Mommy Law: Watch Those Corners!

“I arrived exactly on time and went inside.  Within minutes, a nanny came running in as another nanny went running out.  It was probably time for a shift change.  I entered the house and headed to the music room.  Three of the daughters came bounding in to show me their guinea pig, and I could hear the youngest daughter singing upstairs.  Since the parents didn't come to greet me, I knew they were still at work.  I began the piano lessons as usual.”

This was my life before law school.  I ran a piano studio.  I taught oodles of lessons each week, mostly from my home studio.  Occasionally I also played "ambassador of music" and travelled to my students’ homes to teach on their pianos.  In the process I came into contact with dozens of different families.  I watched, listened, and learned as they struggled with the same issues of balancing that I struggle with today.

With four girls, two ambitious parents, and guinea pigs, the family I just described was one of the busiest.  Some weeks when I arrived for our regular appointment the family wouldn't even be there.  Usually this meant that they had made other plans and forgotten to tell me.  This family was happy.  The children were well taken care of.  Both parents had ambitious careers.  In order for all of these things to happen, they were comfortable cutting corners on some of the details of home life.  And sometimes things fell through the cracks.

Forget the Linen Closet: Balancing Family with Your Legal Career

Many women entering the legal profession from Generations X and Y are pioneers in their families: the first to go to college, the first to go to graduate school, the first to do both of these and raise a family.

While we may feel like we're the first to struggle with balancing a legal career and a family, it's helpful to look around and realize that scores of strong women have blazed the trail and have done the hardest work of mapping the territory so that we would have a well-worn path to make our journeys a little easier.  

Choose Your Heroes Wisely... 

My mother once told me about a commercial from the 80's that featured a beautiful woman who enters her house carrying a briefcase and wearing a tailored suit.  She proceeds to put down her briefcase, let down her hair, step into the kitchen and prepare an amazing gourmet meal for her family. The tagline was, "I can bring home the bacon and cook it, too."

Choosing a fantasy or having some vague, idealized version of yourself as your hero can spell trouble and stress, because you will constantly be falling short of your own expectations - or those that you feel others have placed on you.     

Look for a Real Hero...   

"Opt Out" or Pushed Out: Are Women Choosing to Leave the Legal Profession?

In our first major conference since we helped launch Ms. JD, Yale Law Women is excited to announce our spring conference, "Opt Out" or Pushed Out: Are Women Choosing to Leave the Legal Profession?. The conference will be held March 27-28 in New Haven, CT. We would like to invite Ms. JD readers personally.

We invite you to participate in this thought-provoking and timely discussion of the institutional and social forces behind what some have called the "opting out" of female professionals.

Family vs. Law School

OK, I have to somehow vent this stress I've been carrying around for the last several weeks.  I work full time and go to law school at night.  The stress of law school is enough by itself, but with family pressure, I'm feeling a little crushed.

My husband is going to be away for a few hours this weekend. I reminded him that I have a Legal Writing assignment due next week, and I got a dirty look.  It's the same attitude I got when I came home last night, said hello to everyone, and started reading.  I figured I could get at least a little reading done before dinner.  My husband acted like a child.  So do I not spend time with my family, and go to class poorly prepared, or do I prepare for class, and have my family give me the guilt trip?

Demanding Balance by Rejecting the Blackberry?

For 3 years the New York State Bar Association's Special Committee on Balanced Lives in the Law has been holding forums and collecting data on their members' work lives, expectations, and quality of life - essentially their ability to be anywhere but the office on the weekends. As noted on the front page of the New York Law Journal, the resulting report makes some interesting observations:

• Attorneys feel they have less time for volunteer and pro bono work than earlier generations
• Increased demands of child rearing compound the strain put on families with no primary care giver
• Female attorneys have expressed their expectations of maintaining personal commitments outside the office to a greater extent than men have - those who don't work towards greater flexibility in traditionally demanding work environments opt for practice areas with greater leeway
• Flex-time is offered as a reward to the most desirable associates to increase retention
• New communications technologies have increased pressure on attorneys' personal time
• Collegiality within the profession and between lawyers and their clients is on the wane

The report also outlines best practices for implementing more flexible time requirements and recommends that law schools engage students in discussions about work-life so that their expectations for their workplace commitments are realistic and so that they can career plan accordingly.

Of all these observations the one I've been thinking about all day is that new telecommunications technologies (i.e. Blackberries) have exacerbated the imbalance between legal career and personal life. Constant vigilance of a Blackberry inherently disrupts every conversation and activity because you are interrupted not just with urgent emails but with every email - the automatically generated ones, the ones that can wait until Monday, the ones on which you were just cc'ed and to which no response will ever be required.

I was with a couple friends this weekend who kept their blackberries out throughout our time together - if a partner or client needed them they wanted to be sure not to miss the email. Makes sense to me. Only for all the checking of the Blackberries none of these folks ever had to leave or cut short our time together to work. Still they were constantly distracted by the continual flow of info to their PDAs.

Another friend has refused her Blackberry - she figures if it's that important then someone will call her.

Childcare = Superwoman's Big Secret

I stumbled on a great little article about a lawyer mom who is “keep[ing] the scales in balance”, posted on The Chicago Tribune. It’s a nice read except for one glaring omission: any mention of childcare arrangements. The focus of the article is a full-time patent lawyer, Sharon Hwang, who gives credit to her husband, her sister, her parents, and her firm for helping her keep her life balanced.

Mommie knows best?

When we found out we were pregnant approximately one month after we were married and about four months before my husband was set to start his MBA in a different city than my job was located, I knew life would never be the same.

A shift in focus from the "opt-out" to the "opt-in"

Both Lawjobs.com (via law.com) and NYLawyer.com have recently reported new programs at Hastings and Pace University which are designed to bridge the gap and ease re-entry into the legal market for professionals who have taken a year or more off of work.

Not surprisingly, most of the individuals enrolling in such programs are women who have taken time off to have/raise kids.

The Motherhood Experiment

Today's New York Times featured an interesting article discussing the problem of low fertility rates in several developed countries. It touches on an issue important to many of us: achieving work-life balance and juggling motherhood with a career. While it's no secret that women's employment is one of several key factors to declining birth rates in the developed countries, what is interesting is its discussion of efforts by a few of these countries (mostly Scandinavian) to increase their birthrates by making it easier for women to successfully manage the balancing act.

Sure, you passed the bar, but are you relationship material?

Valentine’s Day has already passed, and this is therefore coming late, but I was interested in this post two weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog entitled “Lawyers in Love” (this was the second part of a two-part series; the first was the lyrics of a 1983 song by Jackson Browne, which I will spare you).

A lot of the more “life” posts at this blog and others are frequently externally oriented, by which I mean they are focused outward (towards employers, towards institutions, towards spouses or significant others) with their observations and comments. I don’t mean to criticize or call a halt to this, since I think many of these targets have certainly been giving women less than a helping hand for a while.