Essentially, WLB was shorthand for the widespread sense that the demands of a legal career had outstripped the personal benefits it conferred — or, as my father used to say, “There’s not much point in earning a living if you can’t live the living you’re earning.” WLB was applied most frequently within the context of large law firms, where even jaded observers would admit that billable-hour targets had escaped any rational trajectory. Across all firm sizes, though, people looked at the law and saw a career where effort and satisfaction were headed in opposite directions. It was not irrational to think that this could stand some improvement.

(It’s important to recognize, by the way, that WLB was not exclusively a Millennial issue. Lawyers of all ages reported dissatisfaction with the perceived effort/reward ratio of their careers, especially in larger firms — though Gen Y was the most willing to talk about it, at length. Remember that WLB was also often used to describe the plight of older small-firm lawyers whose clients had come to demand legal services far more quickly and cheaply than before, catching the lawyer in a vise between ever more work and ever less time. Wherever legal work seemed to grow beyond the boundaries of “worth it,” we heard about WLB.)

Most lawyers seeking WLB were really seeking an answer to the question: “Does a legal career have to be all-consuming and exhausting?” As to that, I’ve written before that lawyers now work long hours thanks to a competitive economy and our own inefficiency, and that we’ll always have to run fast enough to keep up with our clients. But during the economic bubble, lawyers who asked that question often perceived that the answer was “no.” The demand for legal services sufficiently outstripped the supply of lawyers, such that lawyers could start to dictate the terms of their availability to employers and sometimes even to clients. The whole thing got wrapped up too often in buzzwords like “personal fulfillment,” “family time,” and WLB, but what it really came down to was lawyers’ rational response to market conditions. They had a chance to get more rewards for their time and effort — unfortunately, many of them chose those rewards in $160,000 annual packages.

Now, of course, the market has changed just a little. After 10,000 lawyer and staff layoffs at large US and UK firms, even the most active WLB boosters have toned down talk that might earn them the dreaded “entitlement” label. Articles and posts that reference the term “work-life balance” now do so in an environment of cold pragmatism: Ashby Jones at the WSJ Law Blog and Dawn Wagenaar at The Complete Lawyer provide good recent examples. Realist observers like Dan Hull and Scott Greenfield have gained the upper hand in the WLB discussion — check out this slam-bang debate at Legal OnRamp about “work-life balance” generational expectations.

Where proponents of “work-life balance” went off-track, to my mind, was that they argued the duty to ensure a satisfactory proportion between a lawyer’s work and the rest of her life was an institutional responsibility — that it was up to the law firm, basically. The  firms disagreed, and all they had to do was wait for the marketplace to turn their way to make that clear.

Law firms aren’t going to unilaterally change their business models for the sake of WLB. No law firm ever budged an inch on its billable quotas or offered associates more money and perks because its partners genuinely felt they should be nicer employers — appeals to conscience at partners’ meetings don’t have a roaring record of success. Firms change their working conditions as the talent market dictates. In a seller’s market like the one we’ve just had, they play nice; in a buyer’s market like this, they don’t. If almost every potential legal recruit said, “I’m not going to work at that firm — the demands are ridiculous and the benefits to my career aren’t nearly worth it,” and did so for several consecutive years, then you’d see the firm think about changing its business model. That didn’t even happen during the boom, and I doubt it’s going to happen now.

The thing is, “work-life balance” is a lawyer’s personal choice and responsibility. If money and “prestige” are that important to you, you’ll sign up to work 3,000 hours a year at a law firm, and you can reap the rewards and suffer the personal consequences accordingly. If keeping your work hours within a predictable box is important to you, you’ll be seeking out public-sector jobs or setting up a practice with just enough reasonable clients to pay the mortgage — and you’ll always have one eye on your bank statements. When we talk about “balance” in lawyers’ lives, we’re really talking about the tradeoff everyone has to make between compensation and lifestyle. If WLB stood for anything, it was for the fact that we all have the right and the obligation to make that tradeoff on the terms we want.

But here’s the caveat, and here’s where “work-life balance” proponents were right –  most lawyers in their first several years of practice don’t really have that choice. There are two institutional flaws in our system that hurt our newest colleagues. First, there’s the unspoken symbiosis between law schools and law firms — the former charge students huge amounts of money and provide little practical lawyer training, allowing the latter to hire low-skilled and heavily indebted graduates to fill virtually the only positions lucrative enough to pay off their loans. And secondly, billable-hour targets for associates at more than a few firms simply can’t be achieved without damage to one’s health or ethics, or both. These problems are neither natural nor inevitable — they result from our neglect of the system, and they annually damage our profession’s standards and morale.

In the heyday of WLB, we were at least starting to talk about these things, and the whole debate should have shined a light directly on them. What we were groping towards, under the banner of WLB, was the gnawing sense that most everyone starts their legal career behind the eight-ball for no particularly good reason. Now that the moment has passed, I worry that WLB will be relegated to the status of a mere generational quarrel during a freak economy. We need to do better than that. There are still some serious institutional problems for our profession to resolve — dealing with them openly and effectively would be the kind of legacy “work-life balance” deserves.

I was wondering if you have any suggestions for me. I graduated with a degree in accounting and had worked in a Big 4 accounting firm for a year before I quit. It’s not that the work was especially terrible, but working 60-90 hours a week, 6-7 days a week, I just didn’t have time for anything else.

While I’m finishing up my accounting licensing requirements, I’m contemplating going to law school, because I have always had quite an interest in legal work. However, I want to enter a career where I am not working over 60 hours and get the majority of weekends off, even if it means less money.

Are there any sectors of law where lawyers have these kinds of hours on a consistent basis (with a comfortable and reasonable salary) or does becoming a lawyer come with the implied recognition that there is no semblance of a “9-5″?

Here’s my response:

I’m probably in the minority of people in the legal world who would still recommend a law career to their children (though I suspect my preschoolers are destined for engineering). I still think the law offers a rare combination of intellectual engagement, collaborative activity and social benefit, especially to those of us who are a little challenged in the math-and-science department. That latter difficulty wouldn’t present itself to you, with your experience in accounting, but I’m nonetheless bullish on law as a career.

That said, I’m bullish only to the extent that someone is choosing a legal career for the right reasons. I’m one of the stereotypical Arts majors who went to law school because (a) it seemed challenging and worthwhile and (b) there’s not much else you can do with an English degree. There are a lot of lawyers out there, like me, who went into law because they didn’t know what else to do and it seemed like something worth trying. That’s an approach you can afford to take if, say, you’re attending a Canadian law school in the early 1990s, where tuition topped out at around C$2,500 a year. That environment, though, is pretty much gone today: tuition at my alma mater has risen about 400% since I graduated, and it’s still reasonably affordable in the overall context.

So to one extent, law is simply too expensive a degree to undertake just to see if you’d like it, both in terms of the tuition costs and in the difficulty of getting a really high-paying job (NALP’s figures on median lawyer incomes for recent graduates are sobering, and should be digested by anyone considering a law school application) to help quickly pay down your debts. That was certainly the case before the recession, and it goes double or triple now: this is going to be a longer and deeper downturn than most people are willing to admit in the run-up to an election. There are no safe careers anymore, and that very much includes the law.

But your question is about hours, and your priority is more safeguarding your personal time than necessarily earning a big salary. It’s good that you recognize the reality of trading off between these two criteria — you might be surprised how many new lawyers don’t yet get that. In this regard, I would say that there are legal jobs and careers — or perhaps more accurately, jobs and careers available to a law graduate — that require more traditional hours and a bare minimum of weekend and evening work. But I don’t think there are very many of them.

I would rule out almost all private-practice jobs these days, and not just with the big firms — ask any sole or small-firm practitioner about the necessity of not just doing the legal work, but collecting outstanding accounts receivable, making equipment lease and premises rental payments, marketing the practice, doing all your own IT troubleshooting, and so forth. I expect there might be some positions with established firms in smaller communities that require predictable and relatively brief hours, but you could not describe them as either remunerative or secure. Legal support jobs — in research, knowledge management or (especially in your case) financial management in bigger firms — would seem to be much more promising. But until clients’ concerns start keeping 9-to-5ish hours, private-practice lawyers can never be entirely the masters of their own time.

In-house work for a long time supposedly offered a respite from the time demands of private practice — steady white-collar work in a predictable corporate environment. If that was ever true, it sure isn’t now: small law departments are overwhelmed with issues that keep their lawyers at the office well past the time other employees have taken the bus home, and larger law departments usually have multinational and multi-time-zone concerns to cope with. The rapid rise of governance as a key corporate worry has also added tremendously to in-house lawyers’ workload, usually without a commensurate increase in staff and resources to handle it. And as tough as law firm partnerships can be about billable hour targets, CFOs facing a long and dark recession make law firm partners look like church mice. In-house lawyers often say they have more predictability in their work flow than law firm lawyers do, but the hours are definitely longer than the corporate average, and the stress is at least equivalent, if not more so.

I’d say your most promising avenue for a legal job or career with more traditional hours might be in the public or non-profit sectors. Many of my law friends work for the federal government, and they enjoy both the challenge of the work and the benefits its provides, in terms of health coverage, work culture and vacation time (both the availability of vacation time and an expectation that it should be taken).

Again, I stress that the work is by no means easy, and if you’re offering legal services, no matter in what environment, urgent matters always emerge that will require you to arrive early and leave late. It’s also not the ticket to a Maserati in the driveway and Ivy League schooling for the kids. But as a general rule, the culture tends more towards the kind of predictable and traditional hours you’re seeking. And if the events of the last several weeks are any indication, the government is going to become a busier and more active employer for quite some time to come — we’re heading into an era when governments are the lenders of first and last resort, so as a legal employer, government is hot for the first time in awhile.

So in general, I’d suggest looking into law firm support work on the financial side, or government legal work. But I don’t want to end this email without a friendly caveat regarding the approach you’re taking.

I understand completely the drive and need to safeguard personal time — I’m not a Millennial, but I’m not a Boomer either, and I tend to be agnostic about this issue. But I would suggest that of all the criteria you might use to decide what sort of career path to pursue, time demands ought to be fairly low on the list. For one thing, hourly demands can change in a hurry — bankruptcy lawyers who were twiddling their thumbs 18 months ago can attest to that. But more importantly, what really sustains you in any kind of job or career — especially during those times, and we all experience them, when the people or the client or the environment gets you deeply down — is whether you have a passion for the work itself.

If you care about the nature of your work — if you look upon it as much as a calling as a job, or if you could honestly say some days that you’d do it for free if you had to — then you can ride out the rough patches. But if you don’t — if the job is just a means to an end, or rewards criteria that are largely unrelated to what’s really important in your life — then even the good days won’t be great days. That’s true in any career, but I feel like it’s especially the case with the law, many of whose practitioners are, frankly, kind of geeky about it.

What’s more, you’ll always be at a competitive disadvantage to those classmates or colleagues who do care about it. These people will work harder and longer on their assignments in law school, maybe even irrationally so, because they get a charge out of it. And they’ll show more enthusiasm and garner more positive attention in the workplace because at some level, their genuine enthusiasm for the subject can get them past dumb bosses and bad policies and silly clients.

So I’d have to advise — strongly — against going to law school in hopes of landing a job with limited hours. Not just because there are fewer and fewer of those jobs all the time, but because unless something about the law really appeals to you, matters to you, and sustains you, it’s very hard to make it through the doldrums, of which there can be more than a few in this profession.

The happiest and most successful lawyers I know love something about the law — from the driest black-letter contract interpretation to the social activism of anti-poverty advocacy, it doesn’t matter what — that makes it all worthwhile. I’d recommend giving some serious thought as to whether you think there’s something in the law that would similarly touch your heart — and if not, law might not be the right path for you right now.

1. Journalists are not your friends.

2. Nothing is ever off the record.

Now, that does tend to exaggerate the point for effect, and we did talk about the importance and benefits of developing a solid relationship of trust with selected reporters. But overall, we went heavier on the stick than the carrot. It’s better that lawyers be overcautious than undercautious when the microphone is live.

But afterwards, I admit, I found myself wondering if we tend to go too heavy with the warnings about dealing with reporters. Some are untrustworthy and will twist your words to get a juicier story and a better shot at publication, it’s true. But many of them are just doing their jobs, the same as lawyers, and needn’t be approached as the enemy. An abundance of caution can easily creep over the line into fear, defensiveness and aggression, none of which serve your purposes very well.

I was reminded of this when I read a thought-provoking article in Texas Lawyer, written by professional coach and psychotherapist James Dolan, about the role of fear in the legal profession. His thesis is that lawyers live in fear — as his patient puts it at the start of his article:

“Hell, the whole profession is about fear. Fear of not billing hours, fear of not bringing in business, fear of losing business. Fear of not making partner. Fear of being in trouble with my wife for working too much, and, of course, fear of being in trouble with the partnership for not working enough.” He stopped for a moment, letting his own words sink in. “And it started in law school. The whole thing runs on fear. I’m sick of being afraid all the time.”

I think this is an important point, and one that we don’t talk about enough in the law. Much of the normal activity in our professional lives is powered by fear: of the client, of the partners, of the billable hour target, and of failure, to name just the biggest ones.

- Law students early on develop a fear of their growing debt loads and, consequently, a fear of not getting a job or making enough money to pay their bills. This is on top of the fear that they’ve chosen the wrong line or work and are wasting tens of thousands of dollars per year.

- New lawyers suffer from “impostor’s syndrome,” the fear that they don’t have the skills and knowledge to equal the power and responsibility of a law license, and that they’ll soon be caught out for their ignorance and drummed out of the profession.

- Large-firm lawyers are afraid they won’t bill enough hours, that they’ll screw up an important client’s case, that they’re wasting crucial skill development years on grunt tasks, that they won’t make partner, that they’ll make partner but it won’t be worth it, and that their personal lives are being sacrificed.

- Small-firm and solo lawyers fear they’re walking a tightrope with no net, afraid of low-cost competitors taking away their clients, out-of-control overhead costs, shrinking client bases, the absence of a succession plan, and not being able to self-fund their own retirement.

- In-house and public-sector lawyers aren’t immune, either: especially in recessionary times, they’re afraid of cutbacks, job losses, “right-sizing,” and other manifestations of the risks you face when you have only one client and you’re on its payroll.

And fundamentally, there are also the fears that every lawyer has, fears endemic to the profession.

1. Fear of clients: that they’ll be unreasonable, demanding, dissatisfied, disloyal, vengeful, refusing to pay or even threatening you physically.

2. Fear of other lawyers: losing their respect, being barred from their partnership, being sued for your mistakes, failing to meet expectations.

3. Fear of the law: unable to keep up with everything, the fear that a case or statute has changed what you thought you knew and wrecked your reputation for competence.

4. And most perversely of all, fear of time: from the limitation period invisibly ticking away to the filing deadline approaching too fast to the days running out of hours left to bill.

Lawyers do live in fear. Is there anything we can do about it? Dolan thinks not, and focuses on understanding and accepting “the tiger” in your professional life. I would take a slightly different tack: lawyers are so fearful because lawyers don’t really understand or like risk.

A great many of the services lawyers sell are based upon calculating, analyzing and modifying risks for their clients. But lawyers are notoriously risk-averse, and much of their advice comes down to “avoid this risk,” frustrating counsel to many clients who can’t avoid risk, and especially to business clients, who don’t want to avoid it but to manage it profitably.

Lawyers apply the same terrible risk-management skills to their own professional lives. Sure, the client might sue you, the partnership might reject you, the law might have changed, the money might be tight. You might get hit by a bus, too, but it’s not very likely, especially if you don’t walk into a busy street blindfolded. Good lawyers take steps to mitigate risks — attend CLEs, communicate frequently with clients, understand the partnership criteria, manage their money wisely.

But even good lawyers don’t give themselves enough credit for having done so and having taken steps to pay down the debt in their risk portfolios. There is always some risk that can’t be eliminated, but lawyers don’t want to hear that. We have a hard time distinguishing between the things we can control and the things we can’t; partly by nature, partly by training, lawyers subconsciously believe we should be in control of everything. That this is an impossible goal makes it no less compelling a directive gnawing away at our peace of mind.

Fear is a mental and emotional state, and so I think the solution lies in mental and emotional fitness. Lawyers could use better training in risk management and control, understanding not just what steps they need to take to reduce risk, but also accepting that it’s okay not to worry so much after having taken those steps. Lawyers are professional worriers, it’s true; but there are limits, and lawyers need to cut themselves some slack or face a life spent being afraid of most everything.

But I think my primary difficulty with the term became clear to me after reading (with a hat tip to Legal Blog Watch for the link) this American Lawyer article by Denise Howell on work/life balance. There’s a lot of good stuff in the story, including the harsh reality behind producing even 1,800 billable hours a year (which at some firms these days is considered part-time work) and the gyrations large law firms now put themselves through to show their commitment to work/life balance (and the young lawyer attrition rates that demonstrate how these efforts continually fall short).

Denise also suggests that lawyers had work/life balance figured out pretty well in the 1970s, when a law firm lawyer could take an entire month off to go river-rafting with his family. My sense, though, is that law wasn’t the only line of work where saner hours prevailed nigh on 40 years ago.

It seems to me that North American business and industry in general led relatively uncomplicated lives back then in terms of pressure and competition, and so could proceed at what we now view as a somewhat leisurely pace. Right up until the early 1970s, North Americans could work about as hard they felt like and still rule the economic roost.

Then came oil shocks, Asian competition, the rise of the microcomputer, free-trade agreements, labour mobility, technology explosions, globalization, and the Internet. And within the space of a few decades, our work culture changed from moderate to frenetic.

Make no mistake, it’s been a net benefit: our society (or at least parts of it) is much wealthier than in the 1970s. But the price has been two generations of hard-working multi-taskers whose jobs have mastered them and defined their lives. Now, we work as hard as we possibly can in order to keep our businesses afloat or our jobs from being relocated to Tianjin.

Law has not been spared — in fact, handcuffed as lawyers are to our clients, the faster they sprint, the faster we have to gallop along to keep up. When you’re in a service industry, as lawyers are, you work at the same pace as your customers, or they’ll find other service suppliers who will — and since the legal industry has itself become much more competitive, find them they can.

That’s a big part of why I’ve stopped using the term “work/life balance” when it comes to the law — it suggests that long hours and hard work are simply symptoms of greedy law firm management or bullying clients, rather than part and parcel of a much tougher global business environment. Proponents of “work-life balance” essentially argue that lawyers are worked too hard by their employers and aren’t given enough time to attend to positive and necessary personal affairs. I’m sympathetic to that complaint, believe me — but the marketplace isn’t, and it gets the final word.

That’s not an especially pleasant reality, but there it is all the same. And I think that’s the major reason why working hours for a lot of lawyers have skyrocketed over the past 20-30 years — our clients face more demands in their personal and business lives, and we’ve had to adapt. Our problem is that we haven’t adapted well — we haven’t adopted the same workplace efficiencies as our clients have.

Lawyers cannot blame clients or the marketplace for the foolishness of 2,000+ billable-hour targets — they can blame themselves, and the law firms that still use these targets to assess, reward and promote their employees. Yes, clients are extremely demanding, but they’re not demanding billable hours — they’re demanding that their heavy workload gets done quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively. The ever-rising billable-hour target is lawyers’ unsophisticated and self-serving way of dealing with these demands — but it doesn’t deliver what clients are asking for.

Lawyers can do better — and in the near future, we will, because the same market forces that have driven client demands and lawyer efforts upwards will also, inevitably, reshape the business models by which lawyers provide and bill for their services.

Law firms are slowly, painfully coming to accept that their services can no longer be sold according to the amount of time it takes to complete their assigned tasks. They will have to come up with ways to calculate the value of the service they’ve offered and invoice an acceptable fee that will not vary according to time spent. If the job takes 100 hours to do, but the value to the client is only equal to 20 hours’ labour, then it’s the firm’s problem how to get the job done in 20.

And it’s at that point that lawyers will suddenly realize the tantalizing prospect before them: perform better client service in ways that actually reduce the number of hours they spend on a matter. And that will be a whole new, internal market force that is going to put the change process into overdrive.

So what we need to do is abandon all talk of “work/life balance,” and think more in terms of “alignment.” Is the way in which you perform your tasks aligned with your client’s interests? And is it aligned with the kind of life you want to lead? Your client’s interests aren’t usually malleable, and nor should the quality of your life be a variable dictated by others. The one thing you can change in that equation is how you work.

It’s the mark of the creative, intelligent professional to deliver services and solutions efficiently and effectively. Lawyers haven’t been doing that, and have been suffering the consequences as a result — long hours at the office and self-destructive pressures to reach annual hourly billing targets. But it doesn’t have to be that way. A lawyer who feels his “work/life balance” is out of control is obliged to align his approach, methods and work products with what he and his client both want. There’s no rule that says lawyers have to keep plugging away at their jobs the same way they did back in the 1970s.

The less we talk about “work/life balance,” and the more attention we pay to reshaping the way we work to align better with what clients want and what we need, the better off we’ll be.

For a long time, we’ve created a myth in our culture that it’s worth any price to reach your goal, especially if your ego tells you that you’re the best solution. We’ve created legends of people and organizations that pursued transformative long shots to achieve great results.

I need to be really clear: pushing through the Dip and becoming the best in the world at what you do is in fact the key to success. But (and it’s a big but), if you’re required to become someone you’re not, or required to mutate your brand into one that’s ultimately a failure in order to do so, you’re way better off quitting instead.

This got me thinking about lawyers. Many lawyers are happy with their working lives — or at least they’re content, having decided happiness was too high a target to aim for. But a lot of lawyers are unhappy, sometimes deeply, with their job or career. A lot of them talk about quitting, and a growing number of them do — either to find another job in a more fulfilling environment, or to keep looking until they eventually leave the profession altogether. Neither the law, nor every job in the law, is for everyone.

But many others stay where they are and grow more unhappy by the day. Some do it out of financial necessity, especially recent graduates with mountains of debt or a family to support. Some stick it out in the stubborn hope that things will improve, despite the absence of supporting evidence. Some convince themselves that the intangible benefits (social status, professional prestige, family pride) cancel out the misery. And some subscribe to the fallacy of “sunk costs,” that they’ve invested so much time, money and soul into a legal career that they can’t give up now.

One way or another, the unhappy lawyers in this second group are going to wind up in the same place as the unhappy ones in the first group: in a different job or out of the profession. They don’t have a strategy for finding fulfillment where they are, and they probably don’t have the motivation to execute such a strategy if they had one. Sooner or later, they’ll have to give it up; from my perspective, it might as well be sooner, and I recommend The Dip for more on that subject.

But there are worse things than being in a career that goes against your grain; there’s changing your grain to go with your career. Some lawyers have gone this route, too: either in single-minded pursuit of career goals, or simply as a survival mechanism, they’ve moved away from who they essentially were and became someone they felt they needed to be. Faced with what they perceived as the difficult, exacting mold of the lawyer’s life, they twisted and bent themselves into someone new in order to squeeze inside and fit. You know at least one lawyer like this; you might know several.

I thought of those lawyers today too, when visiting the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog and reading reactions to a story of two Illinois attorneys who allowed an innocent man to sit in prison for 26 years because the guilty man, who confessed his crime to them, was their client, and they felt ethically bound to keep silent. I’m astonished that the sheer obviousness of how wrong they were to do this didn’t overwhelm them from the start; but I’m even more astonished by the WSJ commenters who support their decision. Here’s my favourite:

I don’t know. Letting an innocent man rot in jail — and we’re not talking club fed, we’re talking maximum security — like that. I just don’t know.

You don’t know? Seriously? If we don’t know that legal ethics is a subset of, not an overriding exception to, fundamental morality — if we really don’t know which of these two courses of action was undeniably the wrong one — then we’ve gone down the rabbit hole here.

Look, this is hardly a groundbreaking point, but it bears repeating, especially to recent law school graduates: no job, no career, no status is worth not being true to yourself and to what matters. You’ve spent three decades or more becoming who you are, through daily interchanges with family, friends, loved ones, classmates, colleagues and others, not to mention with literature, philosophy, politics, activism, religion, and the dazzling multifaceted nature of daily life. Don’t diminish that person in the mistaken belief that this profession demands abandonment of principle, compassion and decency.

In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. The best lawyers, without exception, are authentic to their core: they know themselves, they know what’s true, and they’ve aligned their daily behaviour to their internal ethical clock. For their efforts, they have the respect and admiration of those around them, and they are as happy as you could ask to be.

A legal career should never force you to choose between who you are and who someone wants you to be. But if that choice is presented to you, then think long and hard about the value of quitting.

I read that and thought of the survey of law firm associates that Hildebrandt issued a little while ago. Its findings caused something of a stir by flouting the conventional wisdom that associates, especially in large firms, were overworked, stressed and deeply unhappy. I won’t go into the nuts and bolts here, but among the findings was that satisfaction was much higher than expected and that there was no correlation between long hours and unhappiness — rather the opposite, in fact. I think these two items say something about today’s new lawyers that law firms need to understand.

I continue to be amazed by senior lawyers who complain long and loud about the current generation entering their firms: “no commitment,” “not willing to pay their dues,” “a sense of entitlement,” and occasionally, even “lazy” are among the apparent sins of the young. The people saying these things are very smart, very capable, often leaders of their firms, but I don’t think they’re grasping a critical point: by and large, today’s new lawyers have no qualms whatsoever about working long and hard. What they have serious qualms about is working long and hard on rote tasks, unfulfilling assignments, due diligence and similar kinds of docket-filler, with few opportunities for serious client contact, independent undertakings, or crunch-time appearances in dealrooms and courtrooms.

The standard large law firm model, both economic and cultural, requires junior lawyers to labour in the salt mines for a certain period of time; those able and willing to make it through advance to the next phase. That’s the way it’s been for decades now. But it looks to me as if the newest shipment of law school grads isn’t interested in playing that game. They’ve been raised from Day One by their Boomer parents to work hard, seeking out and conquering challenges, and they expect work to be engaging and meaningful. It’s no surprise that they chafe and carp about what lands on their desks at law firms, and it’s equally unsurprising that their employers aren’t sympathetic.

But what Seth observes and what Hildebrandt shows is that there’s potential here for a more positive result. Young lawyers, if set to work on tasks that stretch their abilities and engage their intellect, will respond enthusiastically and become tremendous resources for their law firms, now and down the road. They won’t talk as much about “work/life balance” because they’ll be more willing to make work their life — if the work matters and if it allows them to rapidly develop their skills.

I’m pretty firmly of the mind that the disconnect today is not between hard-working older lawyers and laid-back young ones — it’s between different ideas of what should constitute satisfying work for novice lawyers. The firms that can (a) figure this out and (b) re-engineer their processes to get their new lawyers engaged quickly on meaningful work that develops skills and contacts will have a great advantage in winning the generational war. Law firms are run by smart people, so I think they’ll get the first one soon enough. But the second? Well, it takes quite a while to get a fully loaded tanker ship sailing at full speed to change direction.

I’ll leave the articles for your perusal — they don’t say much that critics within the legal industry haven’t been saying for awhile –but it is interesting to see the MSM take an interest in the effects of the profession’s broken business model. One explanation could be the old anti-lawyer standby, that the media has always liked kicking lawyers around at any opportunity. But I don’t buy it in this case: the tone and approach of these articles is fair and at times downright sympathetic. The writers and editors behind these stories, I’m guessing, have friends and colleagues in the law and have been struck by their misery.

I suspect what we’re seeing here is the sharpening of the crisis within the profession — the tension rising to a pitch high enough to be heard outside our cloistered walls. This is, in the long run, a good thing — it’s like when an addict’s friends arrange an intervention; it lets the addict know that there really is something seriously wrong. I look forward to seeing a segment on the billable hour on a future 60 Minutes – and that’s not as outlandish as it would have sounded even a couple of years ago.

But here’s the problem. Look beneath those shallow and cynical diatribes against our professional conduct, and you’ll find a few uncomfortable truths. Read the more legitimate but equally disturbing article about large firm life in the September 2007 Toronto Life. Hear the speakers at the CBA’s Canadian Legal Conference last month describe women lawyers who hide serious illnesses in order to protect their careers.

We damage our profession when we pretend that everything’s just fine in the practice of law. I’ve spoken informally with any number of lawyers and heard countless stories of frustration, worry, heartache and exhaustion. Big firm or small, urban or rural, many lawyers suffer from ineffective business models, uncompetitive practices, unfulfilling tasks, punishing workloads, and unacceptable behaviour by colleagues and bosses.

None of these issues has anything to do with the fundamental nature of being a lawyer — we’re no more susceptible to these sorts of problems than are accountants, architects or investment bankers. So much for the lie that lawyers are inherently unprincipled or miserable.

What these problems do have in common is a broken business culture. Compared to today’s successful organizations, the way lawyers structure their businesses, sell their services, treat their employees, market their practices and relate to their clients is obsolete and harmful. The poor workplace culture that afflicts many law offices can be traced to our outmoded approach to business — and our refusal to admit it.

National has been exploring these business and cultural problems for years. But the stories we’ve published are outnumbered by the ones we’ve had to abandon, because we couldn’t get enough lawyers to talk on the record.

Those lawyers who shared their stories with me informally were adamant that they would not be interviewed on these topics, not even under assumed names. They’re afraid to speak the truth, afraid for their jobs and reputations — and that’s as damning an indictment of the current system as I can think of.

We can summon the courage and honesty to address these problems ourselves — or we can continue to hide behind our professional walls and wait for more outside attacks to bring them down altogether. Which sounds like a better option to you?

This post first appeared as the editorial in the October 2007 issue of National magazine.

“I enjoyed the last three months immensely,” I said. “But trust me, ‘time off’ does not in any way describe it.”

If you’ve spent more than a few weeks raising a child hands-on, you’ll probably get that. If you haven’t, you might have a hard time understanding how parenting can be more work than the toughest law job — and can be more rewarding than the greatest law job, too. Similarly, I think most legal employers these days are either clued in to helping their lawyers be parents, or they’re not.

It’s been heartening to hear and read the stories of law firms that do get it: they accommodate within their work structures lawyers’ decisions to have kids. They understand not only the business advantages to that approach — retention, recruitment, and more (set out below) — but also that a law firm community that respects its employees’ personal lives is a triumph of professionalism.

And some firms don’t get it. Their business models can’t maximize production from young parents, and so they accept high turnover rates and the exodus of women lawyers as a tolerable cost of success. What strikes me, even more so than before I spent three months as a full-time dad, is how it’s the firms who are missing out here, not the lawyers. What sensible law firm wouldn’t want to employ a parent?

Parents are the ultimate multi-taskers, simultaneously juggling numerous duties — all urgent priorities and all mandatory — through hard work, organization and efficiency. That’s not valuable to firms trying to leverage the most work out of the fewest professionals?

Parents are tremendous dispute resolvers, balancing both the short-term demands and long-term interests of parties with deeply self-interested viewpoints, usually in high-stress situations. That’s not useful for clients who need conflicts settled quickly and calmly?

Parents are great listeners, reading between the lines of what they’re told and figuring out what someone really needs, earning their trust in the process. That’s not the very heart of effective client relations and marketing?

Parents function on much less sleep than they need. That’s not a survival skill in the modern law firm?

The business case for law firms to recruit and retain lawyers who are parents is clear. The business case for the billable-hour regime and the work-‘em-till-they-drop culture of many firms, which drive away these valuable professionals, remains a mystery to me.

This post first appeared as the editorial in the July/August 2007 issue of National magazine.

This is good news, of course, and I applaud the architects and pioneers of parental leave acceptance. But in many firms, parental leave allowances are simply part of an effort to staunch the hemorrhaging of young talent. Firms have learned that if they want to keep young lawyers around, they could start by accommodating these lawyers’ desire to have kids and to be with them during the first several months of their lives.

But that young talent probably will continue to drain away regardless, because it’s not just about getting time with a newborn. Consider that for many of these lawyers, the hard part comes when they return to work and find the firm demanding exactly the same hours and dedication it did pre-leave — if not more. I know a lot of ex-firm lawyers for whom that was the breaking point.

Why do so many lawyers still have to choose between a fulfilling career in a law firm and a fulfilling role as an involved parent? There are always tradeoffs, naturally: you can’t be a high-powered, high-paid lawyer and still spend hours on the playroom floor with your kids. But lawyering and parenting don’t have to be mutually exclusive. And more to the point, the firms seem to keep mistaking the symptoms for the problem.

Law firms are businesses trying to turn a profit. But they’re hamstrung by how they go about it — by their addiction to the billable-hour system. When you sell your services, compensate your workers and evaluate your future partners on the volume of hours billed, you will disproportionately reward those lawyers who have few if any commitments outside the office.

If time equals profitability, and if profitability equals profile and promotion, a firm inevitably will exclude lawyers who want or need to spend time away from work (a group that remains overwhelmingly female). There are thousands of excellent lawyers who fall into that category. They form a vast pool of top-quality resources that continue to slip away from firms addicted to the billable hour system. Is the system worth that?

This post first appeared as the editorial in the March 2007 issue of National.