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As a junior partner wanting to expand my department during the nineties and noughties, maternity leaves were a positive benefit as the resistance to recruitment I encountered when I was perceived to be "empire building", miraculously disappeared when it became recruitment to cover maternity leaves.
We have a wide variation in working patterns in my firm and a number of very talented lawyers who almost certainly would have been lost to the profession had they not been able to work round their families needs.