What to expect when you’re expecting

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There’s no attorney handbook on how to navigate maternity leave.

“And there are a million things to take care of when you’re going out on leave,” said Margaret Kaiser, a solo lawyer at a primarily guardian ad litem practice in Hudson.

For Kaiser, who was part of a mid-sized firm when she had her son in 2014, planning was everything.

“The best advice I can give is communication — with your boss, with other members of your firm, with your clients, with other people in your community,” she said. “I had a firm-wide memo very clearly setting out my preferences for communication. I was checking my email one time a day. If they needed anything in less than 24 hours, they should call me. I made a list of my cases and put which other attorney in my firm should be contacted.”

Jessie Lochmann Allen agreed.

“Start dialogue internally at the law firm as soon as you feel comfortable,” suggested Allen, who took three six-month maternity leaves in four years and, in between, managed to become a partner at Foley & Lardner in Milwaukee. She is now the vice chair of the firm’s nationwide Transactions Practice Group and co-chair of the Manufacturing Industry Team.

Having the talk

The best time to start these sorts of discussions will vary, of course, from workplace to workplace. Allen said she started talking about her plans months before her leave began. The first step she took, she said, was to learn more about her firm’s parental-leave policy.

In Wisconsin, businesses with more than 50 permanent employees are required to offer up to six weeks of unpaid leave for the birth or adoption of a child, according to the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development. Mothers and fathers can both receive this sort of leave. But to be paid for this time off, employees must often use accrued paid leave, such as vacation time, although some firms do offer exceptions.

“Once you know the policy basics find who the right decision-makers will be regarding any variations from that policy,” said Allen.

Not everyone can, like Allen, find a way to get six months of leave. Allen said she was able to get so much time, in part, by making some time for work, even while she was away. Those arrangements brought complications of their own.

“If you are going to work during your leave and you have unpaid leave, you have to negotiate how you’re being paid for that time,” Kaiser said. “You have to negotiate your hourly rate.”

All that takes time, sometimes months.

So, Allen said, “Don’t surprise anyone; give people significant advance notice, internally and externally, about your leave, the duration of it and your general availability. Talk to the key stakeholders, direct partners if you’re an associate, partners you share clients with. Include the administrative assistant, include the associates, so people feel vested because a lot of people will be impacted when you’re gone.”

High up on that list should be clients.

Allen, for her part, began reaching out to clients a month or two before her leave was expected to begin. She emailed each client, laying out dates showing when she would be gone and how long she would be out and stating who would fill in during her absence. She also made it clear that there would be no charge for clients to obtain representation from another attorney during her leave.

“If it takes five or 10 hours for someone to transition, at least at Foley, we’ve taken that as a cost of doing business,” Allen said. “And the clients loved that. They felt like they were part of the transition team, and they want to know that you’re thinking about them.”

Working ahead

Kaiser said that before she went on leave she made it a point to do as much as she could. If a summary judgment was likely, she outlined her arguments and drafted a distillation of the relevant law for use in a brief. If a summons and complaint deadline was expected after her leave began, Kaiser prepared the required work in advance.

“Anything I could anticipate that might come up, I did,” she said.

Kaiser and Allen also laid out what they would and would not be able to do during leave.

“I took three six-month leaves and, frankly, I didn’t want to be completely cut out of the loop,” Allen said. “I wanted to still be a part of the team. Even if I wasn’t billing my time, I wanted to be copied on emails. And it served me well because, when I came back to work, it wasn’t such a huge learning curve to figure out what happened for the six months I dropped off the face of the earth.”

Allen, the only female partner among the nearly 40 attorneys in Foley’s transactional and securities practice group, acknowledged that the extent of her participation has varied from leave to leave.

“As an associate I felt I could check out a lot more,” she said. “When I was a partner the buck stopped with me. I was the billing partner. I was the relationship person, and that made it tougher to walk away.”

So she worked during her leave on a few transactions that were hard to hand off to another lawyer. And she made sure she could work if needed, even if the timing wasn’t necessarily convenient.

“That worked for me,” Allen said. “I had child care and I had people to help me. It made it OK for me to stay in the loop. I understand that wouldn’t be fine for everyone, but I felt it was important to keep that strong relationship because you want to come back and have those relationships come back to you.”

Flex (time) for me

This is why planning for what to expect after maternity leave is central to being able to have a smooth transition.

“I was pleasantly surprised that coming back it took a while to be really busy again,” Kaiser said. “My actual caseload was pretty small. I had to be given new assignments so it took a while to be going 100 percent, which was nice when you take a break from thinking analytically and writing legal documents. It does take a minute to get back in the groove of things after you’ve been home changing diapers and being taxed in an entirely different way.”

Despite the manageable transition, Kaiser eventually decided to go into solo practice.

“Having him was definitely a piece of why I wanted to go out on my own, so I could have more control over my schedule,” Kaiser said.

She began her solo practice by working just three days a week, adding a day as her son got older. These days, she works the usual 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., except on Wednesdays, which she has taken off since she began working solo.

The schedule has allowed her not only to balance the demands of motherhood and work but also to maintain her role at the St. Croix Valley Bar Association; she was vice president the year her son was born and president the year after.

“It made sense for me to take one full day off a week in terms paying for child care,” Kaiser said.

“One thing I’ve always done, and its worked for me, is that when I’m working there’s always child care. I don’t set it up so that I’m just working during a nap because of how I work. And 2-year-olds are unpredictable so, in general, I have to have child care, anyway.”

Child care has also been indispensable to Allen, who learned to make time for work and family while also maintaining her community involvement. Allen, at 40 years old, is a member of the board of directors of the YMCA of Metropolitan Milwaukee, president of the Betty Brinn Children’s Museum Board of Directors and is on the steering committee for Milwaukee Women Inc., which promotes the advancement of women in the boardroom.

“My schedule has varied depending on the return from maternity leave and, frankly, how many kids I’ve had and what child care options I’ve had,” she said. “Those work together. What child care options you choose can impact your schedule.”

She’s also learned that she can’t maintain work and family alone.

“We all love to feel indispensable. But, at some point, you have to come to the realization that you need a team to support your indispensability. It can’t always be you,” she said. “It is a huge investment to train up with junior associates at the firm or with babysitters or a nanny. But I can hardly think of a better investment; you’re trusting people with your most precious things — your kids. And you’re trusting them with your livelihood. That is where peace and relief comes for me. You believe in them and you trust them to handle things.”

Allen also has adjusted her schedule since becoming a mom.

“I’ve been on a flexible schedule since the birth of my first baby,” Allen said. “We call it flex time, and its intended to provide any attorney — man or woman — the ability to work flexible hours through the course of the year.”

Attorneys on flex time still have to meet a minimum number of billable hours each year, but flex time also allows them to have fewer than that minimum in exchange for receiving less pay.

“Some people may say it’s not to work on Tuesdays and Thursdays or to leave everyday at 3 o’clock,” Allen said. “Other people, like me, have opted not to pick a day or block of time, any specific window, to be out of the office. I have not done that. I have just decided to work fewer hours over the years. When the highs are high, I can take a lower low. When the work is coming in, I’m working. And that works for me because of the child care I have, and I have a very active husband, who is a partner at Foley, as well.”

Foley’s flex-time plan also allows attorneys to maintain partner tracks; last year, three attorneys at Foley made partner either during or just after the period when they were following flex-time schedules.

“I made partner on flex time, too,” Allen said.

Still, Allen said, learning to manage her expectations has been just as important as learning to manage her schedule.

“For Type A overachievers, as many of us are, it can be challenging to adjust to the fact you can’t always be the person taking the very most plumb assignments,” Allen said. “You have to pick and choose a bit because your availability, in certain circumstances, may be limited. And not that your partners don’t believe you can handle the work, but sometimes you have to say ‘no’ because it’s not possible to fit that work into your schedule. And that takes a mental adjustment.”

“I found a way to juggle it. Not perfectly,” Allen admitted. “Some days, many days, it’s not perfect. It’s messy. It requires sacrificing in many ways — by me and the people who support me, my husband, even my kids, sometimes. I can’t be at all their events. But, everyday, I have choices to make.”

At least, she said, she has the freedom to make them.