By: Caryn Tamber

We ran an item in our On the Move section yesterday on land use lawyer Erica Leatham moving from the small Rockville firm Meyers, Eisler & Leatham to the Bethesda office of Ballard Spahr. This caught my eye because I recalled that Leatham was featured a couple of years back in a Legal Times story about young female lawyers who were fed up with big law. Leatham talked about having left Holland & Knight to help start what was then Stark, Meyers, Eisler & Leatham because she was miserable with the pace at the large firm and felt it was very difficult to balance work and family there. She told the Legal Times reporter that she was working just as hard at Stark Meyers, but at least she could set her own schedule.

When I saw that Leatham had gone back to big law, I was curious to find out why, so I called her. She reiterated that life at a small firm was extremely busy. Instead of working exclusively on legal work, though, she had to take care of administrative tasks, too. What’s more, land use is not an area of the law well-suited to working in a small shop, she said. Leatham said she isn’t sure how her schedule and workload will work out at Ballard, but she can only hope that since her last stint at a big firm, she has become “more efficient and more practical about what I choose to do and not to do.”

She said there is “no good answer” to the problem of unrealistic work hours for ambitious attorneys who also want to have a family. “I thought maybe I’d found it,” she said.