"If you are a great associate and you work hard and you're dedicated, it is a very small investment for me to make—to give flexibility while they're young," said Kristen Riemenschneider, a partner at Arnold & Porter who has three elementary school-age children. "It's a finite window of time in somebody's life."

'The Collective Experience'

Perhaps the most illustrative resource for the temperature of working attorney parents comes from a recent survey of parent attorneys conducted by Whittney Beard and Malini Nangia, career coaches at Volta Talent Strategies.

Much of the survey's findings are perhaps unsurprising. Parents said they were worn down from the "24/7, seven days a week" grind of working—during an extremely busy second half of the year many firms—while directly caring for their children. Prior to the pandemic, most parents relied on a network of caregivers that allowed time for their busy work schedules. But school and daycare closures have taken that resource from them.

"This is not a new issue. [The pandemic] has merely magnified the issue and allowed the collective experience to come to the surface of what many people deal with all the time," said Michelle Coughlin, founder of MothersEsquire, an email listserv of more than 6,000 working attorney parents.

Respondents to Volta's survey said their firms have responded to the pandemic challenges with increased communication, technology stipends to ease the transition to work from home, special monetary bonuses and child care stipends, when possible. But when asked about what their firms should be doing to provide more support, the survey authors found an apparent "gap."

The six most popular answers said nothing of programming or stipends. Instead, they focused on lawyers' anxieties about their workload and career trajectories.

"I think it's terribly sad that our profession is in a state where people are worried they're going to lose their jobs [because of their children]. That's really heartbreaking," Riemenschneider said.

Roughly 45% of respondents said they want their law firm to demonstrate empathy and understanding; 41% said they want COVID to be taken into consideration in performance reviews; and 33% want time off.

The cost of ignoring those needs is great, especially as law firms continuously push for diversity and look to retain women attorneys.

Almost half of the respondents to Volta Talent Strategies' survey said they are seriously thinking about leaving their current job because of the pandemic, and 71% of those respondents currently work at law firms. The authors noted that they don't have comparative data from previous years on attitudes about attrition, so it's unclear whether a similar number were already feeling that way before the pandemic.

Even before schools and daycares shut down, compensation disparities and inflexibility in law firm work schedules have long hampered those efforts to keep women from leaving the profession. While women make up 45% to 50% of law school graduates in recent years, only 20% of law firm equity partners were women in 2018, according to a 2019 study conducted by the American Bar Associate and ALM Intelligence.

Will The Understanding Last?

Riemenschneider, a life sciences partner, said 2020 was the busiest year of her career—she and her firm represented vaccine-makers in negotiations with governments. Although her kids are a bit older and more independent, she, like many, was burnt out from the day-in-day-out combination of being direct caregiver and her workload. (She noted that none of the blame lies with her firm.)

As a partner, Riemenschneider found herself as the conduit between the firm's clients and its associates, many of which were struggling through the pandemic with much younger children. So she was careful not to push down the increasing client demands to the associate ranks.

"I am better to withstand this pressure than an associate with a 2-year-old. Certainly from the partner perspective, it has been really important for me to have the associates make it very clear what they can do and can't do. I don't want to hold work [back from them], but I make it very clear that turning this down won't adversely impact your career," she said.

But, like Coughlin, Riemenschneider noted that much of what working parents are asking for now is not new. It's just that the illusion of bifurcation between work and caregiving, especially among women, has evaporated in the pandemic.

Riemenschneider went part-time when she had her first child, she added. The most meaningful help she has ever gotten as a working attorney was not any single program, but the fact that her supervising partner allowed her to leave each day at 3:30 p.m. to pick up her daughter. If a client wanted to schedule a call, he would tell them to either reschedule or he would cover the call and fill Riemenschneider in when she logged back on at 8 p.m.

"I think it's really important to normalize what's happening in the world and not pretend that we're not operating in extraordinary circumstances," she said. "In the past if I had been at home and my child showed up up in a Zoom call I would have been very embarrassed. Now, we really don't really care."

Coughlin, of MothersEsquire, said she hopes this sort of visibility and consideration continues past the pandemic.

"It has changed things, [but] my fear is that it will go away when childcare comes back," Coughlin said.

For example, half of all women say they are primarily responsible for arranging childcare, while just 1% of men say they are primarily responsible, she said. "The disparity between those things [existed] pre-pandemic. I fear that people are going to forget, or that evaluations won't take those things into consideration."

Read More:

• Law Firms Less Likely to Apply for Next Round of PPP Loans
• Big Law Litigators On What's Worrying Clients About COVID Liability