I love being a family law lawyer (most of the time) and leading my team.  

Just like you, I started my firm for both balance and financial reward. Armed with a healthy does of optimism and more than a few thoughts and ideas, I thought "it can't be that hard right?"

But things get busy and we normalise 'busy' by working late at night or early morning when everyone else is sleeping, eating more takeaway than we would like to admit and outsourcing our home duties to relieve pressure. The balance we dreamed of becomes a distant memory. We become more stressed and snappy, and our relationships and work quality suffer.

Grow the team. Fix the problems. That was the theory, anyway.

If I had a dollar for every time I told myself and my husband in those early years "I’ll just hire this person and then I won't be as busy," I'd be rich. It was my master plan. Hire people. Get less busy. Problem solved.  Spoiler alert: it didn’t get better, my pressure just changed.  I was now completing more non-legal work in running the business: marketing, mentoring, client complaints, accounts, IT and HR.  It was exhausting, did not spark my joy and did not align with my vision of being a lawyer and how I wanted to run a law firm.

Building a strong team in a regional area is not always easy. The reality is that the talent pool is smaller and investment in growth and training is fundamental. But how do you compete with larger firms offering bigger teams, bigger budgets and shiny things? Throw a global pandemic in the mix and the employment landscape is now substantially changed. As a result, we have since seen an increase in practitioners leaving private practice due to ongoing pressures based on an outdated rhetoric about how the legal profession should operate, and larger firms have become increasingly aggressive in their recruitment intensifying competition for experienced local lawyers

Leading a law firm is not an easy gig and comes with challenges. I have certainly had my fair share.

I clearly remember my lowest point: it was late-2022. I was pregnant with our daughter and the firm had grown to the biggest it had ever been with a team of ten.  The firm had just won Employer of Choice at the local business awards and everything felt like it was on track.  Then our 2-year old son got sick and things began to unravel.  'Daycare germs' progressed to a three week hospital admission and months of monitoring and care. It was the scariest time in my life!

My personal challenges resulted in me being less present in the firm.  In my absence, the team struggled to maintain the stability I had assumed was there.  Our team reduced from ten to four, with one of the four on maternity leave. 

I had built the team, grown the practice and created what I thought was the answer. But during those overwhelming months when I looked around, I had to ask myself: what did I build this for? It felt more like handcuffs than the freedom I had been chasing. I was now the only lawyer with a client-load of four-lawyers, with a recovering toddler and an eight-week old baby.