This article appeared under my byline at the Obiter Dicta, on January 10, 2011.
For most of us students here at Osgoode, work/life balance isn’t much of a concern. At this stage in our lives, we are mainly pre-occupied with getting ourselves through all the work of law school, getting established in our new careers, and using what free time we can find to blow off some steam. However law school is not forever, and articles shall also pass, and eventually each of us is going to come to grips with deciding just how much time we want to spend working, as opposed to having “normal” lives.
Some of us, however, have already given this matter some thought. Those of you who know me, for example, will already know that I have a wife and daughter, living some distance away from me. Work/life balance for me is an immediate problem, as raising a toddler is a full-time job in itself, and my wife is also working two jobs to help put me through school. Every spare minute I can spend at home with my family is one she doesn’t have to do the work of a single, working mom. Alternatively, too much time spent at home helping my wife reduces my grades, and defeats the point of coming to law school in the first place. As you can imagine, I have gained extensive experience in balancing my work life and home life in my two-and-a-half years here at Osgoode. My aim in this article is to share the fruits of that experience with you.
The legal profession goes a long way to discourage such thoughts, and you will find that your superiors would prevent you from even thinking about this issue for as long as possible. Firms large and small foster the ideal of the hard-working lawyer who is devoted to her work, who can be counted on to pull all-nighters and all-weekenders to get through the big contract negotiation, or trial preparation, or what-have-you. This ideal is very lucrative for firms, who because of the current billing practices can afford to hold out billings target bonuses as carrots to encourage their associates to achieve the ideal. Large firms in particular go out of their way to make working hard easier for an associate lawyer. Want to order dinner from your desk? Here’s the menu with all the best local restaurants that deliver. Need to work all weekend? Here’s a bed at the office where you can crash. Shower’s down the hall. One lawyer I worked for last summer told us that at his old firm, the holiday party consisted of a drinks cart, pushed around to all the desks. This is what many of us have to look forward to after we graduate.
“Ah,” you’re thinking, “ but that’s not the whole story. Work hard as an associate, and you can loaf when you make partner, that’s the ticket.” But not so fast, once you make junior partner, the workload doesn’t get any smaller. Instead, you get to take on management jobs, jobs for which most of us get zero training. Now that you’re a partner, you’re expected to help run the firm, and keep your billings up on top of that. Your fortunes are now tied to the success of the firm, giving you even more incentive to keep the money rolling in at the expense of your personal life.
By the time you make senior partner, if you ever make senior partner, you’ll likely have a substance abuse problem, be on anti-depressants, have multiple divorces, or a combination of all three. By the time you make senior partner, all you’ll have and know is your work. In my first year, I attended a resume-building workshop for mature students at one of the big Bay Street firms. There were a handful of associates and partners of the firm on hand to impart their wisdom to us, all of them Osgoode alums. The senior partner there was a thirty year call who had worked most of his life in this firm. As we were nearing the end of the “imparting wisdom” phase, and he’d had his say, we continued on to more practical discussion of our resumes. As we did so, I caught him lean over to a junior managing partner, and meekly ask if he could be excused to go do some billable hours. It was at that moment that I decided to skip OCIs.
Now I haven’t gone through all this to slag Bay Street. If you’re interested in making a tonne of money, it’s one of the best paths to achieve that goal. And I’m not suggesting that working in academia or small practice will necessarily involve less work: on the contrary, I know small-firm and sole-practitioner lawyers who put in easily as much time as their Bay Street colleagues, and for much the same reasons. What I do want to get across to you though is that the people you’re going to be working for in a few short years want to wring as much work out of you as they can, because doing so will make them wealthier, and much of the processes even here in law school are designed specifically with that end in mind. If you don’t look out for your own work/life balance, nobody else is going to do it for you.
So, how do you manage your work/life balance? There are several factors to consider. The most important being this: how much do you value money? The hard fact is that if you’re determined to work less, you will ultimately make less money. Not only are your superiors going to push you to work harder for their benefit, but clients of all kinds are increasingly pushing firms to lower their rates and change their policies to encourage greater “efficiency”. And “efficiency” means making you work harder for less money. If you want to have a life, you’ll have to 1) push back against this trend and 2) accept that you’re not going to make as much money as the harder-working lawyers on Bay Street.
Secondly, and this is where great gains can be made, you need to think about working smarter. The other primary component to working efficiently is to get the same amount or value of work done in less time, thereby allowing you to take on more files. Working smarter requires you and probably your employer to think creatively about how you work. You will likely meet resistance to your best ideas, because of a kind of ideological inertia that seems to thrive in the legal profession. For example, in personal injury/insurance defence work, there are strong pressures for both sides of a suit to drag that suit out as long as possible. For the insurance defence lawyer, a longer file means more billings over a long time. For the personal injury lawyer, longer files usually mean bigger settlements (and higher fees) as the damages continue to add up. But a smarter way to work (one that I learned about at a firm I clerked for prior to coming here) would be to settle most of the files early, saving your client money (if it’s an insurance company) or inconvenience and hardship (the accident victim) and giving you more capacity to take on more cases. Other examples of working smarter are streamlining office processes, and making good use of tickler systems to keep on top of your files (instead of your files being on top of you). Firms will tend to embrace these different solutions to different degrees, depending on the working culture that’s already been established.
Thirdly, You should keep your mind open to new experiences. The law profession is wonderful for the fact that it can take you in many different directions. You can be a litigator or a solicitor, work for the criminal defence bar or the Crown, practice in a small or large firm, or enter academia. If what you’re doing isn’t working out for you, don’t be afraid to change tracks and find something better. You have great opportunities open to you, take advantage of them.
Lastly, and this is fundamental, you have to decide for yourself what it is that you want out of your life, and you have to start thinking about this soon, if not right now. Do you want a family? Do you want to work for five or ten years and then maybe start a family? How much time is your life going to take up? Do you want time to travel, or have a social life? Be honest with yourself about what you want to do, and how much time you’ll need to do it. Then set up a rough plan, and stick to it. If your plan only allows you to work forty hours a week, be aware of that, and be honest about that with your prospective employers. Be prepared to make sacrifices or compromises at work to get to whatever level of time commitment you find appropriate. Don’t think it’ll all sort itself out in a few years, because it won’t, and you’ll one day find yourself asking your office manager if you can be excused to go do some more billables.
If there’s one lesson you can take from my experience, one principle that over-arches all of these points, it’s this; preserving your work/life balance is not going to be easy. You’re going to have to make trade-offs, think creatively, and sometimes fight for your time. Unless you’re self-employed, your boss is going to want as big a piece of your time as she can get. And if you are self-employed, expect your clients to demand the same. Be ready to determine for yourself where your limits are, and how much you’re willing to change or compromise to stay within those limits. It’s a personal decision, one you will have to make alone, but I hope this article has given you some ideas about where to start.
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