It comes as no surprise that a competition lawyer is very competitive. For Ruth Sander, however, the drive to win extends well beyond the courtroom; the 28-year-old is one of the UK’s top rowers as well as a junior associate at Herbert Smith, an international legal practice.

Sander signed up to join her college rowing club while studying law at Oxford, partly because the club had a great social reputation. As it turned out, she fell in love with the sport.

But she decided to give it up when she started as a graduate trainee at Herbert Smith in London.

“I had heard that I should not expect to have too much spare time on my hands, so I focused on my work,” she says. “But I lived near the river [Thames] and when I walked along it and saw people rowing, I really missed it.”

Six months later she joined a London club because she wanted a weekend activity but was soon persuaded to join its performance squad.

Sander won a silver medal for England at the Commonwealth Regatta in 2006 — held in parallel to the Commonwealth Games, which do not include rowing. It was then that she decided to try to get into the British team.

“I was doing quite well without a huge amount of training and I thought maybe if I trained more, there was more to come. I have a competitive side that means if I am going to do something, I want to do it as well as I can.”

This attitude applies to her career as a solicitor as well as her sporting ambitions, so she did not want to move to a less demanding job.

“I thought I would see if I could invent more hours in the day instead,” she says. She tried hard, sleeping about five and a half hours a night to make sure she could train before and after work, even though lack of sleep made her more vulnerable to illness and injury.

She also arranged to work from home one day a week so she could use what would have been commuting time to fit in more training. At the most recent trials for a place on the British squad she came ninth. The top seven people make it through.

“Afterwards my coaches sat me down and pointed out that I was the only one there doing a full-time professional job. They said if I was serious about trying to break into the squad next year I would need to think about what I could do to build more flexibility into my work.”

So Sander approached her managers and asked to work part time. “I was nervous. I think that flexible working is really for childcare reasons, whereas I was asking for it because I wanted to spend more time with my boat.”

Now she works four days a week — with two days working from home and Tuesday and Thursday afternoons off, while ensuring she is available on her BlackBerry all the time she is not actually on the water. “If I want to be involved in interesting work it is just not possible for me to say that at certain times I am not contactable,” she says. “It is important to me that if clients want to reach me they can.”

She and her team plan ahead to make sure she is always available for important meetings and she is always willing to be flexible with her own time to ensure that project deadlines are met.

“It is about managing expectations — and sometimes working in my training gear on the sofa in the evening.”

Her career has not suffered and her rowing has definitely improved, she says. “My coaches have noticed it, too, and I can take their criticism better because I am less tired.” The real test, however, comes later this month when the next round of British trials begin.