HOW LIFE BALANCE ISSUES AFFECT LAWYER RETENTION©

Life balance is a concept meant to include all aspects of American life: Friends/Family, Romance/Adventure, Spirituality, Work, Play and Exercise/Health. Lawyers are people first and lawyers second. Selecting law as a career, or having law select you as a vocation, should not mean that one is deprived of the joys of life. Lawyers appropriately feel they, too, are entitled to life balance. Yet managing a balanced life in the context of law practice has unnecessarily been placed on the same plane as the search for the holy grail.

Many mid-size to large law firms have some type of policy that allows part time, flex time, telecommuting or other alternative work arrangements. Most have maternity, paternity, family leave and disability policies. One would be hard pressed to find a major corporation in America that does not have these programs in place. Yet, lawyers continue to leave their jobs and the profession over life balance issues. Why haven’t these innovative compensation and work programs solved the problem and what can we do to improve quality of work life if these programs haven’t done it?

Lawyers tell us that the practice of law is easily all consuming. It seems the old adage that "the law is a jealous mistress" applies equally to men and women.

The Florida Bar 1997 Opinion Survey reported that most Florida lawyers took two weeks or less vacation in 1996. Most also reported that they had more than enough work to do. When we hear the often reported comment that there are too many lawyers, we wonder where those lawyers are and why they aren’t lessening the work load for the rest of us?

Quality of Life as a euphemism for "too much work, too little life," is a common complaint among lawyers. One reason for this is the practice of charging for legal services by the hour. Hourly billing, unheard of a century ago, has made every lawyer a participant in the race against time.

Lawyers cope with sleep deprivation, law office economics, biological clocks and taxes. While we do so, we literally see our lives slipping through the hour glass with no room for joy, family or recreation while we sell our lives in chunks of six minutes each.

Just last month, a promising young lawyer told us she was leaving her firm because she wanted to start a family soon and she wanted to work 9 to 5. Some lawyers will see that and say, "it’s good she left" because she wasn’t "dedicated to the profession" and wouldn’t "pull her weight." Perhaps your firm only wants lawyers with "fire in the belly" who will devote their lives to the law. But remember that working 9 to 5 results in 2040 hours at work each year, more than a traditional "full time" job.

Americans work more than workers in all the remaining western countries and lawyers work more than other Americans. Bruce Bartlett reported in The Detroit News this past Labor Day that the average American worked 1,904 hours in 1997, according to the International Labor Office in Geneva, Switzerland. Only the Japanese worked longer than Americans, about 1,990 hours per year on average. Germans worked just 1,573 hours in 1997.

Mr. Bartlett also reported that work hours are not only lower in Europe, but they are falling more rapidly than here. Annual work hours have fallen 8.3 percent in Germany during the last 10 years, while they have declined just 0.4 percent in the United States. Our western counterparts also take more vacation, about four to six weeks a year.

Compare that to the typical lawyer. The Altman Weil 1998 Survey of Law Firm Economics reported that median billable hours for all firms surveyed was 1,732 for partners and 1,839 for associates. The median ninth decile was 2,213 for partners and 2,234 for associates.(Averages are slightly higher.) We have not found statistics on how many hours lawyers actually work, although an educated guess is that 20% or more of the time a lawyer spends at work is not billable.

Why do lawyers work so much? Is it necessary? Do we do it because we like the work, it’s fun and we enjoy it? Clearly not. Do we do it because we feel it’s expected of us? Because we can’t turn down work? Because we can’t effectively manage our financial lives? The reasons are typically "all of the above."

Whatever the reason your lawyers give you for leaving your firm, you can be sure that seeking to improve their "Quality of Life" is at or near the top of the list. If law firms and departments don’t figure out a way to manage expectations so that lawyers can practice law and have a life, attrition rates will continue to climb.

All change begins with a change in thinking. First, it is necessary for lawyers and their firms to believe that life and law can coexist. Firms can encourage lawyers to take advantage of part time and flex time work schedules. Allowing lawyers to control their incomes by controlling their work load is also a simple matter. If compensation is tied to performance and revenue production, not to comparisons of one lawyer to another or seniority based, each lawyer can individualize his situation.

Impossible to run a law firm that way? We don’t think so. But even so, it’s more impossible to run a law firm without lawyers.

©PeopleWealth February 1999.