Comments on: The Myth of Work Life Balance in Law

By: John G

John G — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:45:48 +0000

I had thought that the complexity of the debate was not simply to have lawyers recognize, as Gary L says, that choices have consequences – that's not hard to understand. If I work less and thus earn less so I can do something else with the extra time, who cares? There are real jobs out there for me.

The bigger challenge is that the choices often involve whether to have children and how the children are raised: choices that have social consequences, not just personal consequences for the parents. That's what Eva v L seems to me to be getting at: must the full cost of providing good parenting be borne by the parents, and usually more by the mothers? How do you organize society or the economy, or for the purposes of this discussion the practice of law, to recognize the social value of that particular work/life balance?

OTOH should you really take less pay so I can have kids? That's a possible implication of that line of thinking, but one understands why it has not caught on everywhere…

By: Gary Luftspring

Gary Luftspring — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:13:18 +0000

Having lived this debate for years as managing partner of a mid-size firm and now as part of a small firm I think I have a new perspective on the "debate". What is missing is that practitioners in both are to some extent managing their own small businesses; decidedly true at a small firm but in my view also true to those with insight at a bigger firm. Truly successful owners of small businesses tend not to engage in the debate. You do what you have to do to be successful and you balance what you have to balance or accept that certain things will fall through the cracks and have consequences. It is a matter of choices and priorities and will always be thus. I bemoan the lack of personal responsibility and accountability. I am the first to recognize that Big Law and the profession in general suffer from tremendous inertia and will be driven kicking and screaming to new ideas however I am also troubled by an attitude that success comes without cost. By all means let's make room for people who make different choices but those people have to recognize that those choices have consequences. If the "debate" is to accommodate and the changes are necessary to do so, that is one thing; but if what is being said is that people who make different choices will be "equal" in all respects that is nonsensical.

By: Eva van Loon

Eva van Loon — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:18:50 +0000

When I was in law school in the early eighties, it was often said by profs and students that law would turn into a women's profession, because women were garnering the scholarships and were "better at it." Many of us imagined firms that would be family-friendly, with on-site daycare and flexible schedules.

Ten years later, it was becoming clear that many women lawyers were choosing 9-5 work or opting out of practice altogether. Law was not on its way to becoming a women's profession, after all.

Like many lawyers who are also wives and mothers, I learned a painful lesson in the hardest possible way: the sky-high stress of practice, even part-time, is not healthy for young families. The problem is not so much that women lawyers don't get enough help with housework and parenting–that can generally be afforded. The problem is that even when mother/lawyers are home, they're in recovery mode at best. Stress is also inherent in the requirement for a daily decision on where to put one's valuable time.

It was often said that time is all lawyers have to sell. That's the basis of charging by the hour. However, when you think about it, time is all anyone has to sell. We unfortunately live in a society where little or no economic value is ascribed to hours spent on mothering or family life or personal aspirations–we are required to pay for those hours rather than get paid for them.

Yes, law is losing valuable practitioners, many of them women, because of the idiotically high stress of the hourly-billing system, piled on top of the inherent stresses in such high-calibre work. If there is a solution one day, it will come from outside the profession. When society finds a way to make it financially feasible to have a family or personal life without killing yourself on the job, we'll see more women lawyers having a long career. We'll also see an increase in the numbers of that rare beast, the happy lawyer.

By: Jordan Furlong

Jordan Furlong — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:18:23 +0000

Thanks for the shout-out, Nicole! You raise an important point: as long as a law firm sells its lawyers' time, it will resist any attempts to reduce its inventory, i.e., the number of hours available to sell to clients. In a variable-fee law firm, time really is money, so the less time a lawyer makes available, the less valuable that lawyer becomes to the firm. The problem, of course, is that trading time straight-up for money is a terrible swap — they're unequal currencies.

Among the ramifications of this approach is one that was identified at the Great Debate: lawyers who reject the time-selling model will continue to reject those firms that employ it, and the long-term talent drain from these firms will continue. It hasn't occurred to most firms yet that billing by the hour alienates them from a growing percentage of valuable legal talent — or if it has occurred to them, they don't care. Whether arising from cluelessness or complacence, that particular error is becoming more expensive every year.