Career Growth Advice from Miriam Airington-Fisher, Criminal Defense Attorney and Law Firm Founder | Career Tips for Women in Law
2B Bolder Podcast – Episode 143
Featuring Miriam Airington-Fisher
Episode Title: #143 Miriam Airington-Fisher From Courtroom Chaos To A Family-First Firm
Host: Mary Killelea
Guest: Miriam Airington-Fisher
Mary Killelea (Host): Hi there, my name is Mary Killelea. Welcome to the 2B Bolder podcast, providing career insights for the next generation of women in business and tech. 2B Bolder was created out of my love for technology and marketing, my desire to bring together like-minded women, and my hope to be a great role model and source of inspiration for my two girls and other young women like you. Encouraging you guys to show up and to be bolder and to know that anything you guys dream of, it's totally possible. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation.
Hi there. So what if your career you've worked out your whole life suddenly no longer fits your lifestyle? That's the crossroads today's guest, Miriam Airington-Fisher, faced. A successful criminal defense attorney, a new mom, and suddenly a single parent. The long hours, constant travel, and unrelenting court schedule weren't exciting anymore. They were actually overwhelming. But instead of walking away from the work she loved, Miriam reimagined it. She built her own law firm from the ground up, one that thrives in the courtroom and makes space for its team to thrive at home. Today, she's a lawyer, entrepreneur, mom of three, and the force behind a family-friendly firm that proves success in law doesn't have to come at the expense of family life. Thank you Miriam for being here because I think it's such a relevant topic today that we cover for young women who are looking at building careers and are stressed about can they have it all. So let's dive in and have you talk about kind of how you started and that journey of feeling. I think you know the overwhelm of navigating the career and building your career.
Miriam Airington-Fisher (Guest): Yeah, thank you so much for having me and I agree it is a relevant topic. The reason I know that is because I still get questions from women that are much earlier in their careers. I was speaking at an event recently and a woman came up to me afterwards and she was like 22 and she actually said, "I don't even have a boyfriend yet, but I know someday I'm going to want to have a family and I'm looking around my office and everybody's working all the time and I just don't know how my what my future is going to look like." So, I do think it's a very relevant topic. I think it is still a concern still largely for women. So, I love every opportunity to share my story if for no other reason so people can learn from my mistakes and have an easier time of it than I did.
Mary Killelea: That's so great because that really is the point of this show is for us women who have gone the path before others to share our wisdom. So, take me back to kind of when you started out in your career and kind of walk me through you know, I guess the shifts from different companies that you worked at to the ultimate point where you said, "Okay, this needs to change. It's not sustainable."
Miriam Airington-Fisher: So, I wanted to be a lawyer for a long time. I'm one of those people who wanted to be a lawyer when I was a little girl watching courtroom dramas. So my law career really was a dream come true. And I went through college and law school and did my internships and my clerkships. Really passionate about the idea of being a lawyer, specifically a trial lawyer. In law school, I did a lot of work both in the immigration space and also in the criminal dis defense space. When I came out of law school, it was during the Great Recession, actually. So, I didn't quite have my pick of jobs. You know, the way that sometimes we think we're going to when we're in school. I started at legal aid and I was doing a lot of family law, a lot of landlord tenant law, kind of a mixed bag, but representing people in really dire situations and a lot of litigation, going to court 5 days a week. I gained a lot of experience there, but really I felt my passion really was doing criminal defense at that point in my career. So when the opportunity arose, I moved over and worked as a public defender and then also as an associate at a small law firm doing criminal defense. I did that for I would say the next eight years and it was fabulous. It was everything that I thought it was going to be. I worked with some incredible experienced lawyers. I got to sit in the second chair on serious cases. I was driving around, meeting with clients, doing jail visits, checking out crime scenes, litigating, working on really interesting constitutional issues. It really was phenomenal and I loved it. I think because I was so happy doing that and I was also just running. This parenthood hit me like a ton of bricks and I really hadn't realized ahead of time enough to plan out how I was going to adjust my career. As you mentioned, I became a single parent. Long story short, when my daughter was born, I got divorced. And so I became a mom at the same time that I became a single mom. At the time, I didn't have family in town with me. I didn't have child care lined up because I had been planning on kind of going back part-time, flexible. So I really just had to figure things out very very quickly. And leaving law was never a question for me. That I never considered that honestly. I knew that I wanted to stay in areas of law that I was passionate about. I was really hesitant to go look for another job and kind of be bound by whatever norms or parameters would exist at that firm. I started my own practice and I did this without a business plan. I look back on that time fondly because I was showing my baby daughter around to look at offices, buy a desk, buy a computer, open up my bank account, all that kind of stuff. And it was really scrappy and it was not well thought out, but I just kind of took the jump. That was the birth of my law practice. And that was almost 10 years ago.
Mary Killelea: That's fantastic. And by listening to your story, you had to have so much grit in order to just say I can do this and I'm going to do it and I'm not even. I mean like you dove in feet first without really knowing if you were going to swim or not. That's incredible. What do you think characteristicwise fueled that?
Miriam Airington-Fisher: That's my personality, flying by the seat of my pants. You know, I was a trial lawyer. Back then, criminal defense in Virginia was very fly by the seat of your pants. We didn't have reciprocal discovery back then, which for folks listening, you know, basically what that means is if you were a criminal defense attorney 10, 15 years ago, you didn't have rights to have any information from the government to prepare for your case. And so we were, it was very scrappy, flying blind, you know, going to take cases to trial, not knowing what was going to happen. That was kind of in line with my personality. So I was comfortable taking those risks. In retrospect, I am surprised that I wasn't more stressed than I was, but it might have been a little bit of hubris, a little bit of that lawyer overconfidence. I really just didn't see any alternatives at that point. I knew I believed that I could figure it out. I just didn't know quite how at that point.
Mary Killelea: So what would you say was the most challenging part of going from an attorney to entrepreneur?
Miriam Airington-Fisher: Not having a safety net really. And you know, I've come to believe now as a business owner, I've come to believe that employees never truly do have a safety net. You know, we see that now with government jobs, with big company jobs not being as secure as people think. I actually feel much more secure now being an entrepreneur because I'm in control. But, the firm that I had worked for was a wonderful firm. I had a lot of mentorship. I had a lot of colleagues that I could discuss things with that we could refer cases to each other. And so stepping away from that I think was scary because I knew that I was going to have to rely even more on my own abilities rather than try to crowdsource issues with co-workers.
Mary Killelea: You built the incredible business that you have today while raising three kids. What's one lesson about time, energy, or boundaries you wish that you might have learned a little bit earlier?
Miriam Airington-Fisher: I wish that I had put up more work boundaries earlier in my business when my kids were really young. I have very strong boundaries now, particularly in law, I think clients get used to accessibility and lawyers, it kind of becomes like a toxic relationship. You know, the reality is lawyers hate getting calls and texts late at night and on weekends, but yet they take them. So, you know, particularly earlier in the business when I was really feeling like I needed to sign on every case. I didn't want to alienate anybody or lose any leads, I felt like I had to be always available. And even though timewise I was giving myself time at home, I was still very distracted by that communication. And so, today I'm actually very old school. A lot of people find this hard to believe. I don't have email or messaging on my phone. I'm completely inaccessible, outside of business hours, except to my top two leaders at the law firm who will text me if they need me. But it took me years to get there, and I regret that I didn't have this level of separation sooner.
Mary Killelea: That's amazing. I just you say that and I just go, "Oh, how that would be so nice to not have the tether, you know, to access and feel like what am I missing or who should I be responding to and all the stuff that honestly could wait till tomorrow."
Miriam Airington-Fisher: I'll tell you what I did. I just experimented with this when we went on vacation. My husband and I took the kids to Ecuador for vacation. We went to the Galopagus Islands. I knew it was going to be a very fun, active vacation. And I left my phone and my computer at home. And I told my COO, "If you need me, call my husband." Which of course, she didn't. One, she didn't need me and two, that she didn't call me. And it made me feel freer than I've ever felt in my life. And I came home and as soon as we came home, I took everything off of my phone, I don't have any internet browser. I don't have Slack. Yeah.
Mary Killelea: Wow. That's such a good role model. For other women in law who are thinking about starting their own firm because I think there are so many of us these days who do want to call the shots. Knowing that sometimes there are glass ceilings when we work for other people. What advice do you give them about where they should start?
Miriam Airington-Fisher: So, in addition to running my law firm, I also work with other law firm owners or prospective law firm owners. And the number one trends that I see are people feeling like they need to be more prepared. Something really common that I hear, and I don't know if this is advice given somewhere else or not, but a lot of people want to have 12 months expenses in the bank before they start their business. I've heard that many different times. As I just shared, my self-launch into entrepreneurship was with no plan and no money. I don't necessarily advise that, but there's definitely a middle ground. I like to say with 90 days of planning and budgeting that you can start a law firm. I really believe that. And so, sitting down, coming up with a plan, knowing that it doesn't have to be perfect. If you're opening a law firm, a law practice for the first time, you don't have to open the perfect beautiful office with full staff, with a full marketing campaign right off the bat. You can just start and build up gradually. There are so many more options these days on how to scale with different staffing options and different, you know, more accessible marketing options. And so really just coming up with a plan and starting at some point you've got to just go for it. There's no perfect time. It's like having kids. You're never going to have everything perfectly lined up so that it's the smoothest experience. It's going to be new. It's going to be scary. Same thing for starting a business.
Mary Killelea: That's so true. What role has mentorship, either giving or receiving of mentorship, played in your success?
Miriam Airington-Fisher: So throughout my legal career, prior to entrepreneurship, I had a very good mentor on the legal side of things. He was still very close. He was my boss at the law firm. And he was just a very visionary creative lawyer, trial lawyer, like died in the world trial lawyer. And I learned so much from him about what it meant to be a good lawyer, to connect with clients, to really look deep into the case, to evaluate a case, to see the human component in everything. Those are natural gifts that he had. I saw what an impact it had, how clients connected with him and how it allowed him to be a great lawyer. I like to think that I picked up a lot of that from him because I do believe that you have to be a good lawyer, ideally a great lawyer in order to start a law firm because even though these days I don't do all of the legal work, the buck still stops with me. And so you need to know how to be a good lawyer before you can have a good law firm. So I'm very grateful to the substantive legal mentorship that I had. Once I started my law practice, I floundered a little bit in looking for a role model or a mentor on the business side. And I think the reason is that it was so challenging and the landscape has changed in the past 10 years, but back then small law firms really did not typically follow a business model. It was you know a lawyer would get to a certain point in his or her career, hang a shingle, hire a secretary and you know try to get through month-to-month of scraping together enough business. That was mostly what I saw. And to me that's a hamster wheel that I didn't want to be on. That was you know what I was essentially leaving. So what I ended up really finding to be a pivotal experience was I joined a mastermind of women immigration law firm owners. It was that this mastermind no longer exists otherwise I would plug it. This was back in when I joined in 2019 and it was very specific which was important because there is a big difference among practice areas and so when you're thinking about how to structure a business it is really helpful to have people in the same field. By the same token, I do think that there is a lot to be learned from other disciplines and other fields. But for me at that point in my business, having a group of women that were essentially in the same spot and also wanted to go to the same place was really transformational. I grew up a lot during that time and since then we've been on a really rapid upward trajectory.
Mary Killelea: There's so many golden nuggets in what you just said. So I'm excited for those listening because that really is fantastic insight on how to fast track based on your learnings. Okay. So, the legal profession isn't known for, I guess, being family friendly, you know, as far as balance. How have you tackled the cultural challenge and making that such a priority in your industry?
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Miriam Airington-Fisher: You're absolutely right. Law is not a family-friendly industry and similar to other professional fields where there's just this kind of societal expectation or acceptance that those are kind of the workaholic fields and I think that the only way out of that is to reject it. And not try to accommodate that and be willing to be a little countercultural. Might get a little bit of push back. I typically have gotten less push back than I thought I would and I, you know, things like just setting specific hours. My own hours are aligned with my kids' school schedule. So I just do not have meetings at 4. It doesn't ever happen for any reason and it's really not that big of a deal because of two things. One, I've built a firm where we have stacked schedules. And so in terms of clients and business coming into the firm, there's always going to be someone available, but also for people who need to meet with me for one reason or another, there's plenty of hours in the day to do that. So, you know, certainly as far as our law firm goes, one of my big core beliefs is being client friendly, being accessible. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to interact with our firm. But there are ways to do that without breaking your back and you know bending to every every request that is inconsistent with what you need.
Mary Killelea: Can you share a moment where things felt like they might be falling apart and how you overcame it?
Miriam Airington-Fisher: Yes. Also with a very clear lesson of what I wish I had done differently. After a few years of really liking working on the business, I would say 2018 is probably when I decided I'm going to try to turn this into a real business. I don't want to be a solo practitioner. My youngest son was born in 2018 and so once I went back to work I was pretty much ready to hit the ground running. I was the mastermind. It started in 2019. 2020 had some challenges of course with the pandemic, but we actually continued to grow ultimately during that time after, you know, a little bit of a slump during the initial shutdown and we did pretty well. But where I really hit a roadblock was when the firm got to the point where we were really busy. We were bringing in revenue. I had grown the team. I had added people to accommodate the business and I hadn't paid attention to our profit margin and our expenses were growing in lock step with our revenue which meant that there was not a lot of money at the end of every month. I was very stressed about making payroll. I never actually got to the point where I couldn't pay a bill but I did have months where I couldn't pay myself and that's not sustainable. We didn't have a cushion. So, it was a huge amount of stress on my shoulders because at that point, not only was it my livelihood, but I also had people that were working for me. So, I really did have some months where that bottom line was keeping me up at night. And so, what I started doing after working with a couple different bookkeepers and CPAs and CFOs trying to find the right fit, I found, my current CFO and we've been working together for several years now. And we really, dove into the finances of the business and really put in a budget and, paid attention to cash flow and also held back retained earnings in the firm. So now, you know, we're in a totally different position. We're very financially healthy. We have a very healthy profit margin. We've got money in the bank. I still keep paying attention to our revenue every single day because, you know, we have to keep moving. But it's been years since I've woken up in a cold sweat. So what I wish I had done and one advice that I do have for people that are earlier in the journey is don't wait to take the business finances seriously. Even if you have one client, even if your business is making $1,000 a month, have a plan for that $1,000, don't spend it all. Don't take it all home. You know, you need to start building a budget. Reinvest in the business. Make sure that you're paying yourself. All of those habits, I think the earlier that you put it into place, the less stress, you know, you'll have less financial stress in the business.
Mary Killelea: Valuable lesson there. So you've built this recognizable voice and platform as a lawyer like a mother. How did you develop your personal brand and make it feel so authentic to who you are?
Miriam Airington-Fisher: I just love that, by the way. Well, it is authentic. It really is genuine and the personal brand grew really naturally. So, over the, you know, the last, 7 years or so that I've really been focusing on the firm and building the firm up, I started to get calls, I would say maybe about four or five years ago, I started getting calls from other lawyers saying, you know, oh, hey, I know so and so. She said your firm is doing really well. I know you have kids. Like, how are you doing it all? So, I started having lunches, having calls, having coffee with different lawyers who wanted to start their own practice or wanted to make their career more familyfriendly. I was giving advice. I was like writing up these guides based off of what I had done or and it kind of turned into a book manuscript and it was you know how people say you should write a book. That is what happened. I started working with a publisher called Lion's Crest and published the book Mom's a Lawyer in January of 2023. And it was really fun. It was something that I'm really passionate about. I really wrote it in my own voice and I truly wrote it as a guide of what I wish I had in the beginning. That's purely what it is. And I was very humbled by the response that I got. I didn't know if anybody was going to, you know, buy this. It's very specific, but people did buy it and I was getting messages, LinkedIn messages and emails from people all across the country, Canada, also some dads, not just moms, you know, saying that it helped them. And it was really special for me, really humbling for me. So, I started working with some people one-on-one, helping them with whatever their pain point was. And I just realized that it was really a second thing that I could be passionate about. I still run my firm and I love doing that. I'm very proud of my firm and we're growing rapidly. But now I have this other piece that kind of complements that of just as our law firm helps clients with problems, with their legal problems, I can help other women very similar to me with their pain points so that they can build the career that they want, just like I did.
Mary Killelea: I think it's such a good example of you not fitting a certain mold in how you show up online and offline. And that really is to me the essence of what a personal brand is is being true to yourself. And I guess my question is that I see so many women hold back from doing that because of fear of judgment or fear that it's going to restrict them from having the success in their head. While I think women like you show it actually could unlock future potential that you never even imagined. What advice do you have for women who hold themselves back from putting their true self out there and building their personal brand based on I don't want to say scarcity mentality, but there's a little bit of that. The scarcity mentality, judgment mentality, the fear. Any advice?
Miriam Airington-Fisher: Yeah, I think there's a couple things in there. I've found that the key to success is really being myself because it's easier. It's just less effort. So being myself is something that comes naturally to me. So it's not a chore. It also really lends itself to brand consistency. Which is another positive you know in terms of whether people like me or not. I mean, not that I'm this big shot, but we do get messages sometimes from people like I got a message once from someone like making fun of my dress or, you know, making fun of a video or whatever. I mean, very rarely, but you know, there's always going to be people who you're not their cup of tea, but in any business, whatever your business is, you're not trying to appeal to the entire planet. You're trying to appeal to specific clients. And so that's something that I always advise with law firms is figure out who your ideal client is. Your ideal case type, who are you talking to and where are they? And it's the same with a personal brand. Just like probably every person that I've ever met in my real life maybe doesn't love me. So maybe there's some people that see my material and don't love it, but you're focusing on the people that do, the people that you can help. That's really where I think to put the energy. And then finally, a piece of advice that somebody gave me years ago is that, how do I say this nicely? People never look at less successful people and make fun of them. like you know the people that are out there starting businesses, writing books, changing lives, they're not trolling Tik Tok, posting mean comments on people's videos. And so, you know, if I look back at my own Facebook or my own Instagram, yeah, there's some cringy stuff from, you know, 2020 when I was trying to do these Facebook lives and, you know, it's really not what I'm doing now. But, you have to put yourself out there. You have to build content. You have to learn what works. And just remember that I don't think anybody really is that focused on us. And if they are, it's not somebody who counts.
Mary Killelea: Right. Such great advice. What are three myths about your job or about women in law that you wish people better understood?
Miriam Airington-Fisher: I wish people better understood that it could be accessible for working moms. I hear and see that so much even today, even from all different stages of legal careers. People feel like they have to sacrifice one or the other. And you know, I've taken my route based on what's important to me, but I never want that to be judgmental to people who maybe work more and have had child care or things like that. But I think that law really can be more flexible than we give it credit for. You just have to ask for it. You know, nobody is going to come to us and say, "Would you like to make a ton of money and have a very flexible schedule?" you know, no. So, we make it and it can happen. I also there's a lot of negativity around law, there's a lot of like ex lawyers who hate law and left to, you know, move on to happier, greener pastures. And while certainly I understand that law is not for everyone, it does not have to be negative. It doesn't have to be drudgery. For me, every day of work is inspirational because we get to work with amazing people and help them solve their problems. So, I think law also can just be wonderful and a happy career. And then finally, I would say that starting a business is easier than a lot of people think. You know, you put in time, you put in effort, you have to put in sweat equity, but there are so many tools available to make it easier than it was 5, 10, 15 years ago.
Mary Killelea: You focus on immigration and civil rights. Why did you pick that focus?
Miriam Airington-Fisher: So over the years I phased out of criminal defense for two reasons. One because personally I couldn't be in court all day like I had been and secondly because it's a more difficult area to scale. I knew I didn't want to stay at a one two lawyer law firm. I wanted to scale our practice and criminal defense is one of the few areas of law where an attorney does almost all of the work and almost all of it is facetime with clients or courtroom time. So when you think about scaling a business, you think about being more efficient in building an organizational chart where there's parallegals and legal assistants that are helping do the work so that you can maximize attorney time. I'm not saying it's impossible to do with criminal law, but it's more challenging and I really it wasn't clicking for me. I had always been doing immigration law. I had always been interested in that. And so I kind of just scaled down criminals and scaled up immigration, which is a very rewarding area of law to do and also a little easier to scale because the actual work is a combination of lawyer work and administrative staff work. Civil rights is something that it's a small percentage of our practice and essentially it's a way where we can decide as a team if a very meritorious case that we feel passionate about comes across our desk we will get involved in it. Usually it tends to be something that correlates with our other practice areas. It's a little bit more of a passion piece of the firm. It's not our a primary revenue driver, but it's just a way for us to just continue to sort of self check and make sure that we are doing everything that we can that of what we view part of our our professional responsibility in the community to be helping people to be taking on important cases to be you know standing up for issues that that we're passionate about.
Mary Killelea: What does to be bolder mean to you?
Miriam Airington-Fisher: I love the idea of to be bolder. I think it means just always pushing yourself. Always pushing yourself. Waking up every morning looking forward to a new challenge, a new way to improve, a new way to grow or learn something.
Mary Killelea: What piece of advice would you give your younger self?
Miriam Airington-Fisher: Do not worry so much. I spent years worrying about how life was going to turn out, if the business was going to take off, all of my cases, my family, and you know, I turned 40 this year and I' I've entered an era of really great satisfaction and a little bit more peace and just enthusiasm for being bolder, growing, continuing on. I have to say it's been a long time since I've woken up at 2 o'clock in the morning really worried about something.
Mary Killelea: You are just such a joy to talk to because it feels like I see your journey within you. You know, there's just so much wisdom that you've lived and that you're willing to share with other women that are, you know, rising in the ranks. So, thank you so much for being on the show. How could someone learn more about you?
Miriam Airington-Fisher: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a lot of fun. Our website is momsalawyer.com and then my social media handle is lawyer like a mother.
Mary Killelea: I love it. Thank you so much.
Miriam Airington-Fisher: Thank you.
Mary Killelea: Thanks for listening to the episode today. It was really fun chatting with my guest. If you like our show, please like it and share it with your friends. If you want to learn what we're up to, please go check out the website at 2bbolder.com. That's the number 2 little bbolder.com.