legal sanity

A couple of months ago, I looked at the economics of lawyer depletion. The subject recently resurfaced in a post at Bruce MacEwen’s Adam Smith, Esq. discussing sustainability and the law firm business model. Reflecting on that paradigm’s inherent weaknesses, MacEwen states: “it's a structural difficulty created by client expectations for responsiveness, combined with the ineluctable financial arithmetic of the billable hour, colliding with women's prime biological and sociocultural child-bearing years, and with everyone's desire that life consist of more than the four walls of the office.”

Responding to MacEwen’s post, blogger Rob Millard of The Adventure of Strategy offered up some possible law firm solutions to the problem of “overworked and overstressed associates,” including: accepting lower per partner profits; instituting a staggered compensation system; and leveraging technology so that lawyers can work from home some of the time. Millard winds down his commentary by observing: “It’s all very well to have swimming pools, concierge services and restaurants to support those that are willing to sacrifice all for their careers. But excluding those that seek a balance is depriving the firms of potentially valuable capacity at a time when good corporate lawyers are in desperately short supply.”

Lending a broader cultural context to MacEwen’s and Millard’s observations is a flurry new posts and articles on the American phenomenon of forfeiting accrued vacation time. I’ve previously discussed Americans’ work-life identity crisis and the problem of over-work in America (pdf).

Adding to this foundation of information is a BostonWorks.com article, titled Time off is a gift; it would be rude not use it, and a related post from the Job blog. Both consider why we tend to live to work in this country and the fallout from doing so.

The discussion continues in a Time.com essay called Just Sit Back and Relax! and in a piece from CSMonitor.com on corporate efforts to counter employees’ all-work-and-no-play mindset. Notably, the latter article points out that the law is one field in which these new quality-of-life efforts have yet to get a foothold.