Leaving the law over lack of maternity leave

Thanks to Susan Cartier Liebel of the Building a Solo Practice LLC blog for bringing this article from Lawyers Weekly to my attention, which discusses maternity leave issues encountered by our colleagues on the other side of the border in Canada.

The article examines the familiar dilemma many women lawyers, regardless of citizenship, face after the birth of their children:  have kids, lose business, lose credibility, lose standing, lose income, lose all that you've worked for. 

Is there a solution?  You bet there is. Legal employers planning for and accepting the inevitable.

Legal employers should presume that 80% of their women attorneys will likely have children during their fertile years and that most will take 3 months maternity leave and might also want to work a reduced schedule for a few years while their children are young.  Smart employers will ensure that their office and staffing infrastructure will accommodate these predictable life events and temporary schedule changes by allowing case management by teams of attorneys rather than a single lawyer.  That way, one lawyer can run with a case when another is out on leave.

In the long run, firms will save money by retaining employees and avoiding the cost of hiring and training replacements, even if there is a temporary loss of income due to the birth of a child. 

Of course, most firms are shortsighted and fail to appreciate the long term benefits of retaining good lawyers who happen to have been born with a reproductive system that requires them to bear the burden  of carrying offspring to term and caring for the child in the months after its birth. 

Perhaps that sad fact will change sometime soon.

From the article:

Maternity leaves don’t come easy for women practising in small firms. Financial challenges loom large; hanging on to clients poses a major difficulty. The result: they have been leaving private practice in droves...

“There were two main issues we heard recurring,” Warkentin said. “The first was the hardship to maintain an income during a leave of absence, and the second was maintaining the practice during the leave. If you take a leave of absence, you lose the income flow, and you also lose your clients — you don’t have a practice to return to"...

(E)veryone agrees that women in small firms need help with maternity leaves in order to stem the tide leaving private practice.

“The financial hurdles faced by female sole practitioners...are so big that the decision to have children really comes down to ‘can I afford to do it?’” Newton-Smith said. “The fear of not being able to have a family drives many women out.”