Work-Life Whatever
Work-life balance is a hot topic in the legal community these days. The Omnibus Report (Phase 2) of the National Study on the Psychological Health Determinants for Canadian Legal Professionals) identified work-life balance as one of the top 3 issues for our community across Canada, and Phase 2, which provided breakdowns of data by province or territory, identified as Work-life balance as being tied with Working Conditions and Cognitive Demands as the top theme for Alberta lawyers and students.
As you know from reading this blog, I was called to the Alberta bar in 1987. A lot of things have changed since then. I predate desktop computers for lawyers—and assistants! When I started practicing, assistants had high-tech typewriters like IBM Selectrics which had changeable font balls so you could have Times New Roman as opposed to Century. This was high tech! And we female articling students and junior lawyers were cautioned to never disclose that we could type, or we would end up doubling as assistants. I was a fairly poor typist, so there was no danger of that for me. But firms were starting to have word processing departments which produced documents.
So, while some things have changed dramatically since those days, others have remained the same Work-life balance, in particular, remains just as elusive.
When I opted in to the 1800 billable hour target in 1988, I went in with my eyes somewhat open as I had discovered that smaller firms with lower billable hour targets had files that couldn’t generate as many hours, and we were also expected to be bringing in files. Choose your poison, and I chose hours over marketing. But I still remember one of my first days at my Big Law firm when a more senior associate explained the math for reaching 1800: bill 7.5 hours per day for 48 weeks of the year so you could take your four weeks of vacation, and that billing 7.5 hours per day meant about 11 hours per day in the office.
The calculus has not changed. The 2022 National Study on the Psychological Health Determinants for Canadian Legal Professionals found, as a result of data provided by survey participants, that lawyers bill about two-thirds of the hours they spend working, and 7.5 over 11 is 68%--the math still holds.
I consider my twenties—my time in law school and in private practice-- as my lost decade, between working hard in law school and then at law firms. But when I was an undergraduate student, I had developed a plan to build my life around ensuring that I had some degree of balance around academics, creativity, physical fitness and spirituality, and I was quite successful at keeping these four balls in the hour in a decent pattern. When you are a student, you think that student workload is going to be the heaviest you will encounter, and that once you graduate, you will have free evenings and weekends—but then came law school, where I could somewhat manage my work life choices and then legal practice where I had to give up my model. The wisdom that I had so carefully honed and implemented evaporated with a whimper.
I accepted that practicing law meant that work came ahead of everything else—I was there to learn, I didn’t have children, my spouse worked the same hours. But it all changed when my first child was born. I had a four-month maternity leave, and my mindset shifted cataclysmically. I didn’t like the person that my work above else persona had become, and I wanted something different for my son. I still wanted to return to work, but in a very different way. I revived my work/creativity/physical fitness/spirituality model and added in “being the best mom I can be on my terms.” This meant that work no longer ruled the roost.
I had a clear game plan: reduced hours. My firm had a policy on this—associates could apply to work on a reduced hours arrangement (66%) for a reduced salary (55%). Money had never been the primary driver for my interest in law. I wanted a fulfilling career that would provide a reasonable standard of living. It wasn’t hard for me to step back from money.
After two years and a second baby, I resigned to take a chance on a contract job share position in the law department of a large multinational company. My job share partner and I were eerily similar--we each had two sons (at that time), a lawyer turned entrepreneur husband, undergrad degrees in English and French, and the same wedding china pattern. We could finish each other’s sentences and pass files back and forth. This was truly serendipity—you must have two people who are truly in sync and can sacrifice personal ego for the greater good. I worked Wednesday to Friday and loved it.
Sorting through some old photos and memorabilia last weekend, I came across copies of two articles that I had given to my mother, one in my employer’s internal magazine (which I had forgotten about) and one in Canadian Business magazine, extolling the virtues of job-sharing professional roles.
The inhouse publication quoted our General Counsel as saying, “I did not think that job sharing was something professionals could do….But together these lawyers fulfill a seamless role and I’m astounded at how well it works.”
And a process for setting up a job share was outlined:
- Determine if the job can be shared, depending on aspects of the job and relationships with clients/customers
- Find a prospective partner who is a good match
- Both partners must be committed to the job share and not using it as a “stop-gap to a full-time position.”
The article stated that it was difficult to predict how promotable the pair of us would be, but stated that we had received the full support of management. Not only management—we delivered presentations to the Board of Directors of a multinational public company! And, it also didn’t mention that we were originally retained as contractors at the Corporate Counsel job band, but within six months we were promoted to Senior Corporate Counsel and became permanent employees.
One comment about finding a partner who is a good match: our law department was working on conflict management processes and had retained a psychologist who ran us through a battery of personality tests. He reviewed our individual profiles in a group meeting, commenting that our personalities made taking vacation of at least three weeks necessary for us to unwind and then showing differences in our attributes. After he reviewed my peak and valleys on the personality inventory he had used, he moved to my partner’s and said that he didn’t have anything further to say about hers that was not covered by his remarks on mine. I asked if he knew that we were a job share and he didn’t! Somehow, my partner and I came together with consistent traits and styles.
The inhouse article closed with this comment from our GC: “[they] are positive and upbeat with ‘can do’ attitudes. But most of all, they are at peace because they are masters of the relationship between their personal and professional lives.”
I guess that I still have that “can do” attitude because the reason that I have quoted this newly-found article is that if my partner and I were able to do this, so can other lawyers. You just have to believe in yourself and know that you are going to do everything you can to make your alternative arrangement work.
The second article, from the April 1996 issue of Canadian Business magazine, reported that we generally worked 9-10 hour days and quoted my partner—the one with more interesting styles of speech than boring me—as saying “Working part-time, we come in and just burn it!” We also promoted the benefit of having someone to test out ideas with, creating better performance.
And what kind of work did we do? We advised the Human Resources department on all employee and policy issues, supported the Human Resources and Governance Committees of the Board of Directors, and worked on international acquisitions. We passed files back and forth—even transactional projects—and it worked.
While my job share ended after about six years, I remained as a part-time lawyer for several years and then ran my own small practice (at first in conjunction with a human resources consulting business which fell away over time) where I was able to somewhat control my hours. I joked that my practiced followed the Rule of Three: when one client had an emergency, it usually seemed like two others did as well! But by keeping my client roster manageable, I was able to manage even those spurts of crises.
I thought that I was part of ushering in a wave of a new way of working, rooted in work-life balance, and I was excited about what the future would hold in terms of creative arrangements that allowed employees choices about how to allocate their time between work and their non-work lives, whatever that entailed at different points in time. But, that isn’t how things turned out—and thirty years after opting into alternate work arrangements, they remain unicorns.
In life, things work until they stop working, and I opted to return to the regular workforce in 2014, marking 20 years of navigating the integration of work and life and plotting the best balance for me, where change is the only constant.
This week, I read an interesting American state-of-the-legal-profession study which found that 52% of Gen Z lawyers (largely associates, I would guess) would gladly trade salary for reduced hourshttps://www.leopardsolutions.com/in-the-news/surepoints-leopard-solutions-debuts-state-of-the-legal-industry-findings/. I get it—as I did it 30-odd years ago-- and anyone who wants to achieve a different relationship between their work-life and their life-life can do so as well, and you can return to more traditional practices if you keep your skills marketable and current, and you can achieve law practice excellence.
Is the time finally right for law firms and legal departments to reconsider alternative work arrangements? I believe it is, based on the American stat that more than half of young lawyers would trade salary for shorter hours, and the fact that the National Study in Canada found that lawyers regretted that they lacked time for their families, hobbies and activities. Still not convinced? The National Study also found that 15% of Canadian lawyers were opting to not have children because they viewed becoming parents as incompatible with practicing law.
I have followed with interest the debates over what the best term is for non-traditional legal practice that consumes less than, say 40 hours per week. “Work-life balance” has been in vogue for many years—it is the term that I began using 30 years ago! But more recent commentators take issue with the fact that “work life balance” implies that there is in fact a balance between these two dimensions of our lives while in reality they are never truly in balance. My take was that the balance didn’t have to be exactly equal. It just had to be better than it was in conventional lawyer jobs.
Then “work life integration” was coined instead. But our work and personal lives have always had a degree of integration whether we lived to work or worked to live—they are not mutually exclusive, and the mere fact of integration does not connote that the relationship is ideal.
I applied for a position many years ago at a large organization that just identified “work-life” as a value, but I thought that was extremely unhelpful: we all have work, and we all have life or we wouldn’t be at work. This nebulous but inoffensive term was utterly meaningless.
Recently, I came across “work-life harmony” which I prefer. We all like different types of music, but most of us are drawn to more tonal sounds over dissonant, atonal ones, and most of us want our lives to be harmonious. But our choices as to what is tonally appealing or harmonious is subjective, and we all have the right to select what works for us.
To be honest, I thought that so-called “alternative work arrangements” would become commonplace in law. I didn’t think I was an outlier or a trailblazer, but I knew what I wanted out of my work life and my family life and knew that I needed to find a way to bring them together in a ratio that suited me. But we continue to hear lawyers lamenting the amount of time and energy that their work consumes along with the desire to reprioritize their lives.
If you are interested in changing the relationship between your professional life and your personal life, please know that you can dare to put your dream into action. Start by making a business case for your firm or employer. In my job share, it was easier for the pair of us to work 50-55 hours per week (three days each, essentially) while other lawyers in our department were burning out working those hours chronically. We were fresh and recharged when we began our three-day sprints, and as my partner said, we just burned it! We had built-in vacation coverage as we took our vacations at different times, allowing for greater continuity than when individual lawyer were away. And we were immune from many of the divisive issues plaguing our workgroups—we could get wrapped up in whatever the political issue was, but then have four days off in which to realize that these issues were counterproductive.
I believe that the time is right for lawyers to start asking for what they want. Yes, you trade dollars—but about half of young lawyers are prepared to do this because the status quo isn’t working for us, and we know that money doesn’t deliver happiness. (And the National Study highlighted that young lawyers have a low level of commitment to the practice of law.) Unfortunately, law relies on external validation—how much money you make and the prestige of your practice—but an important lawyer study found that alignment with internal values was robustly linked with subjective well-being.
I don’t think it matters whether we call what we want “work-life balance,” “work-life integration,” or “work-life harmony”—call it “work-life whatever.” What matters is that we empower individuals to choose how to allocate their time and energy based on what works for them at different times of their lives. This week, I attended the Calgary Bar Association’s biannual KC dinner, and I invited friends and colleagues who have supported me in different roles over my career. I am mentioning this because one of the features of my KC application was that I worked in alternative arrangements for many years which helped equip me for the valuable work I am able to do leading Assist (that and my own experiences with mental health.) So, yes, you can take steps back in your career and then step back into full-bore practice, and you can be recognized for what you do.
I am happy to chat with lawyers who aspire to alternative arrangements, and I would also love to deliver presentations at your workplaces about how alternative arrangements can not only work but be beneficial.
Work-life whatever? It can be whatever you want it to be.
Loraine