More on billable hours and work-life balance

No less than the eighth-highest-ranking lawyer in the country, Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, had this to say about the problem of billable hours in the foreword to the ABA's August 2002 Commission on Billable Hours Report:

The villain of the piece is what some call the “treadmill” — the continuous push to increase billable hours. As one lawyer has put it, the profession’s obsession with billable hours is like “drinking water from a fire hose,” and the result is that many lawyers are starting to drown. How can a practitioner undertake pro bono work, engage in law reform efforts, even attend bar association meetings, if that lawyer also must produce 2100 or more billable hours each year, say sixty-five or seventy hours in the office each week. The answer is that most cannot, and for this, both the profession and the community suffer....

Does [the billable hour] unnecessarily aggravate the pressures that threaten to confine the lawyer to the office, insulating him or her from the community? Moreover, does the billable hour contribute to or undermine a practitioner’s ultimate goal — to provide clients with the best legal services possible? And to the extent billable hours are counterproductive on either or both counts, how, when, and to what extent, might it be possible to change billing methods?...

[The Commission's task] concerns how to create a life within the firm that permits lawyers, particularly younger lawyers, to lead lives in which there is time for family, for career, and for the community. Doing so is difficult. Yet I believe it is a challenge that cannot be declined, lest we abandon the very values that led many of us to choose this honorable profession.

So at least one Supreme Court justice believes that work-life balance is an important problem, and that billable hours just may be one of its causes. (You can access the entire Commission report here.)