"How does she do it all?"

It's a question people can't help asking of Julia Charlton. She's the senior partner of an award-winning law firm in Hong Kong, an active member of six professional committees and a single mother with four children - three in Oxford and the youngest ready to pursue a medicine degree in college.

Julia Charlton

But to her, all these achievements come down to three simple rules: doing what one loves, staying focused on objectives and being organized.

Enjoy what you do

Born in New Castle in 1959, Charlton graduated first of class from the University of London. She joined Slaughter and May, one of the Magic Circle law firms from the UK, in 1982 and moved to Hong Kong in 1987 as an assistant solicitor for the firm. She has been here ever since.

In 1998, she founded Charltons, a corporate finance law firm with H-share heavyweights including Guangdong Investment and Zijin Mining among her clients.

Her decision to stay in Hong Kong happened within months of her arrival.

"I quickly realized that it's much easier to be a working mother, to combine the two roles, in Hong Kong than in London ... This is really why I made the decision to stay."

Charlton is the first to admit that she couldn't succeed both as a lawyer and a mother without domestic helpers - "the unsung heroes of Hong Kong."

"I'm always very fortunate," she said, to have a Filipino maid who was with the family since she moved to Hong Kong and later a Chinese woman who has been with the family for more than 12 years.

However, said Charlton, motherhood doesn't become less demanding as children grow up.

Younger children may be more tiring but they are more controllable. As they get older, "what they want to do becomes important," she said. "It's not less time or energy. It's rather time and energy going in another direction. Luckily for me, I enjoy my children (as much) as they get older as (when) they're little."

Enjoy what you do is Charlton's No 1 rule. To working mothers, her first advice is to have a career you really enjoy.

This is also her secret in motivating the children: "Its important for them to study what they enjoy as well. It's difficult for children to be made to study a lot things they don't enjoy very much."

Her eldest son, for example, had been interested in history since he was young. Charlton encouraged that interest by buying him every history documentary she could find. Today, Uther Charlton Stevens is in the final year of Oxford's doctoral history program.

If buying educational material doesn't sound extraordinary, Charlton has actually created two charitable foundations to help her children to pursue their dream.

Together with her other son, she set up The Asia Education Foundation in 2006 to help Chinese university students pay tuition. The idea came when the family read a newspaper article in 2005 that a farmer in North China's Shanxi province committed suicide because he couldn't afford the 5,000 yuan tuition for his son to go to college.

The foundation has since established ties with Sun Yat-sen University (in Guangzhou, Guangdong province) and Nanjing University (in Nanjing, Jiangsu province) to provide financial assistance to poor students.

Meanwhile, "it's very good for my children, especially my son, to know that there are children of similar age who are having great difficulty affording universities," she said.

The other charity, the Asia Environmental Foundation, was set up with her daughter Olivia, who "had a great interest in the environment," said Charlton. The foundation has raised more than $100,000 for relief work in Myanmar after the Cyclone Nargis and is helping build an environmentally sustainable village in the stricken area.

Balancing act

Balance the family and work is never easy. Interestingly, Charlton doesn't try to draw a clear line between office and home, which "would be more stressful for me," she said.

Often, Charlton has to take work home: "Because what I do is very client driven. If a client wants to talk, I have to make myself available."

This is where technology fits in. Blackberry and emails are how she manages to stay in touch with clients in different time zones, with colleagues when she is on business trips and even with her children studying abroad.

"I talked to them on the phone every day."

Julia Charlton and her four children. Photo courtesy of Julia Charlton

Such flexibility is built into the culture of her law firm, where most of the staff are women. Her own firm, Charltons, has three part-time employees who choose their own hours.

"This works well for both of us, because they're all very capable ladies and have great talent. They just don't want to work rigid hours," said Charlton, always an advocate of supportive working environment for mothers.

The effort in accommodating employee's needs is more than compensated in the loyalty and the enthusiasm they bring to work. Eventually it's the company that benefits and this is especially true for law firms, she said.

"We're in a people-driven business. People are our biggest asset. So we focus on people and make sure they get an environment that suits them."

Charlton likes to attribute her success to her mother, who is also a single parent.

Divorced when Charlton was two, her mother had few qualifications except as a catering teacher. However, she worked her way up to the head of a college department, which incorporated catering, nursing and a few other subjects.

"I grew up with a mother who instilled in me a great sense of confidence, and who was a role model in the way she pursued her own successful career," Charlton said.

In the same way, Charlton has inspired her own children.

"My mother has never aimed low," said her eldest son Uther. "We are immensely proud of her for showing us how to focus on what we might achieve."

(HK Edition 12/11/2008 page4)