It sounds like the beginning of a tongue twister, if you say it quickly—wouldja be a widget? Kind of like “how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood” or maybe “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.”
But I am not going to build this little question into a full-fledged tongue twister. Saying this phrase quickly has a certain alliteration—but what is more important is why I want to talk about being widgets in the first place. And that means revisiting our early law student selves.
If you were like me as a law student, you didn’t really know what lawyers actually did-- we didn’t have any in my family, but law sounded interesting, so I applied. I had fairly romantic and idealistic ideas about how worthy clients would come to me, and I would solve their problems for them (and they would be very grateful and would sing my praises….). I thought I would have my own office and be in full control of the volume of work I took on so I could have the life I dreamt about.
First year summer student positions didn’t exist when I was a law student, so my classmates and I first encountered law job searches and interviews in January of second year when interviews for articling positions began. It was an exciting time, it was scary, and it was nerve-wracking, all at the same time. We shared information, including stories about what happened in interviews and questions that were asked. Forty years later, I remember two odd questions that my classmates were asked. One classmate was asked if he could be a salesman (to which perhaps he replied that he didn’t spend seven years in university to take a sales role?) and another was asked if he were a tree, what kind of tree he would be.
No doubt the lawyers asking these questions had put thought into these questions and had good reasons for asking them. The interviewer who asked if the candidate could be a salesman may have wanted to know if the candidate was comfortable marketing himself and the firm—which turns out to be a fair question, even though we law students thought it was decidedly odd. But the question about what kind of tree a law student would be was harder to understand. Perhaps someone at the firm had been reading pop psychology and thought they could perform an armchair analysis based on what tree the candidate chose. Or perhaps the point was to see how the candidate responded to a ball out of left field.
As I advanced in my legal career, I remembered these two odd questions, the first one because marketing was very much a reality that didn’t exist in my idealistic visioning, and the second one because it illustrated how little we knew about how law firms worked.
But I would have phrased these questions differently. Forget trees and salesmanship. I would have asked candidates if they thought they could be widgets and, if so, what kind of widgets they wanted to be.
Now I have to confess that my undergraduate degree was in English, French and Canadian History which equipped me with some skills that I put to use in law school. But I was absolutely baffled by a term I first heard in Contracts Law: widget! I remember asking a classmate what a widget was and having no frame of reference in which to make the answer make sense. Why on earth was there a manufactured term for something that did not exist except in economics or business courses? I could have explained an archaic English synonym perhaps, or a French translation of a synonym. I may have been able to tell you about a term’s etymology within the Canadian lexicon if I had time to do some research. But I couldn’t get my head around an imaginary unit of production used in hypothetical examples—there wasn’t a lot of that in my humanities-based BA!
I was also baffled by how everyone but me (or so it seemed) knew what a widget was, so not knowing something that others seemed to know fed into my imposter syndrome, and the feeling that I was utterly outclassed in law school is probably why I remember this more than forty years later.
Law students—and many incoming articling students who may not have had a summer student experience—do not understand that they are effectively widgets, clever devices which generate billable hours, the cogs on which law firm machinery spin. As law practice newcomers, we hope that we will wow our employers with our scintillating legal skills and creative solutions. We daydream about being promoted because of the quality of our work, and we don’t understand that our job (regardless of the size of most firms) is really to generate billable hours. i.e., quantity in a model that demands much more than a conventional work week.
Of course, most firms are not so crass as to say that they are in the business of generating billable hours as their mission—they want to tie their mission to fulfilling (and exceeding) the needs of clients and being good corporate citizens. But at different points in my career, I have wondered if they should be fully honest about the role that juniors play. Juniors are not valued for their incredible legal talent but for their hours, which are either billed or written off. And once juniors learn that docketed hours can be written down or written off, they resolve to become even busier, generating even more hours than theirs target required because they weren’t in control of what happened to them.
I came to relate to what a widget was when I was in private practice—I was a widget, a unit of production in a law firm budget. I could be a good widget and reach my billable hour target, or I could be a poor widget with deficient hours.
Forget my idealistic vision of helping clients as my primary role. My job was revenue generation pure and simple. Yes, we solved legal problems as the basis for our revenue generation. While firms were rarely so blunt as to say that they were in the partner compensation generating business, I encountered this in my corporate counsel life where our CEO liked to say that we were in the business of delivering shareholder value. This left me cold.
I could embrace the mission of being the best petrochemical business producer, thereby generating shareholder value—but the bald (and can I say harsh?) assertion that we were in the business of delivering shareholder value just didn’t work for me. I haven’t heard of law firms making this same kind of bold assertion, but we all know that there are lawyers who prefer the profit motive to the service motive.
Over my career, I formulated my theory that the question interviewers should ask candidates is if they thought they could be a widget. First, you will unveil the humanities grads who didn’t pay attention during Contracts and have no clue what a widget is, and you will also see how the candidate responds to an unexpected question. But asking this question may also be honest because we know that law firms may not want to hire people like me who had completely idealistic an unrealistic sview of practicing law.
I am thinking about the concept of being a widget this week because it was Mental Health Week and Well-Being in Law Week. I attended two excellent webinars in addition to the Assist webinar on Neurodiversity and Law. The first webinar was hosted by the Law Society of Alberta and featured UK lawyer turned therapist Annmarie Carvalho on the subject of toxic productivity in law. And while she was speaking and showing a slide of a hamster on a hamster wheel, I kept thinking of my lawyer-as-widget analogy: produce, produce, produce!
According to Ms. Carvalho, toxic productivity is caused by a convergence of several factors: the chargeable time model, the six minute mentality, self-worth becoming tied to our hours and volume of work (aka success), valuing quantity over quality, and loss of creativity. She cited one of my favourite research models, Laura Epsom’s ”Insecure Overachievers” (https://hbr.org/2018/02/if-youre-so-successful-why-are-you-still-working-70-hours-a-week) where knowledge workers work harder and harder (quantity) because they doubt the quality of their work due to a profound sense of their own inadequacy.
Ms. Carvalho advocates pursuing wholeness to counteract the changes to our brain circuitry that toxic productivity can cause. There are actions you can take personally, and there are actions which legal employers can take as well (moving away from the billable hour model in favour of fixed fee/ value based model as one example that obviously does not fit all law practices). I can’t summarise her presentation in a blog—I couldn’t take notes fast enough, and some of her material is proprietary—but if you have a chance to attend one of her sessions, go for it!
The second webinar was hosted by the CBA Well-Being subcommittee, featuring two lawyers and a judge who discussed negative impacts to their mental health while practicing law. They then discussed the concept of making work fit your life rather than building your life around work, and they advocated taking time off to recharge. Interestingly, one panelist mentioned that her firm had a mandatory two month sabbatical every three years—and her billings in the year she took her sabbatical were her highest years because she had recharged and was fresh.
I can relate to this sentiment. I job-shared a position as Senior Corporate Counsel in a large, multinational company for many years. My partner and I each came in fresh for our half week, and we were extremely productive. I worked the end half of the week, and when I arrived at the office on Wednesday, there were many morose and uninspired people in my midst. They drifted around, looking for motivation to tackle their work at the same time as seeking a distraction from it. As my job share partner said once in an interview “we come in and just burn it.”
Before joining this innovative job share, I felt that I wasn’t doing my best at work, and I wasn’t doing my best with my young family. I was exhausted and was in survival mode. But when I moved into a fully supported job share, I gave 100% at work three days a week and 100% to my family life four days a week. I felt like a whole human and not a failing lawyer and a failing mother, and I had outside interests and friends, two things that my work-at-all-costs model hadn’t allowed.
My partner and I gave our employer good value. We split one salary 50:50 but both worked three days per week, and we were inspired, energetic and creative. And because we had been given the opportunity to work in a model that worked for us, we went above and beyond in our roles.
On one hand, you could say that we were part-time widgets, but we didn’t have to track time which makes a world of difference. But it was more than that. We were able to be the people we wanted to be and not lawyers struggling to get by. I felt like an anti-widget.
New data from the NALP Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that tracks trends in law practice in the US and Canada, indicates that the associate attrition rate has increased (https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/resources/practice-management/associate-attrition-rises-first-time-in-three-years-highest-in-small-firms-nalp-foundation-survey/392395) for the first time since 2021 (from 18% to 20%), and that associates are leaving their positions earlier. I wonder if this trend is related to associates seeking a different blend of work and non-work life.
Being a widget is dehumanizing. The reality is that many of us in an 1800 hour pyramid structure law firm knew that some of our cohort would fall off each year, winnowing down the prospective partners and then winnowing the partners down the top dogs who shared the biggest slices of the pie. It wasn’t what I ever wanted to do, but I found myself doing it and caring about all the things that go with being a diligent people-pleasing widget. We live the under-promise and over-deliver message: they want 1800 hours? I want to give 2000 or more. Most lawyers are people pleasers with competitive streaks, and the billable hours model relies on this.
There are many lawyers who are happy in the widget-world, and I doubt that they see themselves as widgets. But for lawyers (and students) who begin to feel like widgets and are unsatisfied, don’t be passive. Feeling like a widget is disempowering but it is okay to want something different from the dominant model in our profession. There are firms that offer sabbaticals with coverage for your files, for example, or roles which allow more flexibility and time-off.
I will be a panelist at an upcoming CBA Articling Students section meeting (https://cba-alberta.org/sections/articling-students/) discussing alternate career paths along with the amazing Pauline Chan. We will share information and maybe even wisdom about building your career your way. This shouldn’t just be limited to articling students and junior lawyers—Assist can deliver a similar session or perhaps even an alternative career fair. If you would value this, let us know. I can tell you that I built my career around work-life harmony/integration after my first six years in practice and that I worked in alternative arrangements for close to 20 years. And I returned to the conventional workforce, found my passion and was awarded a KC designation. Dare to dream about your career—if you do what works for you and what you are most interested in and which aligns with your core values, you can achieve excellence and also be happy and content.
Assist hopes to offer a series of webinars with Marc Adler about how lawyers can achieve wholeness in the fall, bringing some of the wisdom from his Mental Health and the Legal Profession course at the University of Calgary to those of us past our law school days. Marc will write a blog or two outlining the types of issues which originate in law school and continue into practice, as well as some strategies to overcome them which he shared with his students. So watch for that in the upcoming weeks.
If this blog resonates with you and you want to chat with me or any of our peer support volunteers who have built their careers their way or have explored how to be the well-rounded person they want to be, just call us.
Loraine