Big Law isn’t exactly designed for working mothers. Corporate law firms pay well, but they demand long hours and, sometimes, hectic travel schedules of their lawyers. Women lawyers looking to achieve the coveted work-life balance often find they have to choose between starting a family and pursuing a high-power career.
Latham & Watkins, an international firm ranked No. 1 on American Lawyer’s annual ranking of law firms by gross revenue, just made nursing lawyers’ lives a bit easier. In a move it says is a first among law firms, Latham now offers its lawyers a breast-milk-shipping program so that nursing moms travelling for work can send their breast milk home on the company’s dime. Law.com reported that the program was thought up by Latham associate Hayley Gladstone, who is the global co-chair of the firm’s Parent Lawyer Group.
Here’s how it works: When a nursing-mom lawyer travels for work, Latham sends a special shipping unit to her hotel. It includes a Styrofoam box that chills down after pressing a button. There are also plastic breast milk storage bags, labels, a marker and packing tape. Once the chilling unit is packed, it goes in a FedEx box for shipping.
While nursing, working mothers need to pump for 15 minutes every few hours during the day, according to the Mayo Clinic. For mothers travelling for business who are away from their babies for an extended period of time, this is a guaranteed waste of breast milk. Latham’s program will save nursing lawyers from having to leave enough breast milk at home before they depart and spare them the trouble of storing and transporting breast milk—including the challenge of getting it through TSA inspection on the way home.
Other companies that offer similar breast-milk-shipping programs include Twitter, IBM, Zillow, Johnson & Johnson, Ernst & Young, and Accenture. But Latham’s new program is especially salient in male-dominated Big Law. In a piece for the Atlantic in 2015, lawyer-writer Leigh McMullan Abramson lamented the population of “past-tense lawyers,” or women who left corporate law to raise their children. Law firms make money by billing their clients for hours worked, creating a built-in conflict for working parents. “From the firm’s perspective, a woman who can generate a stellar brief in time to make it to her daughter’s afternoon soccer game is less profitable than an associate who takes all night to complete the same task,” Abramson wrote.
She pointed to statistics from the American Bar Association that demonstrate this trend. According to an ABA report from May 2016, 44.7 percent of associates in private practice are women, but only 21.5 percent of partners are women.
Making it easy for nursing moms to ship home their breast milk is a positive trend, but is it enough? Writing for Elle in July 2015, after IBM announced its own breast-milk-shipping program, Slate contributor Elissa Strauss praised the initiative but noted that companies also need to improve flexibility for working parents when the child is no longer breastfeeding. “It’s awesome, and we can only hope other industries follow suit,” she wrote. “But if you really want to live up to your reputation as disruptive futurists, smashers of hierarchies, and equalizers of power, you’ve got to make it easier between years two and 18 of our children’s lives, too.”