My Shingle

Work Life Balance

The Twenty-First Century Mom Lawyer: A Life Without Seams

May 10, 2009 by Carolyn Elefant

October 21, 1996 marks the day that I qualified to celebrate Mothers’ Day with the birth of my first daughter, Elana.  Exactly a week to the day of my daughter’s birth, I donned the one non-maternity work skirt that still fit me (albeit with the top button open), slipped a boxy red blazer over my [...]

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Michael D.J. Eisenberg – The Other Woman (or how technology helped me take a vacation)

January 22, 2009 by Carolyn Elefant

The Other Woman . . . I admit it, there is another woman.  She is alluring, demanding, and very intrusive.  And yet my wife puts up with my law practice. I am writing this while on vacation in the Caribbean.  We had a vacation like this a year ago and my new wife was so [...]

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Your Partner in Life and Law

September 29, 2008 by Carolyn Elefant

Update – a reader tipped me off to this letter from Bruce Allen’s Marketing Catalyst that seeks a spouse’s buy in when a professional signs up for Allen’s services.  Actually, I think one of the hardest things for a spouse to understand is that new solos need to invest much of their extra in business [...]

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What Michelle Obama Couldn’t Have Found at The (So-Called) Fifty Best Law Firms For Women.

August 26, 2008 by Carolyn Elefant

I’m not much of a political junkie, but I made a point of watching Michelle Obama’s speech to the Democrat National Convention.   Michelle (it’s tough for me to refer to someone a few months older than me as "Mrs.")  intrigues me, largely because she’s a contemporary with many superficialities in common:   we both graduated law [...]

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Big News (NOT): Starting A Firm Helps Work Life Balance

January 23, 2008 by Carolyn Elefant

Nearly two years ago, I posted here about a panel addressing the issue of gender equality in the legal profession.  Strikingly absent from the panel, however, were solo female lawyers.  A month later, I wondered why we should care whether women reach the top at large firms, given that many voluntarily chose a better option [...]

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Been on Vacation — and Off the Grid!

August 11, 2007 by Carolyn Elefant

Sorry for the silence here at My Shingle – I’ve been on a long awaited vacation this week (and here’s the proof!). I know that many bloggers often leave a stock of blog posts to auto-post while they’re away, but I prefer real time postings (anything else is too much like a newspaper article to [...]

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Yes, You Can Solo Part Time

June 29, 2007 by Carolyn Elefant

Conventional wisdom used to be that if you’re going to succeed as a solo, you need to jump in with both feet. But the one rule of solo practice is that there are no rules, only millions of exceptions. And here’s one of those exceptions: Danielle Colyer, a teacher by day, busy real estate attorney [...]

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Does work-life balance mean we need to settle for a B+?

March 16, 2007 by Carolyn Elefant

My colleague and fellow solo blogger, Jill Pugh Employment Law Blog tipped me off to an interesting new resource, Ms-JD to address the growing number of women leaving the legal profession or failing to reach the upper echelons of the profession. The site seems promising, though thus far, there’s little mention of the law firm [...]

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Partners in love and law

March 16, 2007 by Carolyn Elefant

We all know the song, Lawyers in Love, but did you ever wonder what happens to lawyers in love? With many of the dual lawyer couples whom I knew from the law school, once the couple had children, the woman either left the law or went on to an alternative career like teaching, while the [...]

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Quality of Life Tips

April 25, 2006 by Carolyn Elefant

The ABA GP Section just posted a list of quality of life resources that offer information on work-family balance, de-stressing and some silling “time wasters.”  In the three years that I’ve been blogging MyShingle, I’ve noticed a proliferation in work balance resources, but not much improvement on the part of lawyers to strike a better [...]

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