Jenny Alobaidi, newly-appointed partner in a Blackburn firm of solicitors, specialises in family law. She tells PAULINE HAWKINS how her own family has influenced her life and career.

JENNY'S father was from a Lancashire mining village where girls were not expected to go on to further education. She left school at 16 without having chance to sit her A-levels.

She took a business course at St John's College, Manchester, and became a secretary. But as fate took the threads of her life between its fingers, it wove her a tapestry of good fortune, love and encouragement which has seen her develop into a family lawyer.

And now she has completed her legal studies, she wants to learn Greek and take up sub-aqua diving.

Jenny, who will be 53 in August, readily admits that her Arab husband Hadi, a laser physicist, has been a driving force in her life. The support of the couple's three children -- Niel, now 27, Hatham, 24, and Jenan, 19 -- also played a vital role in her career development, as did the backing of her former legal colleagues Andre Rebello and Mike Singleton, then at Fieldings Porter, which later became Roebucks.

But her decision to become a solicitor at the age of 40 demanded no little effort on her part. She would take Jenan to primary school, go to work, pick the six-year-old up in the afternoon and prepare tea for the children. Then she would cook dinner for Hadi, they would eat together and then she would go back to work for a few hours before returning home and burning the midnight oil studying for her law exams.

As a recently-appointed partner in the firm of Roebucks solicitors in Richmond Terrace, Blackburn, Jenny deals with divorce cases, child-care proceedings and financial issues in front of judges. Because of their sensitive and personal nature, the hearings are always in chambers, away from the public eye. She acknowledges that there are many women, some of whom she meets in the course of her work, who have not been as fortunate. They may have had a similar ability, but have not had the benefit of someone to lean on, bounce ideas off and turn to when the going got tough.

But even before she met Hadi, good fortune was seeking her out for special treatment. Jenny, originally from Manchester, and a friend were in Spain when they were snapped up by the Berlitz language school and were trained to teach English as a foreign language.

"We stayed a year and then came home and went back to our secretarial jobs," Jenny said.

She later met Hadi, then a student at Manchester University. They married and, with elder son Niel, travelled to the Middle East where Jenny worked for the British Council teaching English to adults for five years.

Hatham was born while the family was in the Middle East and on their return to England they settled in Loughborough, where Hadi started work as a lecturer at the university. Jenny, adding another string to her bow, started working for the Amateur Swimming Association, qualified as a swimming teacher and worked at the university for three or four years teaching staff and their children to swim. Work then brought Hadi to Blackburn and the family moved with him. By chance she met Andre Rebello, a former partner at Fieldings Porter and now HM coroner for Liverpool. He asked her to work for the firm and she began with basic legal tasks. Mr Rebello and Mr Singleton then encouraged her to sit the Institute of Legal Executives' examinations and she was admitted as a Fellow of the institute in 1996. She obtained the postgraduate diploma in law in 1997 and was admitted as a solicitor in 1999. To become a partner she had to become a solicitor and studied hard while her children also buried their heads in books.

"Having started, I was damned if I was going to give it up," she said. "Jenan did A-level English and one of the things she had to write about was A Woman I Admire. The teacher said other students had done people like Florence Nightingale and Margaret Thatcher but Jenan had done My Mum.

"How could she and her brothers not have studied when their mum was working so hard?"

She remembers how, when she was revising for her examinations, she would leave notes all over the kitchen reminding her of important cases and the year they were heard.

She would be muttering the details and the children would correct her, having read the notes themselves.

Now all three are doing well -- Jenan and Hatham are at university and Niel works as a product manager in the marketing department of a holiday company. Jenny is in no doubt that the children and Hadi provided a rock for her to cling to when she needed support.

"I couldn't have done it without Hadi," she said. "He never ever moaned when we couldn't have a weekend because I had my head in a book and never said 'this house is a mess' when it often was. I'm not special or brilliant -- all I have done is make the best of a little bit."