Biglaw 8th year. Three kids. Still billing. Still alive (barely).

I was a physics major before law school, so I tend to think in systems. Feedback loops, entropy, conservation laws—you get the idea. And one thing I’ve noticed in Biglaw: a ton of brilliant, capable women here are quietly opting out of reproduction. Not delaying. Opting out.

Yes, we make money. Yes, we’re “independent.” But are we winning?

Please read below—continuing in comments.

Personally, I’ve opted for no kids and no big law and it’s awesome.

I’m honestly appalled at the seeming insinuation that women without children don’t have the same level of meaning or joy in their lives as those who do and/or that they will regret their choices.

There were a few years in my early 20s when I thought I might procreate, but when I was truly introspective about it, I only wanted to have children because the message that I was getting from society was that it was what I was supposed to (I do not disregard that there’s a biological component to that, of course).

Fast forward: after years of exploring life and the world, relationships, college, law school, a couple of decades in Biglaw, when my gynecologist told me my hormone levels were such that I couldn’t get pregnant, the first words out of my mouth, truly impulsively, were “I made it!” So if I’d ever had any doubts…the look on my doctors face was priceless .

Physics, chemistry, and biology don’t change, but societal functions aren’t fixed. Perhaps more women, and at even younger ages, are taking a critical view of what has long been dictated as their role in society and saying “ no thanks!”

I’m in my early 50s now with a full life, the firm is my job, not my life, and no regrets. I may concede that I’m a bit of an outlier for women my age, many of whom thought they HAD TO have children, but I hear so many younger women these days saying out loud the things that I was only thinking when I was younger. The societal system can shift in spite of the immutable truths of physics, chemistry, and biology.

Might such a shift eventually lead to stagnation or devolution or extinction? If monumental enough, sure, but that’s definitely a question for another day. In the meantime, plenty of women can eschew the historical sociological patterns with full knowledge of the realities of science and lead happy and regret free lives.

Associate 8, no one said everyone should be a parent. OP is describing biological constraints, not moral mandates. Physics and chemistry don’t care about your plans, feelings, or anecdotes. Systems degrade regardless of how ready you are.

I just want to know how you’re doing it! lol and if you think they’ll make you partner?

I do think that biglaw should offer unpaid leave and to come back with a class cut and that’ll be fine. I have two kids and also in biglaw but prob gonna quit soon cuz I just want to be there for them and spend more time with them but I also think after a few years when they are older I could have more time to work again but it’s near impossible to revisit biglaw at that point or maybe even any law job??? Who knows but we’ll see.

Associate 11,

Because I’m smarter than all the male attorneys I work with.

I automated almost everything, checklists, redlines, documents - using Python and Power Automate. They think I work fast. Really, I just built systems that work for me.

Least energy, most output. That’s the game.

As for partnership, many people with that title have the money but no children. From a physics perspective, that’s stored energy with no transmission. The system ends there.

What does your wife do? Do you have a wife that carries the majority of the load? These women likely do not

Associate 21,

You keep citing “the humanities,” but if you’d actually read the original post, you’d realize it wasn’t prescribing behavior, it was modeling cost and value distribution in law firms.

It wasn’t about “having kids because you should.” It was: do the tradeoffs net out over time?

That’s not ideology. That’s systems thinking. You missed the question and the math.

So maybe the issue isn’t that science doesn’t map to irrational actors. Maybe it’s that you skipped both the question and the rational part.

Looks like the humanities didn’t help much with reading comprehension either.

Thanks for your message, Associate 19. A few others have DMed me too. I’ll respond to a couple directly, but I really encourage people to post in the main forum. Don’t worry about whether your response gets a heart or an emoji. Kids still look better than emojis. Snark moves faster than insight here, but that’s not a reason to keep your thinking to yourself.

Yes, I’m on partner track. But I’ve also automated most of what I do. Power Automate, Python, Boomerang for Outlook. If you’re in transactional work and not using automation, you’re basically giving away your time for free. Happy to walk through some setups if that’s helpful to others.

For reading, Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows is the best place to start. No math. Just patterns. It will completely change how you think about time, feedback loops, tradeoffs, and whether something is truly sustainable.

Gödel, Escher, Bach is also brilliant. The Gödel sections are more abstract, mostly symbolic recursion and logic puzzles. Skim those if they’re not clicking. But the Escher and Bach parts are surprisingly intuitive. They help you start to see structure underneath complexity. That’s the point. The more you see structure, the less you get pulled into surface-level decisions. You stop asking “should I do X or Y” and start asking “how is this system even wired?”

And that’s where Feynman comes in. I’ll post more about this soon, but the idea behind a Feynman integral is that you don’t just look at the straight line between A and B. You sum over every possible path and ask which ones actually mattered. That one shift changed physics forever. And you don’t need to understand the equations to apply the thinking. It helps you realize that what feels like a loss today may be part of a much better path when you zoom out.

This kind of thinking won’t give you a to-do list. But it can save you years of chasing the wrong thing. I’ll post the full write-up soon.

Thanks again for the thoughtful message. You’re asking the questions that actually lead somewhere.

F