the law's corporate culture
This article on corporate culture (flagged by Carolyn Elefant at My Shingle), highlights the decaying “culture of the legal profession and the high cost that its predominant behaviors and values wreak on the industry.” Drawing from a working paper by the MIT Workplace Center, the piece points to findings that the legal industry's “emphasis on `total commitment' as a basis to enter the partner ranks [ ] not only makes work-life balance unachievable, but will in the long run hurt law firms because it alienates large numbers of employees and potential employees while requiring unsustainable levels of growth in billable hours.” This is not a novel observation, as discussed here and here. But, the question evidently remains: how can the legal profession stop the downward spiral and foster a positive workplace culture? As a good first step in this healthy direction, lawyer and author Stewart Levine (who I’ve previously posted about) offers a new survey-based assessment tool for decoding firm culture and understanding the “critical role” it plays “in the success and quality of any enterprise.”
