’There may never be a perfect time’: Building a law firm with young children

By Tuesday, just four days after giving birth, she was back in court for an urgent interim defended hearing.

“Looking back now, I think, Melanie, what on earth were you doing?” she told Lawyers Weekly.

At the time, Vairawanathan had only recently launched Melmark Law and felt an enormous responsibility to the firm she was trying to build.

“My name was on the door. These were my clients. They had trusted me with some of the most important moments of their lives, and I felt an enormous responsibility to them and to this firm I had just created,” she said.

Vairawanathan, founder and principal lawyer at Melmark Law, had launched the firm in 2022 and found out she was pregnant shortly afterwards.

“It was absolute chaos, if I’m being completely truthful,” she said.

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“I had just taken probably the biggest professional risk of my life and started Melmark Law, and shortly afterwards, I found out I was pregnant with my first child.

“So I was building a law firm and becoming a mum almost simultaneously.”

At the same time, Renee Roumanos was embarking on a similarly significant professional and personal juggling act.

Roumanos, principal solicitor and founder of Renee Roumanos Legal, started her firm when her son was two years old and her daughter was just six months old.

Having previously been in an in-house legal role she loved at Qantas before losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic, starting her own practice was not part of some carefully constructed career plan.

“I took the leap of faith,” Roumanos said. “There was no grand plan.”

What followed for both women were years spent building businesses while raising young children – an experience that has reshaped not only the way they work, but what ambition, leadership, and success look like to them.

When two worlds collide

For Vairawanathan, there was no blueprint for simultaneously establishing a firm and becoming a first-time mother.

She was bringing in clients, running matters, appearing in court, building the Melmark Law brand and beginning to assemble a team while preparing for an enormous change in her personal life.

Pregnancy also forced her to confront a question earlier than she otherwise might have: what would happen to Melmark Law when she was not available?

“When I started Melmark Law, I think I assumed I would personally do almost everything for much longer,” Vairawanathan said.

“Then pregnancy put a very real deadline on that business model.”

Vairawanathan hired Landi Freyer during the peak of her pregnancy – a decision that felt enormous at the time, but which she now considers pivotal to the firm’s growth.

“I remember being heavily pregnant and making what felt like an enormous hiring decision at the time because I knew that if Melmark was going to become what I wanted it to become, I needed to start building a team around me,” she said.

Pregnancy, she said, pushed her to hire, delegate, develop systems, and, perhaps most importantly, trust other people with a business that was intensely personal to her.

“So no, pregnancy didn’t make me scale back my plans,” she said.

“If anything, it made my plans bigger. I stopped thinking about how much work I could do and started thinking about what kind of firm we could build.”

For Roumanos, building from the ground up with two young children brought its own competing demands.

“Being a lawyer and business owner does not switch off at 5:00pm, and being a mum does not switch off at school drop-off,” she said.

“Both roles carry constant responsibilities and competing priorities.”

In the early years, that could mean asking herself: “Do I go to the teddy bears’ picnic, or attend the client meeting, or somehow try to do both?”

At times, she tried the latter.

Roumanos recounts watching her child play soccer while reading emails, only to realise that although she was physically there, she was not truly present.

Eventually, she accepted that she could not do both at exactly the same time.

“It was a very real juggle, and it still is,” she said.

“The difference now is that I am more accepting of the fact that I cannot be everything to everyone at exactly the same time.”

Vairawanathan has reached much of the same conclusion.

“The hardest part isn’t actually the hours. It’s the collision between two worlds that don’t particularly care what the other one has scheduled,” she said.

“A toddler doesn’t care that Mama has court in the morning. And the court doesn’t care that Mama has been awake half the night with a toddler.”

Then there is the guilt.

“I’ve sat at work thinking, I should be with [my child] Malakai,” she said.

“I’ve been with Malakai and caught myself thinking about a matter at work.

“That’s probably been harder than any business challenge.”

She has since let go of the idea that balance means every part of her life receives an equal share of her every day.

“There are days when Melmark Law gets almost all of me. There are days when Malakai does,” she said.

“I’ve come to realise that, for me, balance isn’t something I achieve every day. It’s something I try to achieve across a life.”

When life doesn’t follow the business plan

For boutique firm owners, the collision between those worlds can become particularly stark when the support structures keeping everything moving suddenly fall away.

Roumanos experienced that in extraordinary circumstances when, in November 2022, only months after starting her firm, her family home burnt down.

She suddenly found herself trying to manage clients, multiple legal deadlines, two young children, and significant personal trauma.

“I genuinely did not know how I could manage,” she said.

What got her through was not pretending that nothing had happened. Instead, Roumanos was open with her clients about the fire, what she could realistically manage and when their work would be completed.

“It was the honesty that got me through and helped me form authentic connections with my clients, who do feel like family,” she said.

“That experience taught me that clients do not expect us to be robots. When we communicate clearly and genuinely, most people respond with understanding and compassion.”

It also changed the way she understood resilience.

“Sometimes resilience is being honest enough to say, ‘This is what I can manage today’,” she said.

That experience, coupled with motherhood, has made Roumanos more empathetic as both a lawyer and a firm owner.

Losing her home also gave her a different understanding of what clients are experiencing when they come to a lawyer during one of the most difficult periods of their lives.

For Vairawanathan, becoming a parent similarly changed the way she approached her work as a family lawyer.

“Becoming a mother gave me another level of understanding of what is at stake when someone is talking about their child,” she said.

“You can understand something intellectually as a lawyer. Becoming a parent can make you understand it viscerally.”

It has also changed her perspective on urgency.

“Not everything is a crisis. Not every email needs to be answered immediately. Not every problem deserves the same amount of energy,” she said.

Building firms around real lives

Motherhood has had a tangible impact on how both women have structured their firms.

Vairawanathan said becoming a mum made her a “much more human employer”.

“I still have incredibly high expectations. We’re lawyers. Our clients trust us with enormously important things, and excellence is non-negotiable,” she said.

“But I no longer confuse excellence with presenteeism.”

Melmark Law office manager Linda Ho, for example, works three days from home, while lawyer Xara Storey’s working arrangements accommodate school drop-offs and pick-ups for her nephew.

For Vairawanathan, the latter is particularly important because flexibility should not only be available to people who fit a narrow definition of what family responsibility looks like.

“If someone is an exceptional lawyer or an exceptional member of our team, I don’t believe they should have to choose between doing great work and showing up for the people they love,” she said.

“I want people to have careers at Melmark Law, but I also want them to have lives.”

Roumanos has taken a similar approach. She deliberately hired women who understood the competing demands of being lawyers and mothers, and said one of the best decisions she made was building a team around trust and flexibility.

Her longest-serving team member, Annette Wahhab, is a lawyer and mother of four who works hybrid and flexible hours around her family.

“Flexibility does not reduce professionalism or performance,” Roumanos said.

“In my experience, it strengthens loyalty, commitment and the quality of the workplace.”

She has also tried to create a firm where people do not have to “pretend they do not have families in order to be taken seriously as lawyers”.

That philosophy extends to clients.

Roumanos has a creche in her office, along with snacks, toys, and colouring activities, so clients can feel comfortable bringing their children to appointments.

It began because she wanted her own children to feel safe and welcome at “Mummy’s office”. Although, she conceded, her clients’ children generally behave considerably better than hers.

“My children treat the office like Kmart’s toy section and happily boss everyone around while requesting cheese and crackers,” she said.

Nobody actually does it all

For both founders, one of the biggest lessons has been accepting that successfully combining motherhood and firm ownership does not mean doing every part of either alone.

“The biggest lesson has been accepting that nobody actually does it all,” Vairawanathan said.

“I think we need to be much more honest about that, particularly when we talk about successful women.

“There is usually an entire ecosystem behind a woman who appears to be ‘doing it all’.”

For Vairawanathan, that ecosystem includes her partner, family, and the team at Melmark Law.

It has also required her to rethink delegation.

“When you’ve built something yourself, delegation can be incredibly difficult. You think, I’ll just do it. It’s quicker. I know how I want it done,” she said.

“But eventually, that mentality becomes the ceiling on your business.”

She once viewed being indispensable as evidence she was doing something right. Now, she sees leadership differently.

“I’ve had to learn that leadership isn’t being the person who does everything.

“It’s finding brilliant people, trusting them, giving them ownership and allowing them to grow,” she said.

Roumanos has reached a similar conclusion.

A capable administration team and long-serving assistant have been crucial, while her husband, Bruno Altamore, has also become an integral part of Renee Roumanos Legal.

After being made redundant from his employer a few months after the family home burnt down, Altamore joined the business and now manages accounts, the team, administration, marketing, and many of its operational responsibilities.

“Every business owner needs a trusted right-hand person who can manage the day-to-day operations and prevent everything from resting on the principal’s shoulders,” Roumanos said.

“Boutique firm owners are often celebrated individually, but there is usually an entire support system standing behind their success.”

Rethinking ambition

Perhaps one of the biggest changes for both women has been in how they define ambition itself.

Vairawanathan remains emphatically ambitious about Melmark Law.

She wants the firm to grow, to be commercially successful, to attract exceptional lawyers and to challenge some of the traditional ideas about what a law firm needs to look like.

“I don’t apologise for wanting those things just because I’m a mother,” she said.

But the measure of success has expanded.

“I don’t want to build an extraordinary firm and miss the extraordinary little life happening at home while I’m doing it,” she said.

“I don’t want Malakai to grow up knowing that his mama built a successful law firm but wondering where she was.”

Success, for Vairawanathan, now also means freedom.

It is being able to spend an afternoon with her son without the firm falling apart, seeing the people she has hired grow with the business, and creating careers for others without requiring them to sacrifice the people and responsibilities that matter outside work.

“I still want to build something extraordinary,” she said.

“I just don’t believe I should have to sacrifice everything extraordinary in my life to do it.”

Roumanos echoed that sentiment.

As her firm grew, she also created Conveyancing Mastery, an education platform through which she shares practical lessons, systems and risk-management strategies developed through running her practice.

Launching another venture added yet another dimension to the juggle, but it also reinforced something important for Roumanos.

“I did not want motherhood to reduce my ambition,” she said.

“I wanted it to make me more intentional about where I directed that ambition.”

‘Exhaustion isn’t evidence of ambition’

Asked what she wishes she had understood when she was first trying to navigate a new firm and new motherhood simultaneously, Vairawanathan’s answer is immediate.

“I wish I’d known that exhaustion isn’t evidence of ambition,” she said.

When she thinks about the woman drafting an affidavit from a hospital bed two days after giving birth, part of her remains incredibly proud.

“She was determined. She was resilient. She was probably slightly crazy,” she said. “But I also want to give her a hug.”

Looking back, Vairawanathan believes part of her was trying to prove that having a baby had changed nothing.

“I wish I’d known I didn’t have to prove that,” she said.

“Having a child did change me. And that’s OK.

“It didn’t make me less capable. It didn’t make me less ambitious. And it certainly didn’t make me less committed to Melmark Law. It actually made me a better leader.”

Roumanos’ advice to her earlier self is similarly practical: delegate sooner, prioritise time sooner, learn to say no, and accept that burnout is real.

“You can be a mum, a lawyer and a business owner, but you cannot personally perform every role within the business and the home without eventually burning out,” she said.

For lawyers with young children who are contemplating establishing their own firms, neither woman pretends there is an easy formula for making it work. But nor do they believe parenthood should automatically be a reason to wait.

“There may never be a perfect time,” Vairawanathan said.

“There will always be a reason to wait.”

Her own experience was hardly a textbook business plan: she started a firm, became pregnant shortly afterwards, hired a key member of her team while heavily pregnant, and returned to court days after giving birth. Yet she believes motherhood did not derail the firm.

“Motherhood helped create the Melmark Law that exists today,” she said.

“You may have to build differently. You may need more support than you imagined. You will have days where one part of your life wins, and the other has to wait.

“And your version of success might look completely different to the traditional law firm model. But different does not mean less ambitious.”

Roumanos’ message is much the same.

“You can do both, but you do not have to do every part of both alone,” she said.

Perhaps now, years removed from that hospital bed, Vairawanathan has the clearest measure of how much her own thinking has changed.

“The lesson isn’t that I was capable of working two days after giving birth,” she said.

“The lesson is that I needed to build a firm where I would never have to do that again.”