Legal News

Not Your Mother?s Legal Practice

By Peter Lattman

A Legal Times story yesterday addressed the alleged perception gap between older and younger women lawyers. Younger women, while they respect the paths forged by the pioneering senior women lawyers, are taking a different route. The older lawyers “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,” says the story. And once they established their value to the firm, they created more flexibility.

The story features a younger generation who are striving for work-life balance from the start. Like Erin Leatham (pictured), who says she made the “hardest decision of her life” by starting her own firm after nearly eight years at Holland & Knight, which she says were miserable. “I thought we need to be shifting the paradigm,” she told the Legal Times. You don’t need to work, work, work and then have a family.” 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.” (For its part, H&K told the LT that it’s been responding to the concerns that women are raising, but says big firm life isn’t for everyone.)

Ellen Sharpe at Odin, Feldman & Pittleman in Fairfax, Va., tells the Legal Times that she left her big firm — she won’t say which one — after she had her second child. She says her generation “doesn’t want to be told that it has to be one or the other — that you can’t be a mom and a successful lawyer. Our generation has said, ‘No, we can do both. We just need some help with balancing.’”

Of the women who came before her, Sharpe told the paper. “I think we couldn’t have done this if they hadn’t broken the mold,” Sharpe says. “I’m awed and inspired by them — but they … work … too … hard.”

On the flip side, there are probably some older women who feel that the younger generation doesn’t … work … hard … enough. The differences in perspective and opinion probably leads to some conflict from time to time. Law Blog readers, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 23, 2008 (boomark / email).