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| press > reports of the bba > facing the grail report > appendix c | |
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Report of the Boston Bar Association
Task Force on APPENDIX C DISCUSSION VIGNETTES RACHAEL FREEDMAN'S STORY Rachael Freedman sat in the dark in her office
looking out at the Boston skyline. It was 11:00 p.m., over an hour since
her plane from California had landed, but she was still shaken. Mia, her daughter, was four years old. Dan, her husband, was supportive of her career, and amazingly, had agreed to stay home with Mia for awhile after he had been laid off last year. They lived in a lovely home in a great neighborhood about 30 miles outside Boston. Her parents, especially her father, a lawyer with a small firm of his own, were really proud of her. She was close to becoming a full-fledged partner in a firm which only 25 years ago had no Jewish lawyers. But as she sat in the dark in her office, Rachel didn't feel successful, she felt scared. The flight had been turbulent almost from the start, but Rachael had been on so many planes that she had learned to ignore a little turbulence and keep working. She had been formulating a reply to an e-mail that she had received from a client at 6:00 a.m. when the first big dip occurred. Her laptop went flying up off her tray table and landed in the aisle. As she reached down to grab it, the plane dropped again. Passengers went scrambling and several were calling out or crying. The pilot urgently instructed to pull their seat belts tight around their waists and the flight attendants were instructed to take their seats. Rachael watched the people across the aisle trying to call home on the plane's telephone. It was useless to try to call Mia and Dan. What could they do? The plane dropped again and Rachael's stomach fell with it. After a few seconds the plane had leveled off but the remainder of the flight was very bumpy. Rachael abandoned her work and thought about Mia and Dan and what things would be like without her. When the plane landed, the passengers had clapped. The woman next to her started weeping with relief. Now, sitting in the dark, Rachel's thoughts against drifted to the entire span of her life. She realized that to describe her life was to describe her work. Her life was dominated by work. It was true that she liked the work she was doing, but was work good enough to spend so much time away from the people she cared most about? Over the years, her biggest client had become much more demanding. The original partner on the deal was not in the office much. Rachael communicated with him weekly, but she was primarily responsible for the work. The mid-level associate on the deal had left to take an in-house counsel job. She had asked for help but was told that everyone in the department was very busy, and short of associates. The junior associate on the deal seemed to put her work last, all the time. She had spoken to him once, but was afraid that if she got too demanding, that he would criticize her in the bottom-up evaluation process that the firm had recently initiated, and discourage other associates from working with her. This particular junior associate was working on a deal with Jim Foster, a major rainmaker in the firm, and he was clearly more interested in impressing Jim than Rachael. Rachael remembered that Mia's playgroup leader had told Dan that Mia had been crying easily last week. Rachael had worked 65 hours, including most of the weekend to close the California deal. Maybe it was unrelated. . . . Before she had been made a junior partner, Rachael had told herself that once she was a partner she would consider going part-time, maybe 80%. She hated going three or four days in a row without seeing Mia awake. But now that she was on the edge of equity partnership, it seemed even harder than before to cut back. Some of the associates in her department worked part-time, but they were always exceeding their hours. It didn't make sense to take a pay cut and still work the long hours. She wasn't even sure that she could afford to take a pay cut if she and Dan were going to have another child. Something needed to change, but she was not sure what. Rachel thought about having another child for the hundredth time. She recalled how the head of the department had reacted when she told him she was pregnant the first time. He hadn't even tried to hide his dismay about the prospects of finding alternative staffing. Rachel knew that several women senior associates had returned from maternity leave to find that all their clients had been taken away. To avoid this possibility, Rachael had worked up until her due date and only took a four-week maternity leave - the firm's vacation allowance - so that it would seem as if she hadn't really been away. Her mother had been outraged by Rachael's decision to return to work so soon and Rachael had been told that several younger female associates had made disparaging remarks about her commitment as a mother. They said that Rachael was setting the wrong example and making it harder for them to make reasonable work-family decisions. Rachael looked at the message light blinking on her telephone. After she made equity partner she would slow down. But even as she formed the thought, it seemed like a lie. Most of the senior partners in her department worked long hours. Some were divorced. Some actually seemed to hang around at night longer than they really needed to be, as if they were avoiding going home. There were two female senior partners in her department, one had no children and the other one had a teenage daughter who was at boarding school. Rachael realized how isolated she was. Her best friend at the firm had moved to D.C. because of her husband's job. She respected her partners, but they were busy and would forget her within a month if she ever left. There were only two people from her incoming class still at the firm, and her classmates were in different departments so she barely saw them. Rachael had no time to be involved with the bar associations or other community organizations; she was supposed to be out trying to develop business. It was after midnight now. Rachael stood up and turned the light on. She picked up her suitcase and laptop, and began to gather the files that she had stopped by the office to collect for the weekend. The message light on her telephone was still blinking insistently. As she looked at the message light, the papers in her hand slipped from her grasp and spilled onto the floor. Rachael stared at them, unable to decide whether to pick them up. |