A Market for Flexible Law Practice
posted by Frank Pasquale
I was glad to see a Boston Globe article today on some recent advances in law firm flexibility. Law professor Joan Williams has helped promote the movement by “author[ing] the balanced hours model adopted by Kirkpatrick & Lockhart and other progressive firms.” If firms could more easily monetize the value of stable employment, they’d realize the gains to be had:
Lawyers at top firms are expected to bill 1,800 hours a year but put in a grueling 2,100 hours or more of actual work. Part-timers are assumed to be bad deals because their overhead costs equal a full-timer’s. But look beyond such narrow measures, and the picture changes, says Joan Williams, a law professor at the University of California/Hastings. . . . Attrition is far more costly to firms than overhead, and turnover frustrates clients, says Williams, who argues that successful balanced hours programs benefit everyone.
The Project for Attorney Retention is doing a lot to promote this idea, and I’m all in favor: as Pope John Paul II memorably put it in his encyclical on work, “however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is ‘for man’ and not man ‘for work.’” (Here’s more on the relation of CST and law practice from the always-insightful Jeff Lipshaw.)
Unfortunately, it’s often hard to get information about firms’ flexibility policies. One of the main reasons I worked at Arnold & Porter a few years ago was their inclusion in the Fortune 100 Best Employers, but only a few law firms get into that survey. According to the story, “Deborah Epstein Henry created the ‘Cheat Sheet,’ a list of 75-odd benchmarking questions for students to determine about firms, such as what percentage of partners work reduced hours.” But I’d probably be too scared to ask questions like that at the interview stage.
Perhaps the ABA should require the disclosure of answers to questions like these, like the FDA requires nutritional labeling. As Russ Muirhead argues, “without due consideration of how we fit the work we do,” “our notions of freedom and fairness are incomplete.” Opponents of regulation may think a principle of caveat vendor should prevail, with the market for talent meting out punishment for digital sweatshops. But it’s hard to discern the signal through the noise of many unregulated clearinghouses for such information.
Photo Credit: Coffee Monster/Flickr.
November 6, 2006 at 7:04 pm
Posted in: Law Practice
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Responses (3)
Kaimi - November 7, 2006 at 11:17 pm
I worked for a year part-time at Cravath. It was a great experience. It was something that I talked to the partner about, and they were happy to set it up.
In that time, I certainly billed fewer hours than I had billed before. (I approached 400 in a bad month, prior to the switch; after the switch, I wasn’t supposed to pass 160 in a month.) But I also provided a continuing knowledge about the cases, about the team, and so forth, which certainly would have taken time and hours to replace.
Young Associate - November 10, 2006 at 9:01 am
For the life of me, I’ll never understand why big city firms are not more flexible. In Washington, DC, I have to commute forever to get to my office downtown. I get to my office, I sit at my desk, and I do four things:
1. I research and write.
2. I talk to colleagues on the phone.
3. I trade emails with colleagues.
4. I go to meetings.
The first three could be done safely from home, and the fourth one could very often be accomplished by a switch to the second or third.
I’d gladly trade my fairly big office for a smaller one, if I were allowed to come in less often and, instead, to work at my home office several days each week.
True, there are benefits to coming into the office — a team that never gets together will not function as smoothly — but I find it hard to believe that those benefits are worth (1) the cost to the firm to rent all of this downtown space, and (2) the cost to me, in money and time, to come into town at least five days a week.
Aviva Cuyler - November 12, 2006 at 12:02 pm
The quote from Pope John Paul II reminds of a saying I heard while traveling in Greece. The people would say “we work to live, the Americans live to work.”
I have been lucky enough to be able to tele-commute for a number of different firms across the country for the past 11 years, which has given me complete flex-time. This has worked out really well for me – especially after I had children – and my productivity increased exponentially once I started working this way.
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