Don't Wait for Happiness: The "Rules" for Women Change

I'm old enough to tell young women lawyers that I am the ghost of Christmas Future -- I show you how things will be if you don't change your ways.

What does that mean when a middle-aged (yes I do intend to live to 110) woman who's happy with her second career says it.

Here's what it means.

First, by the time I had practiced law long enough to consider myself "entitled" to start a family, I was between husbands. Then I was starting practice at a new law firm. Then I was . . . well . . . too old to conceive. It overtakes you very quickly when you're billing 60 hours a week.

Second, I didn't want to develop my own book of business. I was working hard enough as it was. I couldn't develop, you know, Burlington Industries or BIC, the lighter people, or Hoffman-LaRoche or Lloyds of London, or the Foundation Health Care Plan or California Satellite Systems. You get the picture. And I wasn't going to find clients at Bar Association events and I was too tired to write articles for legal journals and had too little to say to give presentations to industry groups. (none of this was accurate)

My Unsolicited Advice from This End of a Legal Career?

1. Don't delay happiness


2. Don't leave your sweat equity in someone else's brick and mortar


3. If you don't start your own firm, start building your own book of business now.

What inpsired this post? Law.com's recent article Younger Female Lawyers Play by Their Own Rules, which tends to make my advice a day late and a dollar short. Women lawyers are doing it for themselves.

Even 20 years ago, few women managed to combine family and success at a big firm. But these middle-aged lawyers pushed to make it happen. They worked nonstop; they stayed up half the night with a brief in one hand and a crying baby in the other; and they succeeded, damn it.

Carol Honigberg, 52, a partner at Reed Smith, is a good example. She made partner at her previous firm 22 years ago while she was home on maternity leave. The firm, Thomas & Fiske, had no maternity leave policy at the time, so she persuaded the firm to write one and then took six months off. She says she suspects that making her a partner was the firm's way of ensuring she would come back.

That kind of reasoning made sense to her. "Once you've established your value to the firm," she says, you can create some flexibility in your work arrangement.
Thanks for all that forging, say the younger women. But we intend to do it a different way.

Take Leatham, who started her own firm after nearly eight years in the Bethesda, Md., office of Holland & Knight. She was miserable there, she says, because of the way big law firms are set up. She felt she was being forced to buy into a set of rules about succeeding that had been created by a generation that had no other choice.

The older women's thinking, she says, is that you pay some heavy dues first, and they buy you the leverage to do other things, to have a life. But Leatham -- with some prodding from her husband, who saw how unhappy she was -- realized she didn't want to follow that path. "I thought we need to be shifting the paradigm. You don't need to work, work, work and then have a family."

So Leatham, a zoning and land use attorney, left Holland & Knight and, with some colleagues and friends, formed her own firm, Stark, Meyers, Eisler & Leatham, based in Rockville, Md. Ironically, she says, she puts in more hours now than she did at Holland & Knight. "But I can control it in a way I didn't before. It's just empowering," she says.