<p>A friend sent this article to me today. It was published in the Legal Times on January 22nd, and it relates to some of the challenges that women face in the legal workplace. I think that the message is important to both men and women seeking work/life balance when practicing law. I’ve included some exerpts here:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
Erica Leatham, 33, tells a story that sums up the gap in perceptions between many older and younger women lawyers: Working as an associate at Holland & Knight a few years ago, she was expecting her first baby. The firm expressed general support for her maternity leave. But she remembers feeling pressure from some older women at the firm to take off as little time as possible. </p>
<p>They gave their advice quietly, unofficially. But the message was clear: “I was told to come back quickly,” says Leatham, still a bit bothered. “Don’t expect for everyone to wait.”
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
Even 20 years ago, few women managed to combine family and success at a big firm. But these middle-aged lawyers pushed to make it happen. They worked nonstop; they stayed up half the night with a brief in one hand and a crying baby in the other; and they succeeded, damn it.
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
Take Leatham, who started her own firm after nearly eight years in the Bethesda, Md., office of Holland & Knight. She was miserable there, she says, because of the way big law firms are set up. She felt she was being forced to buy into a set of rules about succeeding that had been created by a generation that had no other choice. The older women’s thinking, she says, is that you pay some heavy dues first, and they buy you the leverage to do other things, to have a life.
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
So Leatham, a zoning and land use attorney, left Holland & Knight and, with some colleagues and friends, formed her own firm, Stark, Meyers, Eisler & Leatham, based in Rockville, Md. Ironically, she says, she puts in more hours now than she did at Holland & Knight. “But I can control it in a way I didn’t before. It’s just empowering,” she says.
</p>
<p>
Ellen Sharpe, a real estate lawyer with Odin, Feldman & Pittleman in Fairfax, Va., offers a similar tale. She won’t name the big firm she fled because she doesn’t want to blame one firm in particular: “It’s a great firm, and it’s trying – like all the big firms are.” But for Sharpe, the experience of having a second child became a tipping point for her in terms of demands on her time, so she started looking elsewhere.
</p>
<p>
Sharpe found a firm that doesn’t buy into the old system of setting billable-hour requirements. If she makes a little less money over the year, that’s OK, she says, because the trade-off is flexibility.
</p>
<p>
Perhaps the difference is that the older women felt they still needed to prove themselves not just as lawyers but as women lawyers. To get accommodation for family demands, they had to make it impossible to suggest they weren’t pulling their weight. And they take pride in having proved the naysayers wrong. Many of the younger women don’t buy into that struggle. If big firms don’t support their needs, they’re less likely to plunge into the fray and more likely to leave.
</p>
<p>
What struck Sharpe about the life of a big-firm lawyer was the sense that a lawyer’s main contribution was measured in hours. “I think a lot of people in our generation are a little intimidated by this work ethic from the '90s that if you don’t work 60 hours a week, you’re not doing it,” she says.
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
If these younger women have a battle of their own, it’s trying to make a distinction between the trappings of hard work and the effective use of time. Leatham, for instance, says she often reads of lawyers who work from home at 10 p.m., after their children have been tucked into bed. What that means, of course, is that they’re still fitting their lives into slots that are convenient for their employer but maybe not for the women struggling to keep it all together. “You should be able to work from home whenever you want,” not just late at night, she says.
</p>
<p>
But large law firms still operate on a different model. Not only do associates need to “bill a million hours a year,” says Leatham, but they also need to do it in the office, so that firm managers can keep track of the work being done.
</p>
<p>
Leatham’s former firm, Holland & Knight, has been responding to the concerns that women are raising, says executive partner La Fonte Nesbitt. But at the same time, he admits that large law firm life is not for everyone. “It could be because of the size [of the firm], the work they’re getting or that they want something else,” he says. “Or because they want a different kind of lifestyle, which is harder to obtain in a major law firm.”
</p>
<p>Yes, there is a work-life balance. You work about 90% of the time you’re awake, and the balance of the day is your life.</p>
Hanna
January 25, 2008, 3:39pm
3
<p>“they also need to do it in the office, so that firm managers can keep track of the work being done.”</p>
<p>This is BS, and I’m happy to say that a good number of firms realize that it is BS.</p>
<p>Unless the work is washing windows, the way for “managers” to keep track of the work is to examine the work product. The many good partners at my big firm cared that I (1) produced excellent work (2) on time (3) billed plenty of hours. The smart partners realize that it just doesn’t matter where those things occur. You have to be accessible (email AND cell phone calls should be returned within 5 minutes if you’re out of the office), but you don’t have to be physically present to do a good job.</p>
<p>Firms that believe that seeing the associate physically sitting at the office computer is “keeping track” of the work are seriously misguided, and they pay for that foolishness in wasted time and associate turnover. A LOT of associates at those firms are sitting in their offices IMing one another and playing fantasy football.</p>