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Secrets of Work/Life Balance From That '70s Law Firm
Few would voluntarily choose to turn back the clock to the the 1970s, what with record peacetime inflation and Watergate, not to mention polyester leisure suits, bell-bottoms and disco. But as Denise Howell convincingly writes in The American Lawyer (4/1/08), the '70s were also a time when the legal profession may have had the formula for work/life balance all figured out.
Howell gives a good overview of life at today's large firms, with billable hour expectations ranging from 1,900 to 2,500 per year, in exchange for record-high associate salaries and bonuses. At the same time, she observes:
Younger lawyers [are] increasingly unwilling to sell their parenting opportunities and other extracurricular priorities to the highest bidder. Even if those lawyers had the fortitude (or foolishness) to try and achieve balance, they weren't given much chance to do so. "The money winds up giving people less time to meet performance goals. Decisions about who to keep are made a little quicker," says one Am Law 20 partner.
As a result, most large firms lose 80 percent of law school hires within five years, according to The National Association for Law Placement.
For Howell, one way that firms can foster "reasonable balance" is to return to the 1970s. Howell recalls:
In the 1970s, my dad, who was a partner at a respected California firm, made sure that our family spent most of each August river rafting, and that we took some fishing trips during the rest of the year. In 1963, the ABA considered 1,300 billable hours full-time. This Kennedy-era approach and my dad's insistence on being a dad seem far more suited to the mind-set of the twenty-first century legal workforce than today's firms have yet to recognize.
Howell's recommendation makes sense. But it's ironic that it may take a return to the 1970s, an era when women fought hard for equal rights, to find the solution to helping women retain a position of equality at law firms today.
For another perspective on work/life balance, see University of Mississippi law student Lori Johnson's winning essay on bridging the generational gap on work/life balance at Ms. JD.
Posted by Carolyn Elefant on April 2, 2008 at 04:25 PM | Permalink
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