legal sanity

The other night, my kids turned on one of the made-for-T.V. movies that abound this time of year. It featured siblings who live in a beautiful home filled with all the latest toys and gadgets. Despite the material bounty around them, these T.V. sisters were enormously unhappy because they lived with a disinterested dad and an ogress of a step-mom.

On the one hand, this was a predictable and contrived storyline. On the other hand, it carried an important message: it's the people, and not the things, around us that usually determine our longer-term happiness and fulfillment.

This was the message underlying a post I wrote on toxic law firms. It also runs through this Be Excellent synopsis of a Gallup survey that explored how the employee-manager relationship affects employee engagement.

This same message came to mind when I read a recent New York Times article titled:  For Lawyers, Perks to Fit a Lifestyle (also vetted by Gerry Riskin at Amazing Firms, Amazing Practices). Noting that associates are “routinely jumping ship to go elsewhere,” the piece describes the material perks some firms are offering to “create a workplace that caters to their young recruits’ wants and needs, while freeing them to bill 60 hours or more a week.”

Among the perks cited are:

• Milkshakes

• Extended Sabbaticals

• Mortgage Assistance

• Wine Tastings

• Yoga Classes

• Nap Rooms

• Nanny Services

All these offerings can reduce stress and overwhelm to some degree. But, I wonder if they make any real difference in firms where associates work long, grueling hours for abrasive partners who give them little to no acknowledgment or constructive feedback.

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I want to wish all of you celebrants a very Happy Thanksgiving.

My co-publisher, Lori Herz, and I are grateful for this opportunity to “visit with you” and share our ideas and perspectives on cultivating legal sanity. We’re equally grateful that you share your ideas and perspectives with us.

Every day affords us another chance to contemplate all the blessings in our lives and all the people and things that we’re thankful for. But, it’s nice to have an official 24 hour block of time devoted to this pursuit.

Enjoy!

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We all know people who address a problem by researching it from a hundred different angles. They learn about its origins, offshoots and all known and potential solutions.

But, once they’re armed with this arsenal of information, they freeze up; they can’t move from their place of intellectual understanding into action. Instead, they retreat under the guise of needing more input or a better strategy.

For several years, I’ve been following surveys and other reports on associate contentment and attrition. The wants and needs of associates have been scrutinized along gender, generational, economic and other lines.

Here’s a core sampling of some recent coverage on the subject:

The ABA Journal’s What Associates Want offers a synopsis of a Hildebrandt executive summary on associate satisfaction and morale (pdf).

The Legal Times, via Law.com, outlines Why Associates Bail Out of Law Firm Life and what firms can do to anticipate attrition and prepare for its impact

A bit of the bigger picture comes through this overview of a survey on work/life balance and this take on an employee engagement study.

Given the wealth of information available to law firm management and HR teams, the question remains: Are firms stuck in the information-mining process or are they acting on the data to benefit their current and future associates?

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Last week, I was a panelist and presenter at a two-day conference on Law as a Healing Profession. The presentations and discussions centered on some interesting themes, including:

• The Lawyer as Therapeutic Agent 
  

• Resolving Civil Disputes

• Cultivating Cross-Cultural Competence

• Wellness and Well-being

My panel addressed the subject of law and spirituality. Of course, to many practitioners and observers, this seems to be as potent a combination as oil and water. But, as I’ve explored here at legal sanity and in my training and development programs, there is a potential connection between the two.

To realize that potential, it’s important to understand that spirituality isn’t necessarily synonymous with God or religion. Rather, spirituality can refer to how we infuse what we do for a living with a greater (or higher) sense of meaning and purpose.

When I was at the conference, I met David A. Hoffman. David is the founder of the Boston Law Collaborative, a firm devoted to conflict resolution and collaborative law practice. David pointed me to a commentary on collaborative law he recently wrote for the Christian Science Monitor. The piece offers a well-rounded, insider take on the history, risks and benefits of this “healing approach” to the law.

To me, David’s perspective on the law’s ability to heal, rather than divide, people goes to the heart of the law-spirituality connection. It’s this healing effect that many discontented lawyers are looking to reclaim in their practice. In turn, the more practitioners find their way to reclaiming this kind of meaning and purpose in the law, the healthier the profession will become.

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