Imagine you are a top-tier lawyer. You deal
daily with things major and minor, from oil
disputes in former Russian territories to
financial problems of garage-level startups. The
great equalizer, however, is that you’re also a
parent - of a teenage son no less. As every
parent knows, a teenager on the loose in the
summer can challenge your nerves.
Such is the life of L. Rachel Helyar – woman,
mother and partner with one of Los Angeles’
largest law firms, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer &
Feld LLP. As parent and professional, Helyar
faces this issue a lot, with her children and
with lawyers who work at Akin Gump. Her solution
with her son, Sam, is relatively easy: a big
reader, he is given some study space in her
office. But with other employees, the answer is
not that simple.
Despite shifting workplace practices offering
incentives to working parents – whether it be
flexible hours or increased benefits – female
lawyers at large law firms often find adding
parenting duties to the grueling hours (60 to 70
hours a week) too much to take. Frequently they
jump ship for jobs with the government or
smaller firms where the work is more forgiving,
leaving a void in the pool of attorneys
available to advance to partner level.
At Akin Gump, Helyar co-chairs the firm’s effort
to retain and promote female attorneys. “There
aren’t many of us [women partners] to serve as
role models. I am committed to trying to keep
our more junior women here and moving up the
ladder,” Helyar says.
Time and Pressure
Nationwide, work-life issues are becoming more
prominent. Since 1990, the number of caregiver
lawsuits – suits filed by caregivers alleging
they were discriminated against by their
employers because of their need to care for
others – has increased 450 percent, according to
Joan Williams, a professor at the University of
California’s Hastings College of Law and author
of UnBending Gender: Why Family and Work
Conflict and What To Do About It.
A 2005 study by the Families and Work Institute
concluded that the workplace is changing to
serve the needs of 21st century workers, and
“many of these changes appear here to stay.”
The pressure to change is coming from outside
the legal profession, too. They are surfacing as
increasingly litigious clients such as Wal-Mart
Stores Inc. want female attorneys on their legal
teams.
“If you have a family, and I do, it’s tough.
They’d like me home more,” says Helyar.
Hardest-hit is her 9-year-old daughter, Savita,
who would “like me home doing more traditional,
cookie-making kinds of things.”
It all comes down to scheduling. After all,
Helyar is in heavy demand as a lawyer, too.
Handling mostly corporate lawsuits, she has a
handful of legal issues working simultaneously
at any given time. “Almost every week there is
something new coming through,” she explains.
And cases at the appellate level are not usually
simple. Last year, for instance, she was asked
to help settle an international dispute over oil
and gas rights in Turkmenistan, a former Soviet
satellite which Helyar describes as “a very odd
little country.” Development by an Argentinean
oil company, Bridas Corp., had been seized by
the government. The courts eventually found that
Bridas could recover more than $550 million from
the Turkmenistan government (now worth more than
$1 billion).
It wasn’t much fun for the lawyers – the
international jet set doesn’t appear terribly
active along this section of the Caspian Sea.
Talks were limited to the United States. “You
are dealing with a dictatorship,” Helyar
explains. “It is one where there is no safe
court system, no press; where people who
disagree with the government disappear. It is
not a safe place to be…and not an easy place to
conduct litigation.”
Her cases are not all this big. Some involve
more modest settlements, as with a dispute
between former partners of small California
high-tech company, Electronic Funds Solutions
LLC. Helyar got the court last year to throw out
a $24 million default judgment against her
clients. “I was on the phone to them every day.
They were more concerned than the head of an oil
company. The judgment affects their health and
their wife and their kids,” she says.
Even from a distance the work load seems
overwhelming. Helyar will be the first to admit
that cases can pile up. On the upside: appellate
law, with its time-consuming decision-making
process, allows time between briefs while
lawyers await a court’s ruling. On the down
side: yes indeed, lawyers do occasionally
forget. “I work on so many cases that sometimes
I lose track. I had a colleague come in one day
and say, ‘Hey, we won ‘M----------.’ I couldn’t
remember briefing the case at all. I said,
‘Great. What’s that?’”
Helyar’s cases have certainly not been obscure.
She has written briefs for lawsuits before the
U.S. Supreme Court. But she leaves time for pro
bono work – free legal help for underrepresented
minorities. That was the case in 2004, when she
filed a brief supporting a Columbian emigrant to
this country, Walter Arias, who was charged by
the U.S. government with being a terrorist
because he had paid “war taxes” to members of a
South American revolutionary group. Or, as a
representative of the National Urban League a
year earlier when the courts supported
affirmative action in the University of
Michigan’s admissions policy.
Life Before Her Life
It has not always been Helyar-the-lawyer
standing up for minorities and defending the
rights of businesses. Her resume notes (near the
bottom, very simply) that the 1992 graduate from
the University of California – Berkeley’s Boalt
Hall School of Law also has two masters degrees
– in religion and fine arts. For nearly a decade
before attending law school, she was a painter
and an English teacher (in Switzerland). “I
figured it was easier to go from artist to
lawyer than the other way around,” she explains.
“That means I am happier being a lawyer than
some other people. I do not imagine there is
some wonderful life out there.”
Helyar is a busy woman. But that doesn’t mean
she’s too busy to miss one of the legal
profession’s most important pastimes –
hobnobbing over hooch. A partner needs to be as
tuned into the social side of lawyering as she
is into the intricacies of international
terrorist law, right? Helyar talked at length
with California CEO, but she had to end the
interview to go out to The Cellar, a Century
City nightspot, for a beer with some of her
partners and associates. “Being a lawyer can
seem like indentured servitude to the
associates,” she says. “To get past that, you
have to keep the lines of communication open,
and going to the bar together is one way to do
that.”By Scott
Williams
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October 2007 Issue
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