Sorry for the radio silence; work and life have picked up in the past few days.
Speaking of work and life, I saved a link to this New York Times article about work-life balance for lawyers twice, so I must really have been impressed. It’s a trends piece, sort of, about law firms starting to recognize the benefits of offering their employees more flexible schedules. As with all trend stories, it’s on pretty shaky ground. But I’m still interested, in large part because the article talks about trends toward changing billable-hour requirements.
Some background, in case you need it: Most large law firms require their lawyers to bill X amount of hours per year. X usually equals somewhere between 1600 and 2200, with major urban areas and more prestigious firms generally higher. Those hours don’t count the time you spend checking your email, chatting with co-workers, etc. — just time spent working directly on a case. Even if you’re a model employee, it’s impossible to bill every single moment you’re at work. Fifty work weeks of forty hours each only give you 2000 hours, which is why most firm lawyers work overtime a lot and don’t see their families as much as, say, doctors and accountants. If you don’t make your billable hours, your career will be hurt. This drives down quality of life. I’ve heard the billable hour blamed directly for lawyers’ high stress and substance-abuse rates, and for the low amount of female partners (because women are the ones who have babies).
Anyhow. The article makes the point that young lawyers don’t like billable hour requirements, older lawyers who are about to retire don’t like them, and clients aren’t too jazzed about being billed this way (because it makes their bills hard to predict). The ABA called for an end to the billable hour six years ago. Given all that, you’d think the article would have dug up some innovative practices at law firms aimed at eradicating the billable hour without sacrificing significant profit. Not for the most part. A couple of firms they mentioned — and they must have had to look, because most of the firms they mentioned are not AmLaw 100 firms — ramped down billables. But mostly, we have:
-a family-law firm that switched to flat fees, which is not revolutionary for divorce lawyers
-raises for associates based on merit rather than seniority, which has nothing to do with their billables AFAICT
-decreasing, but not eliminating, billable hours
-allowing associates to choose from two billable requirements, with commeasurate pay [and possibly commeasurate career prospects]
If the New York Times can’t dig up more than two business firms that have ditched the billable-hour model entirely, I’m guessing there aren’t too many more. This is pure speculation, but I strongly suspect that it’s all due to tradition. Big law firms are even more afraid of change than the rest of us, and there are probably some partners who think the youngest associates should have to pay their dues by not having a life for a decade. Unfortunately, the effect seems to be that firms are shooting themselves in the foot. As a legal writer, I’ve spoken to career counselors at a few major California law schools, and they all told me that a substantial number of their graduates call them up in tears about a year after graduation, trying to get the heck out of firm life. Unhappy former lawyers formed a pretty big percentage of my former colleagues, and they’re also a lot of my competition as a freelance legal writer. Of the five or six JDs I know socially, only one is at a big firm. You can find them on the blogs, too, bragging about starting their own businesses or going in-house.
I believe this hurts the firms. It hurts them directly, via the cost of attrition; and it hurts them indirectly, via losing good people (some of whom could contribute needed diversity). If enough white-shoe firms find the courage to change the way they bill clients, the ones who don’t will lose business as well. But the less tangible and more immediate loss is that lawyers have to choose between their careers and things like being there for their kids, and that seems like a really, really high price to pay for being afraid of change.
1 Comment
February 11, 2008 at 10:02 pm
I’ve noticed that most lawyers wear suits and use latin in briefs, and lawsuits still use a vertical row of right parens when the ability to typeset with an actual vertical bar has long been possible. Something tells me there just isn’t much desire to change in this industry.