Is Work–Life Balance Possible in Law?
By James J. Sandman

Seventeen years ago I took a six-month sabbatical to be a full-time, at-home father after my wife and I had our first child. I often think I peaked as both a husband and a father then. For six wonderful months, I had balance in my life—but only because I wasn’t working outside our home. Ever since, I’ve struggled to achieve work–life balance while practicing law. Somehow the work side always seems to predominate.

Why is it that lawyers seem to have so much trouble achieving work–life balance? Many professionals face the same challenges, but law sometimes seems to be particularly inhospitable to balance. Is it because of lawyers’ proclivity to charge for their services by the hour, which means that one’s economic value is measured by how long one works? Is it because of the service demands of clients, who understandably value responsiveness and speed of delivery? Is it because of the demands of employers who are out to maximize their bottom line? Or could it be that law just attracts driven and competitive people?

Whatever the explanation, I think our profession does not have enough role models for a successful work–life balance. We can all think of lots of lawyers who, though successful in their careers, work far too hard and don’t devote sufficient time or energy to their nonwork lives. My first and most important professional role model, the judge for whom I clerked, expressed regret about the emphasis he had placed on his career. Near the end of his 96 years, he was interviewed for a documentary about his life and was asked what he would do differently if he could live his life again. His answer was delivered with visible emotion: “I wish I had spent more time with my children when they were growing up.”

The inability to achieve work–life balance may be the single biggest source of dissatisfaction in our profession. The problem affects men as well as women, and it is a terrible mistake to think of it only as a “women’s issue.” Its impact, however, is manifested disproportionately among women, especially women with families. Because the age at which most women are on the partnership track in law firms so often coincides with their child-bearing and young child-rearing years, the inability to achieve work–life balance is a major cause of female attrition in law firms. It is a significant explanation for why there are not more women partners in law firms.

What can be done to make work–life balance more achievable for lawyers? The elimination of the billable hour as the primary pricing mechanism for lawyers in private practice would surely help. It is no accident that lawyers in private practice seeking greater balance in their lives often move to positions that do not involve billing hours, and where value is measured by results. But the billable hour isn’t going away anytime soon. Although pundits have been predicting its demise for decades, it still seems well entrenched to me. I believe that change will come only when employers understand and embrace the business case for flexible work arrangements and implement programs that promote the success of those arrangements.

Flexible work arrangements include, but go beyond, part-time work programs. They also involve alternatives to partnership positions, elimination or modification of up-or-out promotion systems, and opportunities to exit a job for several years—to care for a young child, for example—and then reenter the profession. The business case for such arrangements recognizes that they are a significant competitive advantage both in the market for talent and in the market for clients. Employers who can demonstrate real success in accommodating flexible work arrangements and in providing rewarding career paths for lawyers seeking work–life balance will be winners in the talent wars. They will outrecruit and outretain less innovative competitors. And I believe that clients, who have an investment in every lawyer who has come to know them and their legal problems and who serves them well, have a self-interest in working with that lawyer’s employer to retain him or her, and not to lose that investment because of the lawyer’s inability to find work–life balance in his or her present position.

Some of the most practical and sophisticated work on these issues is being done by two members of our bar: Joan Williams and Cynthia Thomas Calvert of the Project for Attorney Retention, an initiative of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. Their book, Solving the Part-Time Puzzle: The Law Firm’s Guide to Balanced Hours, is a helpful, thoughtful how-to manual for employers interested in implementing workable part-time programs, and their Web site, www.pardc.org, is a great resource for advice on a wide variety of work–life balance issues. Joan was a 2006 recipient of the American Bar Association’s prestigious Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award.

But the job of making work–life balance achievable in our profession falls not just on employers. We as individual lawyers also have to take responsibility for the choices we make, to recognize that no one can have it all, to accept compromise and flexibility on our part as essential to having a life outside the law, and to set and then follow our own priorities. I know from my own experience that this is far, far easier said than done, but it’s never too late to try.