Ethernet card e1000e works only after reboot

I am running Ubuntu 20.04 on a ThinkPad W541. It has a LAN card, that uses e1000e driver.

The problem with this card is, that it only works after a soft reboot. The procedure to turn it on works like this:

1. Cold start of the computer - LAN card is unclaimed.
2. At login screen do a soft restart.
3. After reboot LAN card works and an internet connection is available.

I tried adding lines:

rmmod e1000e && modprobe e1000e
exit 0 

to /etc/rc.local. It was mentioned as a solution to similar issue in another thread here. The file didn't exist before, I had to create it. However it didn't solve the problem.

This is the output of sudo lshw -c network:

*-network UNCLAIMED       
       description: Ethernet controller
       product: Ethernet Connection I217-LM
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: 19
       bus info: pci@0000:00:19.0
       version: 04
       width: 32 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi cap_list
       configuration: latency=0
       resources: memory:b4a00000-b4a1ffff memory:b4a3d000-b4a3dfff ioport:5080(size=32)

Output from lspci:

00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection I217-LM (rev 04)

LAN card causes one more problem on my laptop. When it is active, suspend doesn't work. Computer can be suspended, but waking it up fails. After pressing power button, computer gets powered up, however the screen remains black, diodes on power button and in ThinkPad logo are flashing as if the computer was still suspended. Only sign of computer being turned on is a spinning fan.

I am not sure if those two issues are related, but I though it was worth mentioning.

Is there a way to configure Ubuntu, so that Ethernet is available without a reboot and it doesn't interfere with suspend function?