legal sanity

In the last several years, I’ve logged a lot of online and offline hours learning, thinking and teaching about work-life synergy for lawyers (pdf). Although different issues converge under this umbrella, one topic that garners a lot of attention is flexible work options. It’s something I’ve addressed in posts on:

• Becoming more flexible

• Flexible work for lawyers 
  

• The flexible law firm: reality or pipe dream?

About a month ago, I came across a boston.com article on workplace trends for 2008. In it, columnist Maggie Jackson declares: “Fluidity is in. Piecemeal flexing is out.” She’s referring to a movement in corporate America to retrain the focus away from flexible work programs and towards the more fluid “Mass Career Customization" (MCC).

Championed by Cathleen Benko of Deloitte & Touche, MCC presumes that, today, more and more employees want to tailor their careers by “periodically adjusting their work pace, job setting and schedule, workload, and company role.”

After reading the article, I went over to Deloitte’s website and continued my MCC studies through a podcast that explores how MCC is not just a women’s initiative. Given the emergence of a dual-centric workforce, career customization serves the needs of men and women alike. I also vetted this series of in-house articles on Building a Lattice Organization. (The MCC model can be visualized as a career lattice - with numerous paths leading to different kinds of success – as opposed to a career ladder.)

In the wake of this education, I started considering the ways MCC might play out in the legal profession. Law firms aren't known for being early adopters of new workplace trends. That’s why it was so interesting to read a recent New York Times article – aptly titled Who’s Cuddly Now? Law Firms – that profiles a new proposal to bring customized career tracks to the law.

The proposal, called FACTS, is the brainchild of work-life consultant Deborah Epstein Henry. Henry doesn’t propose that firms do away with the billable hour. Rather, she suggests that they move from a liner to a more fluid billable hour model that recognizes how lawyers’ work-life needs may change at different stages of their careers. The acronym FACTS reflects the variety of work hour modes that Henry envisions:

• Fixed

• Annualized

• Core

• Targeted

• Shared

To learn more about the FACTS, you can read Henry’s article outlining her methodology (pdf). Those of you in the New York area can join in the conversation when Henry presents her program on Monday, March 3, 2008. To learn more about the program and register for it, visit Flex-Time Lawyers.

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It’s probably no mere coincidence that at a time of political challenge and economic uncertainty in the United States, there’s been a flurry of coverage on the subject of … happiness.

For some time now, I’ve been intrigued by the science and study of happiness, as evidenced in this post on the road to lawyer happiness and this one that puts lawyer happiness under the microscope.

So, I eagerly read a pair of recent Christian Science Monitor articles on the subject.

The first piece - titled Actually, Happiness Isn’t Within - challenges the “firmly held and particularly American belief that happiness” is an internal quality; a state of being, or wellbeing, that we cultivate from the inside out. Citing new findings by social scientists, the article asserts that our happiness is a byproduct of external factors. Topping the list of those outside influences “is the quantity and the quality of our relationships.” (Journalist Penelope Trunk echoes this point in a post that offers a few tests for discerning what we need to be happier.)

Given this new happiness formula and the amount of time most of us spend on-the-job, it stands to reason that our happiness must be strongly linked to the quality of our work environment and business relationships. If we’re routinely unhappy doing what we do for a living, it’s a sure sign that these external components are unhealthy and stacked against us.

This is the underlying message of Alexander Kjerulf’s CSM commentary on cultivating happiness at work.

According to Kjerulf, it’s the norm for U.S. workers to be dissatisfied with their jobs. That’s because managers and employees alike fail to make workplace happiness a priority. This isn’t a gosh, well, I guess that’s too bad fact of life. As Kjerulf puts it: “Hating your job is not an inconvenience, it's a serious problem. It can cause stress and depression. Ultimately, it can kill you.”

Lawyers should be acutely aware of the seriousness of this issue. As Sue Shellenbarger (pdf) writes in an article on Lawyers Opening Up About Depression, studies have found that about “19% of lawyers suffer depression at any given time, compared with 6.7% of the population as a whole.” While some might question the exact correlation between career stresses and depression, it seems that it’s well accepted that the “practice of law, with constant conflict and billing pressures, can take a toll.”

Attorney Daniel Lukasik contacted me last week to let me know about a website he’s launched to support himself and other lawyers who are living and coping with the day-to-day realities of depression. I checked it out and it presents as a terrific and much-needed resource.

For another perspective on lawyers and depression, Stephanie West Allen points us to a new book exploring the “benefits of negative emotions” and “how we might view depression in a more constructive way.”

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Kevin O’Keefe and Carolyn Elefant , among other bloggers, recently posted about this New York Times piece on the diminishing lure of the law. I read the article when it first ran and liked it a lot. But, the news it imparted was not earth shattering by any stretch.

For years, theorists, academics and others have been decoding and commenting on the root causes of lawyer discontent and attrition. When legal sanity launched in 2004, one of its main objectives was to highlight their work and related efforts to remedy an ailing legal profession. Since then, coverage here has included posts on:

• the antidote for lawyer discontent
• the economics of lawyer depletion 
• connecting points for employee engagement 
• wake up calls for lawyers and law firms 
• toxic law firms
  

Threading through the broader conversation about life in the law today – and echoed in the New York Times article - is the realization that the legal profession is out of step with larger social-cultural-generational shifts towards creative personal and business pursuits. You can sample some of the discussion on the new “Creative Age” through these posts:

• working with meaning
• lawyers in the conceptual age 
• the brave new world of law 
• are you untouchable?
  

The lingering question for law firms and practitioners alike is how to bring more creativity to the everyday practice of law. The first step, of course, is to acknowledge the creativity deficit and the problems deriving from it. From there, firms could take it to the people and ask their lawyers what kind of creative outlets and opportunities they’d like to have on the job. Beyond getting this direct input, firms could demonstrate their commitment to creativity through policy and marketing initiatives.

For some inspiration, firms can look to resources like this article on creativity and success (emphasizing the “simple and wonderful truth that all people have the capacity to be creative”) and this terrific marketing-lateral recruiting campaign from Chicago’s Ungaretti & Harris.

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