The law firm founder talks remote work, billable hours, and how a diagnosis shifted her priorities
In 2021, Jessica Chapman was raising two small children, plugging away at the medium-sized law firm she’d worked at for more than a decade, and on the brink of making partner when she realized it was time for a change.
Chapman left BOYNECLARKE LLP, the Dartmouth, Nova Scotia firm where she’d more or less spent the entirety of her career since graduating from law school and launched Chapman Family Law. At first, it was just Chapman and a single assistant. Within months, however, demand had grown to the point where she needed to hire other lawyers. Now that she was in charge, Chapman had a great opportunity before her: to provide that staff with the tools and work conditions she had yearned for but did not always get as a lawyer.
“When I worked at a bigger firm – and I think this is the case for a lot of bigger firms – it was lawyers in offices, often with their doors closed… and women [in support roles] chained to their cubicles from nine to five every day, regardless of whether the lawyer they were working for was even there,” Chapman says.
After the pandemic ushered in remote work on a mass scale, inflexibility about where people could and couldn’t work made less and less sense to Chapman, especially for working mothers. But it also made little sense in family law, her firm’s specialty.
“Day in, day out… I'm in conflict with my client, I'm in conflict with the court, I'm in conflict with my opposing party,” Chapman says. “I'm hearing about the worst possible intimate partner violence that you can think of. I'm hearing about awful child abuse and sexual abuse. I'm hearing allegations of awful things happening in front of children, to children.
“When you are being exposed to that day in, day out, and then are more or less told to go back to your desk and just keep billing, it provides for a culture that is not sustainable and causes mental health issues, causes all this alcoholism, all of this unrest and this attrition.”
Chapman Family Law comprises four lawyers, two paralegals, and an office manager, all of whom are women. Everyone works from home – a permanent arrangement that Chapman hopes will foster work-life balance and stave off burnout in an emotionally draining field.
However, the firm also boasts other policies to advance these goals. Chapman set each lawyer’s billable hours at 1,100 a year—a requirement that’s “remarkably” lower and more realistic than what she has seen at other firms. Recently, she’s also made herself “completely available” to mentor the lawyers at her firm, prioritizing providing guidance and fielding voice notes, phone calls, or messages about files and client strategy.
“I experienced some really valuable mentorship that I don't want to discount while I was a junior lawyer,” says Chapman. “But I can count many, many occasions where I wished a lawyer was in their office that I didn't feel like I was bugging, that I could knock on the door and say, ‘Hey, do you have a couple minutes to discuss this case? Do you have a couple minutes to discuss this call I just had with this client or this strategy on this file?’
“Certainly, I did have the opportunity to do that at times,” Chapman adds. “But it felt like I was sometimes burdening them with my questions because they themselves had a busy practice and a busy schedule, and I was trying to catch them in between client meetings or calls or court appearances.”
Chapman’s current availability was recently forged. Last year, after leaving a settlement conference in court, Chapman went to get her hair cut. During her appointment, she received three missed calls, all from the QEII in Halifax, telling her she needed to go to the hospital immediately. Chapman had been diagnosed with leukemia.
Chapman was 36 years old; her children were three and six. “My whole life was flipped upside down,” she says.
Since her diagnosis, Chapman has gone through four rounds of chemotherapy, during which the other members of her firm “didn't skip a beat, all stepped up to take over my busy practice at the time, and made clients aware,” she says. Chapman is now in remission. “I joked later that if this [were] a movie [and] I was getting my hair cut, the narrator would have said, ‘She would not have hair that summer.’ Which I did not,” Chapman says.
She’s also changed her role at the firm. She cut out most of her legal practice, pivoting to focus on supporting her employees and managing the firm. While her diagnosis directly prompted this change, Chapman says practising less and managing more had already been her aim pre-cancer. Her health accelerated the transition.
Chapman clarifies that she is earning less money now than she was before the diagnosis, when she was billing more hours. She believes, though, that the firm’s current direction is “healthier, more long-term, and more sustainable.”
“I've decided not to go back to a full-time practice and really dedicate myself to making sure that everybody is happy, that everybody feels balanced, feels supported, and feels mentored, because I know that it will end up with less turnover, that they'll be less likely to want to leave the practice of family law like I've seen so many women do,” Chapman says. She adds that she believes her firm’s culture will attract more talent.
“Law firms are experiencing a labour shortage, and there's a younger generation of lawyers that have different priorities than the generation before them,” Chapman says.
Chapman grew up on the south shore of Nova Scotia, in the St. Margarets Bay area. After studying psychology and gender studies at Mount Allison University, she returned to Nova Scotia to study law at Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law.
At Schulich, she spent a semester at the Dalhousie Legal Aid Program, supporting legal aid lawyers and getting exposure to real-life cases. It was there that she first encountered family law.
“I realized what kind of difference you can make as a family lawyer and what kind of intimate relationships you really have with your clients,” Chapman says.
After years of practising in the field, her focus has turned to how she can support lawyers who do that work.
“Our hope, from a macro perspective, is to cause a trickle effect within the industry,” she says.
“The more that a younger generation has options like our firm… the more that I'm hoping that these bigger firms will say, ‘Okay, we're going to have to adopt a new model, a new culture, because this way that we've been doing things is not going to get us the best talent that's out there.
“That’s our other big picture, is hoping that slowly over time, we can be part of making a change.”
