Read The Recorder‘s roundup of the stock-option backdating scandal. There won’t be a test later … but there might be a subpoena.

Rothenberg feels so strongly that women lawyers in particular have not been given useful training in marketing and client development that she’s formed a “sales club” at Womble. The club meets every other week to brainstorm about marketing and compare notes on ways to bring in new clients. Rothenberg feels that understanding how to sell your services represents the key to the corporate kingdom.

Ask her more generally how she manages the 45-lawyer D.C. office, and she launches into an impassioned speech about the book “First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently,” written by two consultants for the Gallup Organization. The book includes a test that helps people discover their top five strengths. The folks in Womble’s D.C. office have been so taken with the test that they’ve posted their lists of strengths on their office doors, which comes in handy when Rothenberg is rounding up help on a project. “I’ll ask, ‘Who’s futuristic? I need someone for the horizons committee,’” she says.

By now, you might get the idea there are ups and downs to Rothenberg’s ability to dip-dip-dip into every last detail of office life. She admits, “People shudder when they get an e-mail from me with the subject line ‘I have an idea.’”

Rothenberg says she never actively sought the management role. But when she was offered the job in 2004, she saw it as a chance to shape the direction of the firm, especially for the associates.

“I decided to take this on because I wanted to create an environment that I wanted to work in,” she says.

Rothenberg doesn’t seem to worry that she might wake up one day and find she has taken on too much. Indeed, it wasn’t long after she became managing partner that she learned the long-awaited baby girl was ready for adoption in Guatemala. The timing wasn’t ideal, she acknowledges, but she had already made up her mind, so it was just a matter of logistics. “I don’t have a problem — I have a challenge,” she says.

Why would she go to those lengths for another child when she already has a full plate? It’s not the first time she’s been asked this question. “I always wanted a big family,” she explains, “and I had two kids, and I got old.” In other words, rather than having a third biological child, Rothenberg looked into adoption.

She approached it with the same intensity with which she approaches a real estate deal: She read every book she could find on the subject; she decided that she wanted an international adoption; she picked Guatemala. She also brought her two older daughters, now 10 and 12, into the process. The girls were so excited about the prospect of a new baby that they drew pictures in school of the little sister they hadn’t yet met.

Even as Rothenberg, her husband and the two girls set out for Guatemala, Rothenberg didn’t slow down. “From the Guatemala City Marriott I closed $30 million worth of deals,” she says. (She notes that her husband, an architect, is “wonderful.”)

Back in the States, when the infant landed in the hospital with a case of pneumonia, Rothenberg was lying in the bed by her side. But she was also “negotiating a $250 million deal.”

Lisa Ruddy, a fifth-year Womble associate, says that Rothenberg “makes me feel it would be more manageable to balance a legal career and having a family.” Ruddy, 32, doesn’t have a family yet, but she says that she knows, when she does have children, “I don’t have to hide them in a closet somewhere and pretend I don’t have them.”

Back when she was trying to imagine how a third, adopted child could fit into her hectic world, Rothenberg says she would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. But then she’d tell herself: “This is my life goal. I cannot not do one of my life goals because this is where we’re at.”

Debra Bruno is a reporter with Legal Times, a Recorder affiliate based in Washington, D.C.