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Is there change in the air
Up and Comers
by Lucy Soto
October 25, 2007
Michelle Rothenberg-Williams was struggling with balance. As a hard-driving litigator, she
was six months away from making partner at Balch & Bingham. She also had a 2-year-old at home
she longed to spend more time with. Making equity partner and being with her family didn’t quite
mesh.
It’s the all-too-common dilemma for mothers who want to be successful and happy in their
careers and at home. The big “either-or.”
But in this case, Rothenberg-Williams’ story has a surprising twist.
Now, two summers later, she is a full equity partner, gets to spend time with her daughter,
Jocelyn, and her second child, 9-month-old Nigel. She still litigates, manages cases and markets
the firm. Now, she just handles fewer cases, delegates more and has what she calls “a backup team”
of associates and other partners who pitch in.
“I’m flexible,” she says. “It’s not like I say I’ll never work late ever. It’s part of it.
And there are times when you get tipped further in your balance in work than to familial demands.
But so far those times have been very limited.”
Balch & Bingham, with more than 250 attorneys, has offices in Birmingham and Montgomery,
Ala.; Atlanta; Gulfport and Jackson, Miss.; and Washington, D.C.
Rothenberg-Williams is part of the firm’s business litigation and health care practice
groups. She handles contractual disagreements involving everything from software licenses and
equipment to property leases and employment contracts. She also has done work for hospitals,
doctors, nursing homes and treatment centers. She represents clients in disputes involving
certificates of need, Medicaid reimbursements, medical malpractice and insurance coverage.
“She participates as fully as the rest of us, which is what we wanted,” says Michael J.
Bowers, a partner in the firm and a former Georgia attorney general. “We all consider her to be a
person of good judgment.
“She’s very smart. She’s extraordinarily personable. She handles people as well as anybody I’v
e ever seen, and I’m a whole lot older,” he chuckles. Meadows, Ichter & Bowers [formerly
Meadows, Ichter & Trigg] merged with Balch & Bingham in 2003. Bowers joined in 1998,
concentrating in general civil litigation.
The decision to allow Rothenberg-Williams to reduce her hours – completing a 1,400-hour year
as opposed to the typical 2,000-hour [or more] year – came after much discussion. Bowers says he
and others, including managing partner Josh Archer, wanted to make sure the firm retained and
attracted “more and more women of quality” like Rothenberg-Williams. “We wanted to have different
views at the partnership table and not just the bunch of views of middle-aged guys,” Bowers said. “
You don’t want everybody looking at it the way I do.” He remembers there being roughly just 10
women out of about 250 students in his law school class when he was at the University of Georgia in
1971. And when he went to work for the attorney general’s office in 1974, there were just three
women. By the time he left in 1997, more than half the lawyers there were women.
So, while the legal profession has made strides in hiring more women in the last three
decades, Bowers says now the profession has to continue to evolve.
“Private law firms with the 2,000-hour model for equity partnership, just to be considered,
if that remains the same, that’s going to make it extremely difficult for a lot of young people,”
Bowers says, “most especially young women who are in the years of building families. We’ve got to
take that into account. We’re all human beings, and we have to have the best young women.”
After graduating from Vanderbilt (magna cum laude) and then from Duke’s law school,
Rothenberg-Williams started practicing law with King & Spalding in 1999. A few years later, she
married Kirkton Williams, a commercial real estate broker. In 2001, she joined Meadows, Ichter
& Trigg, which eventually morphed into Balch & Bingham.
They decided to have children soon, she says. “I debated. Do you wait until you’re further on
in your career or do you wait? I figured having children was going to be a big enough change that
if I say I’ll try to make partner first, well, what if you don’t. I worked up until the day I was
in labor.”
When she hit a crossroads – when the balance between home and work was impossible – she
interviewed for less stressful in-house lawyer jobs. She got an offer.
She considered trying to stay put. What if she worked like crazy at the firm to make partner,
and then maybe negotiated a deal for fewer hours? “Somehow that felt disingenuous. I didn’t think I
could maintain that long-term, and I didn’t think it was fair to work like that for six months and
then change the deal on them.”
So, she went to her bosses and told them she had another offer. They worked a deal to reduce
her hours. She was still an associate at the time and assumed she was no longer on the partnership
track. A few months later, Archer, the managing partner, told her the firm was working on a plan
for her to be able to make equity partner.
“It came from them,” she says. “I was shocked and appreciative. In the ensuing discussion,
[they] … said the practice of law has got to figure out not to force women to make these choices,
especially when their children are young. They were looking at it where I might be the first one,
but I wouldn’t be the last one.”
Now, although she acknowledges her circumstances are unique and the day-to-day reality of
women lawyers who have children is still a balancing act, she sees hope.
“My firm is a pretty old and traditional firm,” she says.
“The fact that they did this means there must be some kind of change in the air.”
