Being a mother and a lawyer is challenging enough, but doing it as the breadwinner takes an entirely different kind of courage. Suzanne Leslie, founder of Leslie Law Firm and once the “baby of the class” at Western State Law School, reveals how she built a thriving personal injury practice while raising two children and supporting an artist husband. In this conversation, she shares how she navigated a male-dominated firm with no female mentors, relied on family support to survive what she calls the “hamster wheel” of work and parenting, and focused on quality rather than quantity of time with her kids. Her story offers a practical blueprint for any lawyer-mom stepping into the breadwinner role and still wanting a meaningful family life.
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Lawyer, Mother, Healer: How Being A Personal Injury Attorney Prepared Me For Parenting
The Leslie Law Firm: A Journey Into Personal Injury Law
Thank you so much, Suzanne, for joining the show. We are so happy to have you here. Suzanne is the owner of an amazing law firm called the Leslie Law Firm. We’re thrilled to have you share not only about your success as a lawyer, which is so impressive, but also how you’ve managed to weave in being a successful mom into the mix. I would love to kick it off and have you share a little more about your firm and how you fell into the law, or hopefully, fell in love with the law.
Thank you for having me. I never wanted to be a lawyer, which is different. You go to law school. Some wanted to be a lawyer, and some went because, like me, they didn’t know what they wanted to do. I did love law school. I fell in love with the law in law school. I was quite young, so I was referred to as the baby of the class. It was interesting. When I went to law school, I went to Western State. It was back in the early ’80s. They had a very large part-time program. There were a lot of second-career people who would go to their classes either on the weekends or in the evenings. There were full-time students as well. It was definitely a mix of some little bit older, more established career people, and then some younger folks like myself.
Did you find that to be enriching, though, because you had the combination of people who were working and applying? I felt like that was part of what I had experienced as well.
Yes, because everybody thinks when you go to law school, that means you’re going to be in a courtroom all day, every day. What you learn from these people was that they were going to law school to maybe get a promotion within their own job or do different things within their own career that didn’t have a lot to do with the law, or they were never going to go into a courtroom. They may not even practice law, but law was going to be something that aided them in their current profession. When you’re younger, you don’t realize that. You think, “Everybody is going to go to law school. We’re all going to be in court every day. We’re going to be a district attorney or a public defender.”
We all walked in with that assumption, but you fell in love with it. Where did it take you after you finished?
I did an internship, or what we used to call. I was a law clerk during my second year of law school. They allow you to work. I worked at an insurance defense firm for a semester. It was not my cup of tea. I went to a firm called Allen & Flatt. They were actually a business litigation firm. I thought, “Let me see what that’s like.” Since I didn’t want to be a lawyer, I didn’t know the different aspects of the law. I went there because I had been a business major. I was interested in business. Shortly after I got there, the owner decided to market for some personal injury and expand the practice. He was a good marketer. Cases started to come in in the area of personal injury. He looked at me and was like, “Let’s figure out how to do this.” Fast forward 40 years, and I’m still there doing personal injuries.
You felt the calling.
I realized that I was going to have to go into some type of law that had to do with helping people and having personal interaction with people. That’s the personality I was born and raised to.
It sets you apart. I got that sense even before we met, when I was trying to figure out who you were on the planet. I was impressed by even the way you articulated how you help people. Coming in at a difficult time in their life is such a hard place to do it with that passion. It makes a big difference.
For all the jokes you hear around about attorneys in general, and then personal injury attorneys, who are even a little bit more special, it is. If people do take it seriously, you realize how much impact you can have on somebody’s life. They come into the office following an accident. They’re lost. They don’t know what to do. You can say, “I got this. Let me take this stress off of you. You focus on recovery from your injuries.” The client I meet at the beginning of their case is a different person at the end of their case. When you know that you’ve helped in that journey and that transition, it’s pretty special.
Motherhood And Law: Skills for Life’s Toughest Transitions
It feels exactly like motherhood in some ways. Do you think that those skills, that expertise that you’ve obviously acquired, doing that transition for many people, and some of the most difficult situations, helped you when you decided to bring children into the mix?
It’s interesting. I never thought of that, but absolutely. I wish I knew now, when I was raising my children. It comes with age. You’re a little bit wiser, a little bit more patient, and not so judgmental. That I have learned as I’ve gone through my career. Bringing up kids because they don’t know anything. You have to raise them and show them the right ways.
They come with problems.
It’s interesting. That’s a good analogy. It is definitely something.
I was in the doctor’s office with an older son. I heard a baby crying from getting shots, that terrifying shrill. I remember that when they were babies, the first shot. I thought, “God, that was like the end of the world, watching your child suffer.” I was like, “I could do that all day now.” That feels like something so much easier than the challenges you’ll have in raising these kids and transitioning.
The easy things were going to the doctor’s office for the checkup, the exam, or whatever.
They seemed hard at the time.
You feel like you’re the only one going through it.
You were young when you went to law school. You did not have children at the time when you were in school. At what point did you decide this is a great time to have kids?
I met my husband when I started my second year of law school. We were together through law school and through the bar exam. I went, “If somebody could stick with me through that, then maybe they’re a keeper.” We got married in my second year as an attorney. He was actually still in college. He was finishing up college still. We were not about to have any children. I’m very much the planner. It was like, “I will get married, and then we’re going to wait a while.” We were fortunate enough to be able to buy a house. We had our first.
Everybody thinks when you go to law school, you're going to be in a courtroom all day, every day. But that is not usually the case. Share on XWe’re going to wait until that one is almost in kindergarten or going to kindergarten before the next one, because I knew I was always going to have to work full-time. I love my husband. I married an artist, which, back in the late ’80s, didn’t equate to a career per se. I knew that I was the breadwinner of the family, which I was totally fine with. He was fine with it, which not all men are. I had to plan it so that I could feel like I could spend as much time as I could with him as my husband first, have the child, and then another one later.
The Breadwinner’s Blueprint: Planning Family And Career
I married a school teacher. I find it a luxury. I find this amongst a lot of female attorneys who have been able to marry people who aren’t huge income earners. I like to say it is based on the quality of their character rather than the financial contribution, but that certainly comes with some tension. I know you allude to that he was okay with it, but how do you help everybody be okay with it? Was it his personality, or is it something that you guys worked on?
It was his personality more than anything. He was an easygoing person. I don’t want to say he never took anything too seriously because that was a good quality in him. That wasn’t a negative quality by any means. It was a conversation that we had to have because I knew that if I was going to do something, I was going to give 110%. While we were dating, while we were in law school, or even after law school and first year as an attorney, I wasn’t around that much. He had to be okay with that. You test the waters. We dated for almost four years before we got married.
Those were the hard things.
It’s like, “This is either going to work, or it isn’t going to work.” I know myself. I’m going to have to give 110% at work all the time. I’m in a very challenging career where women were not attorneys yet. There weren’t too many of us.
You were paving the way at that point.
He never questioned it. As I said, it’s okay. This might work.
He was embracing that. I love your plan. It sounds like it’s orderly. I had three kids in three years intentionally, but it happened. That was a different way to do it. With the planned approach, did he take responsibility? How did you guys work out that aspect of it?
Interestingly enough, he was a good helper in little ways. I felt like I still had a lot of the responsibility of getting up in the middle of the night, taking them to school, and doing a lot of those things. Not that we didn’t co-parent, but he did all the little things. We had a daughter first. When I had to get everything done on the weekends, he would be the one who would go take her, go to the park, and give me the time that I needed to get the house in order to do your typical laundry and groceries.
It's okay to give to other people. Share on XWe were never in a financial position where we could have a nanny or anything. Having a nanny back then wasn’t a thing that you heard that much about. I don’t think there were as many women in the workforce, per se. We also had great family support. My mom and dad watched the kids a couple of times a week. They went to daycare a few times a week. I was fine with that because they always were around other kids, whether they were little at the time, the whole YMCA thing, and all of that after-school stuff. He was always very helpful in the little ways.
Those things matter. When you first had your daughter, what was that like for you as you started to absorb how this might affect your ability to practice law in the way that you were doing? You were already in a space where you’re forging ahead. There are a few years between our getting out of law school. It was even different then. What was that like for you?
I worked in a firm where, number one, they never had a female attorney. I was expected to work more and be there more. When I had my daughter, it was like, “I’ve been working twelve-plus hours a day.” I’ve been doing this for probably seven years by then that I’d been with the firm. I said, “I won’t do this anymore because I’m a mom now. My career is super important to me, but so is me being a good mom too.”
It cut the hours down a little bit. I’ve always been a very efficient worker. I felt like you could do a lot of the same amount of work, but then you squeezed it into a shorter period of time. When 5:00 came, I had to leave. I had to pick her up from daycare. Even if she was at my parents’ house, there was respect for my parents’ time. A lot of time on the road, though.
Breaking Barriers: A Woman In Law And Motherhood
The efficiency thing is huge. We have noticed even in our own firm that there is no more efficient attorney than one who is hoping, trying, working through how to take care of their children, and being present with them. The fact that you were doing that then, without the support, without other women in the firm, who was your go-to to help support you in saying it’s okay to say, “I want to be a super attorney and a super mom. This is how it’s going to look.” I only feel confident saying that because I have the support of people saying, “Yes, you should do that.”
It probably was more my mom and my dad. It was my parents more than anything. I didn’t have a female mentor attorney because they weren’t around. I have friends I went to law school with. After law school, as we all do, you go off and start doing your own thing. A couple of them got married, but they didn’t have children. My mom was a you-can-do-it-all. I can also say that when you do it all, and I would never change anything, it’s all about work, and it’s all about the kid. There’s very little you-time. My husband and I would carve out that us time and again, having parents around who could watch it, so we can have a date night or something. There wasn’t a lot of Suzanne’s time.
The “Me Time” Myth: Finding Balance In The Hamster Wheel Of Life
How was that, though? I feel like that’s a suffering that a lot of women still feel. Is there a point when you start finding that again? When you look back, do you think, “Maybe I could squeeze it in,” where it might have helped you absorb some of the hard impacts of being a mom and a lawyer?
It’s a hard question only because when you’re going through it, you feel like you have no me-time. I look back, and I probably had more of it than I thought. I’m trying to carve out a little time on the weekend to go do something that I like to do. When my daughter was five, I had my son. There were five years apart. You did it again. There was a period of time when it’s like, “Now, I can go to the gym, or I can do that.” I do a lot of different things for myself, but I have very little of that. That was okay because I’m not a selfish person, which also helps. There’s nothing wrong with being selfish.
I’ve never figured that one out.
I’m not a selfish person. I’m a giver. It’s okay to give to other people. We would carve out a date night or a bike ride. I’d take a walk, walk with the baby, or something like that. I have to be honest. There wasn’t a lot of me time.
It’s difficult to imagine life without family support. Share on XI don’t think there’s a lot of me time, but I feel like a lot of people are in that space. You get overwhelmed. It sounds like you had an amazing family support. I’m curious if you’d credit them with helping your mental health state in the right place. Sometimes, you don’t have that kind of support or that kind of help. It’s harder to restore yourself.
It is. I used to call it the hamster wheel. I was the hamster on the wheel all day, every day. Back then, I can tell you, I slept well and hard because you’re exhausted at the end of the day. It’s funny because now I have me-time as much as I want. I’m a horrible sleeper. Isn’t that funny? At night, I was a hard sleeper.
They were mental exhaustion and decision fatigue.
Family is everything. Being able to have both my husband’s family and my family close was critical. I don’t know how women, men, or families do it without family support.
It’s hard. It adds a new layer of complexity, and then finding those people whom you can trust and who you can also break down. That’s the part that you can break down in front of. They help you pick your pieces back up together because it’s going to happen. For those out there who are like, “This seems so easy,” all of us felt like that. I felt, “How hard could this be?” You then get slapped in the face like, “This is way harder.” Before you had your daughter, were you like, “This is not going to be a big deal?” You’re a planner, though, so maybe you were not.
I always had that attitude of I can handle anything. My daughter did not sleep at night very well at all. I’d be up in the middle of the night. I would pray, “My God, would you please? I need you.” It sounded like mom of the year. You feed her, and then you put her in the swing. Nope, I’d doze off and then wake up. Her eyes were bright as can be, having a little good time. I always used to laugh about that because I said, “God, you don’t sleep at all.” In the scheme of things, that’s only such a short period of time.
It’s hard to go to work the next day. That’s the hardest part. It’s fine to be up all night. That’s why there’s some gender variation, because they want all of that. If you are the breadwinner and you are the person who is going to be doing the work, doing that with three hours of sleep is hard.
I used to have friends say, or my mom would say to me, “Just have your husband get up.” I’m going to lie there anyway because he’s not going to do it.
As much as they want in a certain way, they can try as hard as they want. It’s a fascinating phenomenon. I don’t know if it’s innate in human beings, but this is how it’s worked in our family, too.
I look back, and we talked about this. You blink your eyes, and they’re older. I would go back, and I don’t know if I would do any of it differently, but I always said, “I’m going to remember their first steps. I’m going to remember this. I’m going to remember that. I don’t need to write it down.” I can’t remember any of it. That’s so sad.
You blink your eyes and your kids are older. Share on XI love the question. My kids will say, “When did I get my first tooth?” I’m like, “I don’t know, but you got them. I don’t know the date.” The things we do remember, especially if we weren’t there for every single moment, every mom has them. You felt that fulfillment of, “This is working out.” Do you have anyone who pops out in your memory where you felt joy?
Being Father’s Day, my daughter and husband were talking. They used to spend more time together than I realized. When I said he would do things on the weekends, he used to always video us back in the camcorder days. We video her all the time. We watched some of those. He follows her around the house. They always talk about how when she was two, she always wanted her room to be moved around. “I want my bed over here now. I want this. I want to change the color.” Little did we know, 30 years later, she was going to be an interior designer. That’s all she has ever wanted to do her whole life. They joke about that.
Some of the things that I remember are that I’d come home, and we moved a room around again. It’s the little things, the connection, and the little stories. You’ll mention something when you’re talking, because my kids are grown adults now, and you go back and say, “When you were little, blah, blah, blah.” She would go, “I don’t remember that. Tell me all about that.” I don’t remember the first tooth, but I do remember the small things, the things that they like to do, like putting on the little Pocahontas dress. She loved the Titanic and singing the song from the Titanic by the mantle of the fireplace, little stuff like that.
Those are the joys.
It’s quality time. Another thing is that’s the difference. The time that you do spend is quality time. It’s a little time, so you make the best of it.
Raising Future Leaders: A Lawyer’s Approach To Parenting
The intentionality behind our time makes it different. I feel like this with you as well. I don’t know if it’s a lawyer trait or if it’s who we are, too, but we get to the depth quickly, even with my kids in conversation. We don’t have a lot of time, but we do want to connect. Navigating that with your kids, do you have any advice, even with your grown children, because you’re still a busy, successful attorney?
I’m still working full-time.
You’re still working hard.
We’re trained, you and I, to see both sides of everything. That’s one thing that used to drive my kids crazy a little bit, because “Mom, this is my side or this is my side of the story.” “Did you think about how that might have made them feel? Did you think that maybe this was the situation that was going on?” That used to drive them crazy. They say now they love that. A lot of times, something would be going on that they thought was going on, but it was something different.
Especially when you’re younger, you only have your view. The one thing they say as they’re older is that they loved how I used to share more than one view. It didn’t mean I didn’t support them because I would always support whatever their view was. Did you think about somebody else’s feelings or somebody else’s different view? My son should be an attorney because he can argue with the best of them.
He learned that from you.
Sometimes, he’ll say, “I learned that from you.” I said, “It does not always have to be an argument. It’s just a point of view.”
It doesn't always have to be an argument; it's just a point of view. Share on XIt’s how to manage a conflict, even. I love these observations, where a lot of our expensive legal training has helped us be better parents. That’s a solid one. Are there any others that you feel like, “I’m catching myself luring my kids?”
It was always when the kids were in school, you drop them off, and then you don’t see them again. When you have an open house or a parent-teacher conference, we’ve talked about the guilt of not being there for all the little moments. I would go into the classroom. They’d go, “You’re Kelsey’s mom or Shane’s mom. Your daughter, or your son, talks about you all the time. They always talk about how you’re a lawyer and how you help people every day. They’re so proud of you.” Whenever that situation happened often, I would go back and go, “Maybe I’m not the bad mom.”
They see you.
They understand what I do. They care about what I do. They’re proud of me.
That’s worth it. That’s a little fulfillment in there.
That’s a little gem, where you’re like, “Tomorrow, I’ll get up and I’ll do it all over again. Me not being there 24/7 with them, they’re seeing it still.” When they were in school, those types of things would come up either from a parent, another parent, or a teacher. It was something that was always pretty special.
My daughter told her teacher I was a baker. I have a long way to go. I do love to bake. It’s interesting how they’ve evolved over time to know. It is an impressive thing, though, that your children conveyed that so clearly to everybody who would listen.
Important Links
About Suzanne Leslie
Suzanne Leslie, is the owner attorney of the Leslie Law Firm who began her legal journey with a priceless education from her father, a claims administrator who taught her firsthand what it takes to win a case.
She’s taken those lessons to heart, building a reputation for an incredibly strong work ethic and dedication that’s earned her a spot on numerous prestigious lists, including Super Lawyer Honorary and Elite Lawyer.
As a managing partner, Suzanne has created a firm environment that’s less “stuffy law office” and more “family-like refuge,” which explains why so many clients are eager to refer their friends and family.
A devoted wife for over 35 years and a proud mother of two grown children, Suzanne knows a thing or two about juggling a demanding career with the responsibilities of family life.
She brings that same passion and nurturing spirit she has for her own family to her clients, making sure they feel safe and cared for during some of the most challenging times of their lives.
When she’s not busy being a successful lawyer, you can find her cheering on the Angels and Ducks, hitting the links, or staying active with fitness-related activities. She’s a true champion both in and out of the courtroom!
