A Decade of Data, One Message: Why Women Lawyers Keep Leaving Law Firms

In a recent USA TODAY article, “They balanced life and work. Now more women are quitting. Here’s why,” journalist Jessica Guynn examines a troubling reversal in women’s workforce participation, and the structural forces behind it.

During the pandemic, flexible and remote work arrangements became necessary, and made it possible for many women to balance demanding careers with caregiving responsibilities. For a brief period, it appeared that the long-standing tension between work and family might finally ease.

But that progress has stalled. As Guynn reports, more than 455,000 women left the workforce in 2025, a shift that closely followed employers rolling back flexibility and requiring employees to return to the office.

At the center of this trend is caregiving.

A national survey by women’s advocacy organization Catalyst, cited in the USA TODAY article, found that nearly half of women who voluntarily left their jobs did so because of caregiving responsibilities and the high cost and limited availability of childcare. Crucially, these women were not leaving because they lacked ambition or commitment.

As Catalyst research director Sheila Brassel explains in the article, women are not “opting out” of their careers. Instead, the data points to a structural issue, one driven by rigid schedules and a lack of meaningful support for caregiving responsibilities.

A Familiar Story for Women Lawyers

For women in the legal profession, this story is not new.

Nearly a decade earlier, Montage Legal Group conducted and published a 2016 survey examining why women leave law firms, with the results featured in OC Lawyer. Long before the pandemic reshaped expectations around remote work, women lawyers were already identifying the same core pressures that continue to drive exits today.

The findings were strikingly consistent with what we see now. The top three reasons women lawyers reported leaving law firms were (1) a desire to spend more time with family (18.3%), (2) toxic work culture (18.3%), and (3) the job demanding too much time (17.6%).

This conclusion is reinforced by research from the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession its 2024 article, The Legal Careers of Parents and Child Caregivers. Harvard’s article highlights that the legal profession continues to operate on outdated assumptions about availability and commitment—assumptions that disproportionately disadvantage parents and caregivers. The article emphasizes that many lawyers do not leave the profession due to lack of dedication, but because traditional career paths fail to accommodate caregiving realities, forcing talented attorneys to choose between professional advancement and family responsibilities.

In other words, the Catalyst survey highlighted in USA TODAY —and the Harvard Law School research—confirms what women lawyers have been saying for years: when flexibility disappears, options for caregivers to stay in a traditional workforce also diminish.

What has changed since 2016 is not the problem—but the availability of solutions.

COVID Proved What Women Already Knew

When Montage Legal Group’s conducted its survey in 2016, freelance legal work was still emerging as a credible alternative to traditional law firm careers. The legal community often viewed remote work as temporary, unconventional, or incompatible with the demands of serious legal practice. As a result, many women who left law firms had few viable ways to remain meaningfully connected to the profession.

Then COVID forced a long-overdue reckoning with the supposed necessity of full-time in-office work.

Women lawyers demonstrated, clearly and consistently, that they can and do perform high-quality legal work from home without sacrificing professionalism, productivity, or the level of client service expected in Big Law and beyond. Remote work proved not only possible, but effective. At the same time, the use of freelance lawyers accelerated rapidly after 2020, as law firms, particularly small and mid-sized firms, recognized they could maintain excellent work product while reducing overhead and increasing flexibility.

For many, it finally felt like a sustainable model had arrived, both inside and outside of Big Law. That changed when some firms began requiring a return to in-person work while also pulling back the flexible arrangements—remote work, part-time schedules, and reduced billable hours—that had made practice more sustainable during the years following COVID.

The Future of Law Requires Structural Change

Taken together, the data from 2016 and 2026 tell the same story. Not much has changed—except awareness, and opportunity.

Women are not leaving law firms because they lack ambition. They leave when rigid structures leave no room for caregiving, balance, or well-being.

As firms reassess return-to-office mandates, the risk is not simply attrition—it is losing experienced, highly skilled women lawyers who want to keep practicing, just not under inflexible conditions.

Many firms have made meaningful progress in retaining women by continuing to embrace flexibility and evolving their structures. But for those that have not—and for lawyers who still need another option—freelance work is no longer a niche alternative, but a proven and sustainable path forward.

At Montage Legal Group, we view flexibility not as a concession, but as a competitive advantage. Supporting women lawyers requires more than acknowledging the problem; it requires building systems that allow them to remain engaged, advance their careers, and thrive.

We have seen this model work in real time—helping hundreds of women remain connected to meaningful legal work and enabling hundreds of lawyers to later return to traditional practice on their own terms after practicing as freelance lawyers. The goal has never been to replace the traditional path, but to expand it.

The data is clear: when flexibility disappears, talented lawyers leave. The future of the profession depends on ensuring they can continue to work—and succeed—on their own terms.