An innovative parental leave coaching program at law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner stemmed from one of its partner’s personal battles with postpartum depression.
Lindsay Aggarwal had been at the firm, which has its biggest office in St. Louis, for nine years when she and her husband began their family. She sailed through pregnancy with her firstborn, Devan, and returned to work without a problem. She even made partner.
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Yet Aggarwal’s experience with daughter, Miya, just a few years later proved a different story. She found herself struggling under the weight of her workload, breaking down in tears multiple times each day and staring blankly at the walls at night. Two months after she returned to work, she realized she needed help—and ultimately began therapy and a mental health leave of absence that ultimately lasted for five months.
And when it was time to return to work, Aggarwal was determined not to let the moment pass by. She wanted to change the culture so other lawyers at BCLP could get the help she had longed for.
“The short version of why I ended up here was because it went so poorly in my own experience,” she says. “And that’s not to put anything on anybody else. It’s just that I had been at the firm for 10-plus years, and I felt like I didn’t have anyone I could talk to about this, and I just had to soldier on by myself. I mean, can you imagine what a first or a second year associate would feel like?”
In the month leading up to her return this past February, Aggarwal pitched BCLP on a big change in her duties. She proposed spending only half of her time on securities law, where she’d previously focused—and the other half on launching a parental leave coaching program.
After all, for lawyers (and many other jobs as well), taking leave isn’t just about being given the time off. It’s about figuring out how to cover your cases without dumping on colleagues. It’s about ramping down and then ramping back up even while adjusting to the demands of parenthood. Billable hours are always a concern: Will the firm still want you around if yours plummet? A 2023 survey commissioned by an American Bar Association committee found that more than half of working mothers felt they were perceived as less committed to their career after having a baby and 61 percent reported hearing demeaning comments about being a working parent—significantly more than men. The ABA has been concerned enough about the high rate of attrition for senior women to commission a major report on it, one chock-full of details about the “motherhood penalty” many perceive at their firms.
Aggarwal says BCLP was always supportive of parenthood and her needs. The problem was that she needed not just acceptance, but practical advice. Through her new role, she’s now a resource for the firm’s 660 lawyers in the United States, helping them talk through their options and manage their workloads before and after leave.
It’s not just women. BCLP now offers 20 weeks across the board to anyone becoming a parent, a relatively recent change from the gender-neutral policy that designated people as “primary” or “secondary” caregivers. Aggarwal says she hears from men who aren’t sure whether they can, or should, take advantage of it. And while she sees her job as presenting options, not pushing people toward one choice or another, she wants men to take the possibility of a long leave seriously.
“It’s ultimately their decision, but also I want them to be armed with the knowledge of, like, Hey, if you want to make the system better for everybody, there’s a real value in you taking the full leave, and there’s a value in you demonstrating that to other men who come after you. There’s a value in terms of your female counterparts, too: That you’re taking on an equal share chips away at this gender wage gap issue.” She’s been heartened by speaking to male colleagues who want to find a life balance that maybe didn’t seem possible at big law firms even a few decades ago: “Like, I want to be a great lawyer. I want to excel here. But I want to be able to be more of a hands-on Dad,” she says. “And how do I balance that with a demanding career?”
That’s something that Aggarwal feels like she’s figuring out as a mother and a lawyer. She recently wrote movingly about her experience at Law.com, which has led to hearing from people not just at other firms, but in other industries. She’s been gratified by the response.
“I want it to make a difference in people’s lives, not just here at BCLP, but for anybody else who might need it,” she says. The coaching work, she says, has been “energizing,” and sharing her story seems like a way to multiply the impact.
And for any parent who’s struggling with postpartum depression, and worries that they might be hurting not just their career but their child, Aggarwal hopes they’ll take heart from her experience with her daughter.
“This was all I had wanted—a little girl, a beautiful, healthy little girl, and I felt like I was ruining it, because she was never going to be connected to me, or that I was ruining this time in her life. And I look back now and she’s my little shadow, right? I’m her favorite person, and she’s just crazy about spending time with me.
“That’s what I would say to people. There’s so much hardship associated with postpartum depression. But when you come out on the other side of it, and when you put in the work, you’re going to have a fantastic relationship with your kids.”
