The Trials of Lawyer-Moms : Family: Juggling two demanding careers has prompted women to form a group that eases the move from legal eagle to mother hen.

A room at the foot of the stairs is where Kate Gould, mother of two, practices her other profession.

Looking out at a suburban view of trees, a swing set and her son’s elementary school, she settles down to draft wills and plan estates until the kids come home in the afternoon.

Shari Danch doesn’t even have a room of her own. The computer, fax and copying machine share the living room of her Capitol Hill row house. Her clients, mostly people with labor-related grievances, tell her all about them at her dining room table.

Self-proclaimed “mommy-track lawyers,” Gould and Danch are members of the Lawyers at Home Forum, a burgeoning group that tries to reconcile two of the world’s most demanding professions.

Formed just more than three years ago when dozens of women responded to an anguished letter in the local Women’s Bar Assn. newsletter, the group doubled in its first year and has doubled again to 160 members.

“It just blossomed,” said Carlie Sorenson Dixon, at whose Georgetown home the first meeting was held. “You know lawyers--we are very organized. This group is the fastest growing committee in the Women’s Bar Assn.”

Apparently unique in the country, the forum has several members from outside the Washington area and has received queries about forming similar organizations from as far away as Texas and Colorado.

Its members have resumes that vary from high-powered partner to first-year associate. They run the gamut from new mothers who have chosen to give up practice temporarily to women working 40 or 50 hours a week--considered part time in a profession in which 80-hour workweeks are not exceptional.

The common denominator, the group’s “statement of purpose” declares, is that members be “attorneys who have turned a significant portion of their energy from careers to families” and who intend to return to the paid work force if they have stopped for now.

In return for annual dues of only $8, the forum provides emotional support and practical advice on setting up a home office, doing pro bono (volunteer) work or retraining for other careers.

“It’s been a lifesaver,” Danch said. “I’ve gotten information on whether you need a license to practice from home (you do in Washington), taxes and how to get part-time malpractice insurance. It’s kept me from doing a lot of stupid things and really saved me time. We also have an internal referral system so if one of us gets a call not in our particular area, we can refer to others in the group. If we just have a question, we can call and get an answer.”

Beyond assistance on such material matters as what kind of software you need for accounting, the forum helps deal with the trauma professional women often feel when they decide to step off the fast track for the first time.

“It was a complete shock in every way,” said Kathryn Mann Horlick, who quit a high-pressure job at the Treasury Department when her first son was born in 1989. “The skills you need for parenting were not the ones I had been developing for a decade.”

“Is it harder for lawyers than (for) people in other professions? I don’t know, but it’s hard,” said Julie Heflin, who got her law degree at USC and whose first job was as a corporate litigator at the Los Angeles firm Morrison and Foerster.

“Most of us are Type A personalities who are used to having pretty structured lives. You know when you have a brief due, when you have to make a court appearance or have a meeting with a client. Then all of a sudden, nothing is structured and your days are not your own.”

Following her husband back east, Heflin had a rude shock in 1990 when she told a prospective boss at the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington that she was pregnant.

“Even though I wasn’t obligated to tell him, I did and said ‘I hope it’s not a problem,’ ” Heflin recalled. “He said, ‘Yeah, it kind of is.’ He told me I might be able to get a month off without pay and even that was not definite.”

That experience helped persuade her to take a part-time job after her first child was born. When a second son followed two years later, she decided to stop for a while, even though it cut hard into the family finances.

The forum, which she joined in 1991, eased the stigma of going from legal eagle to mommy hen.

“The group has been such a tremendous support in terms of making the decision to stay home full time,” Heflin said. “When I joined, I thought, ‘Wow, there are other people--lawyers--out there doing the same thing.’ ”

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For Horlick, one of the group’s founding members, the forum has helped keep up her organizational skills and broaden a background previously focused on reviewing applications for exceptions to economic embargoes against such pariah nations as Libya and Cuba.

Since quitting that job, her work has been less arcane: She has tutored elementary school students and prepared a survey for local authorities on drug treatment centers hospitable to pregnant women and women with children.

The manner in which the survey was done--two other forum members helped--reflects the loose structure of the group, which has no president, just a steering committee that is supposed to have five members but currently has six.

“It’s a female model,” Horlick said. “We do not have to have any one person in charge, but everything gets done. If someone’s about to drop the ball, she calls somebody else who picks it up.”

At least half the members are working professionally in some capacity; about 30 have practices in their homes.

A motto for the group, Horlick suggested, could be: “Putting family first but not forever.”

The difficulties of lawyering and mothering simultaneously can be daunting.

Gould, the attorney with the view of her son’s elementary school, said she tries to fit her work around her children’s schedules.

“When it doesn’t fit--that’s the challenge. For example, I have a court date coming up and I have to figure out a backup plan if my son, who had strep and every other thing you can name last year, wakes up sick that day.”

Joanne Muir, who has boys ages 8, 6 and 5 (the first two planned and the third sent “to keep me humble”) has had to hide in her office closet with a cordless phone to blot out the background din.

Nancy Lawrence, an immigration lawyer, recalled putting a lock on the door of her home office, as well as employing a baby-sitter. “But my son would still lie on the floor next to the door and shout” while she tried to work.

Marsha Cohan, who works 40 to 50 hours a week arranging Asian joint ventures for American companies, uses a conference room downtown “as a sort of corporate facade” for meeting clients, she said.

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But other home-based lawyers said their informal image was actually an advantage.

Meeting around her dining room table “doesn’t seem to bother” her clients, who come from middle- and low-income groups, Danch said.

“There is a whole network of people who don’t feel comfortable going into a big lobby,” agreed Muir, who does contracts for small businesses and writes on environmental policy when she’s not caring for her three sons. “There is a market out there of people who like the ‘Oh, come to Mommy, Mommy will solve your problems,’ approach.”

Other advantages of home-based work are obvious. Joanne Pratt, head of a Dallas management consultant firm that did a survey for the Small Business Assn. last year, found that home-based workers “expressed greater job satisfaction” than those working outside.

Although Pratt had no absolute figures, she said 6% of a nationwide sample of women workers age 34 to 44 had home offices, a figure that is growing by “a few percent a year at least.”

A 1991 survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that 5.6 million self-employed people work at home, 2.1 million of them women.

“With present-day technology, the fact that you’re working at home is totally transparent,” Pratt said. “It’s definitely a growing trend, and the earthquake in California and the freezes in the Northeast and Midwest may speed it along.”

Staying home suits USC graduate Heflin, who works on the forum steering committee and looks forward to a “gradual re-entry” into paid work once Spencer, 3, and Jorman, 11 months, are both in school.

“I’m not saying someone else couldn’t do the same job with the kids, but I think I love them more and I wouldn’t want to miss out on anything,” she said, chatting in the kitchen while the baby napped and Spencer sang “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” in the background.

“It’s the most challenging, aggravating, rewarding experience I’ve ever had, and no other job I ever have will hold a candle to it.”