The Movement

If there’s been one constant in Jacqueline Simonovich’s life, it’s movement. She pirouetted through pre-K and beyond, beginning her study of dance as a 4-year-old ballerina. And movement followed her to Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where she majored in dance and English literature before earning a master’s in humanities and social thought at New York University.

She eventually landed at Berkeley for law school at 29, after helping her husband get through his Ph.D. program. “I was still in that dance mindset, but I stopped dancing after undergrad,” she says.

Luckily, Simonovich had yoga—which she took up as a teenager—to fall back on; she’s been a devout practitioner for nearly two decades. “For me, movement is good for the brain, especially this kind of movement,” Simonovich says. “I find I can’t just sit still and quiet and expect that my best ideas will magically come my way. I don’t think people give enough credit to how movement can help you think, and how movement is necessary to the mind-and-body connection.”

Prior to joining Weintraub Tobin in 2021, Simonovich says, “I knew I wanted to be yoga certified, and particularly that I wanted to teach yoga to other lawyers. But it was never the right time. … I was filling 2,100 hours a year, and I was also working on international cases, so the hours would be in the middle of the night—It was just a crazy time.”

When the pandemic hit, so, too, did the realization that she wanted more. “I wanted kids, I wanted time, and I didn’t want to be in this place of being on call every second,” Simonovich says. “I just didn’t want this to be my life.”

The transition to Weintraub allowed Simonovich the space and support to become yoga certified, which, after 200 hours of intensive training, she achieved in 2021. She launched Yoga for Lawyers a year later. Her slogan? “Being a lawyer is stressful. Yoga is not.”

“As lawyers, we need to give ourselves a break,” she says. “No matter if you’re a lawyer coming straight out of law school … or a veteran in the field, yoga offers that break; you return to your work with refreshed body and mind.”

The point of the program—to get lawyers to take a break—is, of course, also the sticking point. “Lawyers don’t want to take a break,” Simonovich laughs. “The hardest part about getting this off the ground has been convincing my peers that it is OK to do this for yourself. I’m guilty of this at times, too—this idea of, ‘I should just bill another hour instead.’ I’m still working on how to convince my peers this is something they need.”

The lawyers that have shown up to in-firm or bar-association sessions have reaped the benefits, however. “It’s always incredible to hear, ‘Wow. You’re right—I did need this,” says Simonovich, who recalls a particularly high-strung partner saying, “I should really do that again” after attending a class.

As the diversity director for the Barristers Club of the Bar Association of San Francisco, Simonovich is currently figuring out a slate of yoga events that will overlap with her other passion project: advocating for a more inclusive legal industry. “I’d like to do a full-blown retreat that will intersect the two,” she says.

“Both of those things are really important to me—advocating for more diversity in the legal profession, and also this wellness component. Yoga on its own is such a welcoming community, so the two would serve each other in that way.”