Podcast Ep. 20: Women Lawyers: You Have More Power Than You Think

Many women lawyers find themselves caught in what I think of as an impossible triangle.

On one side, you want to become a partner. You have invested years in your career, built deep expertise, and worked incredibly hard to get where you are.

On another side, you want to spend time with your children while they are young. Those years are precious, and you know they will not last forever.

And on the third side, you are aware that the window for becoming a partner in your firm seems to be open for only a certain period of time. If you wait too long, you worry that the opportunity will pass you by.

So you get stuck.

You do not want to leave your firm because you enjoy the work and the people. You do not want to take the financial risk of moving elsewhere, particularly when family life can be at its most expensive. At the same time, you may not feel able to devote the extra time and energy that partnership often appears to require.

Meanwhile, the partnership clock keeps ticking.

This situation can feel incredibly frustrating because it often presents itself as a personal dilemma. Many women assume they need to choose between being a committed lawyer and being a present parent. They wonder whether they have somehow fallen behind or failed to make the right choices.

But in many cases, the problem is not individual. It is structural.

The years when lawyers are expected to position themselves for partnership often coincide with the years when many women are raising young children. Of course, men become parents too, but many women still feel that the primary responsibility for caring for children rests with them. As a result, they can find themselves facing a set of pressures that law firms were not necessarily designed to accommodate.

The challenge is that partnership timelines can become treated as fixed. People start to believe that if someone has not made partner by a particular age or stage, they are somehow less capable. In reality, it is often not a question of ability at all. It is a question of timing.

When women respond to this challenge, they often do so quietly. They leave a little earlier to get home for bedtime. They focus on delivering excellent work but spend less time building visibility or developing client relationships. They put partnership on hold without ever having a conversation about it.

Over time, that can have consequences. Opportunities become harder to access. Visibility decreases. Peers move ahead. And eventually some women leave altogether.

That is a loss not only for those women, but also for their firms.

Law firms invest heavily in talented lawyers. When experienced women leave, firms lose expertise, client relationships, future leaders, and often a significant amount of money replacing them.

This is why I believe more women need to have open conversations about these challenges.

Many lawyers underestimate the value they bring. If you are a high performing lawyer, your firm needs you. That gives you more leverage than you may realise.

Rather than treating the issue purely as a personal concern, try approaching it from a broader perspective. Explain that you are committed to the firm and interested in partnership, but that your current circumstances require a different path. Talk about the impact that losing talented lawyers has on the business. Share ideas about how the firm could better support lawyers during this stage of life.

Not only are you more likely to be heard, but you will also begin to demonstrate the kind of commercial and strategic thinking that firms expect from partners.

The conversation may feel uncomfortable. But it is worth asking yourself what it is costing you to remain silent.

If the conversation goes well, you may create a pathway forward for yourself and for others. If it does not, at least you will have greater clarity about where you stand.

The important thing to remember is that there is rarely only one route to partnership. The challenge may feel impossible, but there are often more options available than you can see when you are standing in the middle of the triangle.

Sometimes the first step is simply starting the conversation.