not typical,” Schaap said that, today, “the firms that are smart realize that if you give an accommodation, you're going to get back from a dedicated employee in spades.”

The struggle to reconcile child-rearing with rainmaking is, of course, not unique to female lawyers. But women may still be more likely to face questions about their dedication to the practice of law when they start families.

“I think women still are getting that attitude,” Schaap said. “It's still out there.”

The only way to combat that perception, several attorney-moms said, is to demonstrate through action that great parenting and great lawyering don't have to be mutually exclusive concepts.

And to do that, they said, you need to figure out a system that works for you.

Kathleen Wilkinson, a mother of three who recalled being pregnant with her first child while under consideration for equity partnership at Wilson Elser in Philadelphia, which she eventually earned, described her life as “a constant balance of children, outside activities and work.”

She advised young lawyers to educate themselves on their employers' and prospective employers' policies and accommodations for working parents.

“Hopefully you're aware of what the policies are. Do they have flex time? Part time? Am I allowed to work from home from time to time?” said Wilkinson, who is co-vice chair of the Pennsylvania Bar Association's quality of life/balance committee.

Negotiating for Balance

Indeed, more and more women are asking about—and in some cases demanding—that type of flexibility.

“When I was negotiating with my current firm to come to work, one of my key requests—one of the things I really negotiated hard for—was the ability to work remotely without judgment,” said Ashley Menage, a mother of one and an associate at Walker Wilcox Matousek in Houston whose practice focuses on insurance defense.

Menage also said that when she was in law school and even when she was a young associate, she constantly sought advice from women defense litigators, and particularly those with children, to get a sense of how they managed their time and responsibilities.

Similarly, Amanda Romfh Jesteadt, an associate who started at Carlton Fields in West Palm Beach, Fla., as a summer associate in 2008, said that while she was in law school, she ”was looking at the policies of firms and what they would do” to allow her to advance in the legal profession and be a mother.

As a commercial litigation associate, Jesteadt, whose children are 4 and 6, works an alternative schedule with a 75 percent workload and stays on a partner track. She takes advantage of work-from-home and other remote work options.

“It's critical for my particular brand of work-life balance,” Jesteadt said.

But Lara Bach, a senior associate in Weil, Gotshal & Manges' complex commercial litigation practice in Miami, said that even with helpful employment policies, she has had to be assertive about achieving balance.

“I'm lucky that I've set up a system—and I encourage everyone to do this—set up boundaries,” Bach said. “If you don't set those boundaries early, it's very hard to adjust them.”

She makes sure to be home for family dinners, and “everybody knows that I'm back online at 10 p.m.,” she said. “I frequently work until midnight or later on an alternative schedule that works for me.”

While she praised her own firm's policies, Bach said she still sees room for improvement at law firms overall.

“What firms need to be doing is look at their books and make sure they have paid parental leave,” she said. “No matter how small the firm is, we should be leaders in that and not lag behind.”

Can You Do It All?

But there is another school of thought that says no amount of flexibility, understanding or policymaking on the part of employers will make it possible to adequately juggle the dueling demands of parenthood and the partnership track.

“People will tell you all kinds of [work-life] balance things,” but goals and realities are frequently at odds, said Kelly S. Crawford of Riker Danzig Scherer Hyland & Perretti in Morristown, New Jersey, noting attorneys who left the practice to have children and then returned to different practice areas, or became contract lawyers.

“You can't do it all. People say you can, but you can't,” she said. “I personally might have had a much bigger family,” added Crawford, who has one college-age daughter.

In March, the New York Law Journal reported on a growing trend of young women attorneys freezing their eggs and embryos so that they can focus their full attention on their careers without having to give up the possibility of motherhood.

Elizabeth Brown, a 29-year-old associate at Rosenberg & Estis in New York, told the Law Journal that she and two of her best friends are seriously considering freezing their eggs in the next few years if they're still single.

The reason? She loves her job and doesn't want to tear herself away from it.

“Knowing that you can freeze your eggs, it takes so much of the pressure off,” she said.

A Band-Aid?

But others expressed concern about the ramifications for the legal profession if young women lawyers were to simply stop seeking out a work-life balance altogether.

Cynthia Thomas Calvert, senior adviser for Family Responsibilities Discrimination at The Center for WorkLife Law at University of California, Hastings College of the Law, said relying on egg and embryo freezing as a method of time management is “a Band-Aid” for a more serious problem in the legal profession.

“If it catches on and becomes the solution to the long-hours culture it gives the law firms a pass. It allows them to take their foot off the gas and not find a solution that helps men and women find balance. This might really be a step backward if it takes some urgency out of those issues.” she said.

And several women said they consider their own personal battles for balance to be part of a larger fight to advance the cause of working mothers across the legal industry.

“People … have asked me, 'Well if it's so hard, why don't you just quit? Why don't you just go do something easier?” Dahlberg said. “Well, I feel like it is essential that women stay in these jobs and make people understand that there are many different ways to practice law. And they're all extremely valuable.”

Mark Bauer, Susan DeSantis, David Gialanella and Catherine Wilson contributed to this article.