Jaelyn Judelson Pens Bloomberg Article on Making Partner in a Pandemic
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Akin Gump international trade partner Jaelyn Judelson has authored an article for Bloomberg’s “Making Partner in a Pandemic” series, which features several lawyers sharing their stories on how they “rose to the challenges of 2020 to make partner.” (Judelson was one of five newly promoted partners at Akin Gump earlier this year. Click here to learn more.)
Judelson writes that, while 2020 began with her looking to focus on executing a business plan and a possible promotion to partner by year’s end, “the delicate personal infrastructure that makes the multi-year partnership marathon possible for working parents—access to regular childcare and uninterrupted blocks of time to work—completely collapsed,” once the implications of the pandemic took hold.
Judelson describes how “the national reckoning on racial justice in June added an additional, and very personal, layer of complexity and depletion” for her family, along with “the chaos of juggling Zoom schooling for two toddlers.” Following the death of her grandmother in July, Judelson says she still “felt a profound sense of duty to keep moving forward; to wake up each day, and to give my family and our clients everything I had to win, simply because I knew people who were fighting battles of their own needed me to do so.”
“By playing a key role in the firm’s dialogue internally and with clients about how we could increase diversity and inclusion in our business practices,” Judelson writes, she knew she was “simultaneously deepening relationships with those clients as they managed parallel efforts in corporate America and creating space to showcase the depth of [Akin Gump’s] international trade experience.”
Judelson says she would have been gratified to make partner in any year, “but after surviving 2020,” she truly knows “how deeply committed each of us is to the successes of our clients and to each other in meeting today’s challenges and anything that may lie ahead.”
To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
