Lawyers and work-life balance

There is an important conversation — well, important to lawyers — going on in the blogosphere about work-life balance. Dan Hull's always-insightful What About Clients? kicked up some dust in a post about how small firms can win clients away from big firms:

get off your knees, quit bottom-feeding, chuck both your "niche" market thinking and your work-life balance nonsense (the first 8 to 10 years for associates, and lawyering done right after that, should be hard work for even the gifted), steal the good clients, provide outrageous service and get rich.

Professional coach Julie Fleming Brown's Life at the Bar picked up on the "nonsense" tag and has this post about how lawyers can adjust their own balance and still provide excellent client service:

But it’s possible (and necessary) to adjust the balance in whatever direction is most desirable for a particular lawyer and still to provide excellent service. Such an adjustment will lead to certain consequences, whether it’s rapid advancement in career, a deeply satisfying personal life, handsome or sub-optimal earnings, burnout or boredom, or most likely some shifting mix of these and other consequences.

Dan Hull responded with a forthright post about work-life balance being a "dumb-ass issue":

WLB is "your" problem--not mine. Each one of us creates our own quality of life as we learn to lawyer, keep lawyering and serve clients.... If you are a job-hunting student or young lawyer expecting my firm to support a regime of work-life harmony, please try another shop.

This conversation led me back to an excellent summertime post on Tom Collins's More Partner Income
that calls for some creativity in valuing the work of those attorneys (mostly mothers) who work fewer hours:

Let’s turn this conversation around. On the one hand, let’s deal with the child raising years of lawyer-mothers; and on the other hand, let’s start celebrating the benefits of lawyering, including the satisfaction of service to others ....

I think Tom's right. There is a creative way to solve this problem: ending billable hours.

More to come ...

Comments

[Julie Fleming Brown]

Thanks for continuing this conversation and for the link. Nice blog!

I agree that ending billable hours would bring some positive change to the work/life balance issue, and to a host of other issues facing lawyers and clients. (I'm not sure it's the full answer, but it would certainly help.) And I particularly appreciate the candor of the discussion, since one of my theories-in-progress is that a sustainable solution to work/life balance problems lies partly in employer/firm transparency. In other words, if a firm genuinely supports a part-time schedule, terrific; if the partners don't want to support that, by all means say so and allow lawyers who want that to go elsewhere. Right now, I think we've got a lot of political correctness around this issue that's doing damage.