Q.

As a busy Manhattan criminal defense attorney and mother of three young daughters, what inspired you to write a book about your life experiences?

A.

So much of life as a working mother is dashing: to work, to your kid’s piano lessons, to catch the 5:03 train home. You look up and a decade has passed before you know it. Around nine years into this blur of perpetual activity, when I was 39 years old, I had a serious health scare and that motivated me to account for how I had been spending my time. I wanted to explain to my daughters the importance of my work and capture the experience of being their mother. The book started out as a gift for them and sort of evolved from there.

Q.

You say your memoir isn’t meant to be another work/life balance book. How would you categorize your book and what is your main message for women?

A.

The book isn’t really about “balancing” work and life. I hate the term work/life balance because I feel it diminishes the importance of work. My job is an enormous part of my identity. It’s what I spend the majority of my waking hours thinking about. My main message for women is to take the time and effort to find the things to which you want to devote your time and effort. Nobody can tell you what is going to fill your life with meaning and joy. You have to figure that out for yourself.

Q.

Your job involves representing convicted criminals, including murderers, rapists, and those accused of even more horrendous crimes. What are the most gratifying aspects of your work that motivate you to get up and out the door each morning? How do you explain your time away from home to your daughters?

A.

The most gratifying aspect of my work is representing clients in dire circumstances and earning their trust and that of their families. Every case is a story with a different cast of characters and different issues to explore. As a result I feel constantly challenged. As far as explaining my time away to my daughters, since they were babies I have simply told them that there are people who need my help. But I’m extremely lucky because I can also tell my daughters what time I will be home every evening and that makes the time away easier for them to handle.

Q.

What has been the most challenging case you’ve worked on? The most well-known?

A.

The fifth part of the book discusses my hardest case. It involved a man I was convinced was innocent. He had never before been accused of any crime, came from a good family, and had a young daughter at the time he was convicted of taking part in a vicious gang assault. My most well known case is described in part four. It involved a mother and son accused of murdering a wealthy Upper East Side socialite whose body was never recovered. That particular story kept the New York tabloids enthralled for quite a while.

Q.

How does your position as an attorney influence you as a mother, and how does your role as a mother contribute to your success at work?

A.

In my position as an attorney I am constantly dealing with other people --adversaries, colleagues, clients, judges -- and trying to persuade them to follow my advice or reasoning. As a parent, I tend to use those same skills. Of course there are times when the answer is “Because I said so!” But usually my husband (also a lawyer) and I try to back up our positions with sound reasoning. Becoming a mother helped me to develop more patience, heightened my sense of empathy, motivated me to become a more efficient worker, and helps me to maintain perspective, even on the worst day.

Q.

What issues in your work life as a high-profile attorney and in your personal life as a wife and mother are you most passionate about?

A.

I am the founder and director of a wrongful conviction project at my office. The project’s goals are to detect cases where clients might be actually innocent of the crimes of which they stand convicted and to reinvestigate those cases aggressively at the earliest possible stage of the appellate process. I started the project after working on the case discussed in the third part of the book, where an extensive reinvestigation into a brutal prison gang rape turned up some surprising new evidence.

As a wife and mother I am most passionate about carving out time for us to all be together as a family on a regular basis. We try to have Shabbat dinner together every Friday night. My husband and I also try to foster in each of our girls a strong sense of self tempered by a deep commitment to others.

Q.

What makes your particular story unique, yet also relatable to so many women?

A.

My job is unusual in that I specialize in reinvestigating complex criminal cases. The challenges I face in my professional realm -- gaining admittance to maximum security prisons, tracking down witnesses in housing projects or navigating the criminal courts -- are not shared by many women. And yet, the constant attempt to meet all trains, the urge to be two places at once, that feeling that despite all your best efforts you have somehow managed to displease all the people all the time -- those are very common.

Q.

Do you have friends who are stay-at-home moms? Where do you fall in the whole “to work or not to work” debate that isn’t talked about as much in the news, yet is still an issue for so many mothers? Do you think working moms are finally over the guilt of leaving their children with nannies and in daycare?

A.

I do have friends who are stay at home moms and they are incredibly involved in their children’s schools and their communities. I have the utmost admiration and appreciation for the work they do. I do not have friends who stay home to shop at the mall, lunch and then head to the gym. These are challenging times and I believe that every person has an obligation to consider how best to contribute. We need all hands on deck right now. As far as being over the guilt, personally I don’t know any mother who doesn’t feel guilty about something.