Lawyer Monthly - Women In Law Special Edition

WOMEN IN LAW EDITION LAWYER MONTHLY 55 almost certainly have started a lot earlier in the day, as I still have to do my job and provide that value. I think you become a lot more efficient when you have had time off. How can women prepare for promotion after maternity leave? If you are trying to progress towards a promotion, whether it’s partnership or anything else, there are a lot of things you need to do to get there. It is not just about getting the hours in and doing a good job with the client; it’s about business development, growing the team and mentoring others, which all take time. If you have children, you are less able to use your evenings for work and so everything comes down to operating with ruthless efficiency during the day. 6.00pm - 8.00pm is sacred to me to have that time with the children, so everything gets done by 5.30 and if something spills over and I have to do it at the end of the day I don’t mind that at all as I have had that time I needed with my children. Working for DLA Piper you said that there was a maternity plan - do you think that should be mandatory across all law firms? I am not sure everybody would want to work this way. I know that many of my friends and colleagues have not appreciated the value of the coaching scheme and plan and would not want to say in advance when they expect to return and how they would like to work when they do. It is perhaps not until you undergo it yourself that you may appreciate the system in place. I am not sure it would work for this to be mandatory. The notion of flexible working is doing work when you can and what fits well with your lifestyle, and I suppose for some people what might fit in for them is the 9.00 - 5.00 process. therefore you are not going to give as much as you did before. You have to prove them wrong, so you may need to work and give a little bit differently. Do you think flexible working for everyone including men and women, would help with equality at law firms, especially higher up, when moving up towards partner, for example? I do. I think that would really help with the stereotyping – if there is a stereotype – that new mums don’t contribute as much as new dads may do, (because for the dads, their partner may be the one at home looking after the children). I think if everybody who wanted to have the opportunity to work flexibly did so, I am sure that would help when the time comes for progression further down the line. I, myself, am hoping to go for partnership soon and I don’t think that the way I work will impact that, as I still get what I need to do completed, I just do it in a more flexible way. Could flexible working post maternity leave produce a stigma towards women in the workplace? Should this be made for both men and women, to ensure equality? Yes, of course. It should be available to all. It is really important for women who have children and return to work, or for anybody who has the need, to work flexibly when they need to and to do it loudly and visibly. We have a motto in our firm which is: “leaving loudly”. If someone is going to see a school play, we believe they should say so and not appear to be present when they are not. And that is what I try to do. I don’t try to hide the fact that I am leaving early. I will Q Q Q Q A US Ernst & Young study even found that lack of flexibility and part-time options, and having to work more than 40 hours per week, were amongst the top factors pushing career- orientated mothers out of the workforce. CIPD conducted a survey of more than 1,000 employers and more than three-quarters believed flexible working practices had implemented a more positive impact on staff retention.