MOTHERS ESQUIRE

Michelle Browning Coughlin ( far left) and other members of Mothers Esquire presented oral arguments at the Florida Supreme Court in 2019 in favor of a parental continuance rule.

When Michelle Browning Coughlin, a 2009 Louisville Law graduate, began her career as attorney, she was also a mother of two young children.

Embarking on a demanding career while trying to juggle the needs of young children, “I kept running into obstacles,” she says, explaining that with no family in town, she and her husband — a public school teacher — had to manage childcare alongside their careers. “I constantly felt like I was failing.”

Coughlin, who is now a partner at Louisville’s Wyatt Tarrant & Combs, looked for support in women lawyer groups but wasn’t able to find anything that spoke to the unique challenges she was facing as a lawyer and a mother.

Michelle Browning Coughlin '09

So she started a Facebook group. She began by posting articles about motherhood and legal careers for the 30 or so women who joined. As the group expanded, Coughlin gave more thought to her group’s impact and decided to devote more time to what is now MothersEsquire.

MothersEsquire, of which Coughlin is founder and president, is a nonprofit with a mission to “achieve gender equity in the legal profession by improving promotion and retention rates of women in the law, along with championing equal pay and transparency regarding compensation practices in the legal profession.”

Coughlin outlines several obstacles faced by lawyers who are mothers: breastfeeding accommodations, parental continuance motions, paternity leave and pay inequity.

“There is a huge gap between mothers and men — much bigger than the gap between women and men,” Coughlin says.

Through advocacy and raising awareness across the country, MothersEsquire is working to address these issues.