Managing motherhood and equity partnership
The latest episode of the If You Ask Me podcast hears from Louise O'Byrne, partner and head of the commercial department at Arthur Cox LLP.
The lawyer has spent nearly two decades at the firm, building a leading employment practice while raising a young family of three boys.
O'Byrne speaks candidly about what it takes to combine a demanding legal career with motherhood and why the idea of ‘having it all’ can be misleading.
The lawyer, who became partner four weeks before she first gave birth, talks about going on maternity leave, and the worries about maintaining career momentum.
The podcast discusses how ‘in-control’ types, such as lawyers, must yield to some chaos in the transition to motherhood and child-rearing.
Louise speaks about the unpredictable needs and wants of children and the need for flexibility and trade-offs.
Diagnosis
She also speaks about her husband’s diagnosis of a serious illness while she was on a second maternity leave.
Louise became an Arthur Cox equity partner while on her third maternity leave.
She addresses how to plan for maternity leave and how to manage expectations of availability, and how she made equity partnership while the mother of three small children.
The If You Ask Me podcast is produced by two former employment lawyers, Sarah Lyons and Hannah Bradshaw, who now run BlueSky.