Among the phrases, and phenomena, that now seem so hopelessly “last August”
is that of the fabled Work-Life Balance. (“So last August” has been a
phrase around town for several months now, referring especially to examples
of wretched indulgent excess, but by extension to almost anything dependent
on an economy in overdrive.)Â More on work-life balance (WLB) in a moment,
but first consider what happened during a mere 19 days last September. It
wasn’t just the fall of Lehman:
- 7th September 2008:Â Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac nationalized
- 14th:Â Bank of America buys Merrill Lynch
- 15th:Â Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, one of the largest in American
history - 16th:Â Reserve Primary money market fund “breaks the buck”
- 16th:Â Fed gives AIG $85-billion in exchange for a 79.9% equity warrant
- 22nd:Â Investment banks go extinct:Â Goldman Sachs and Morgan
Stanley become bank holding companies - 25th:Â Washington Mutual seized by FDIC–biggest bank failure
in US history
Any single one of these headlines would have been eye-popping, but the concatenation
of all of them in such a compressed period of time clearly signaled the world
was changing.
And among the things that have changed is all of the talk about WLB. First,
let’s simply try to understand what the loaded phrase “WLB” entails. I
think it’s pretty simple:Â It’s merely the sense that the demands of the
profession have gotten out of whack with the rewards. You can solve for
this inequality either by finding greater rewards in your professional pursuits–but
there’s no handy or obvious volume knob that adjusts your reward level, and
it’s usually a long and extended process of introspection and, more than anything,
trial and error, to attain that blissful state–or you can decrease the
demands so as to align them with the rewards. WLB was, for better or
worse, always assumed to mean the latter. And in fairness we know how
to achieve the latter:Â Basically, work fewer hours and/or less intensely
while you do.
There’s just one problem with that, and it’s an enormous one. If you
believe the thesis of books such as Talent
is Overrated, you can never
achieve professional excellence (and the satisfaction that flows from it)
without something on the order of investing 10,000 hours in “deliberate practice,”
which is the demanding exercise of pushing the limits of what you’re comfortable
with in order to improve.
Two other aspects of WLB I will studiously not discuss here include whether
it’s primarily a women’s issue, and whether it’s a Gen Y/Millennial issue. Why
not? The first craven and meanspirited assumption ghettoizes half the
human race, and the second amounts to the feckless and self-indulgent
attempt to “stand astride history, yelling ‘stop!’.” The point
is that neither engages WLB on the merits; both are nasty and somewhat immature ad
hominem reflexes.
My theory about WLB is rather simpler:Â It waxes and wanes in synch with
demand and supply in the lawyer talent market:
- When the economy, deal-making, and firms are all booming, and when the
greatest constraint on capacity is available talent, firms will worship at
the shrine of WLB in order to try to make themselves attractive to a wider
cohort of the (fixed number) of law school graduates. - When, as now, voluntary attrition is nonexistent and law students are entering
recruiting season with expectations ranging from “extremely confident law-reviewers
to those expecting to receive zero offers” (as a top 10 school student reported
to me in an email), or when students are offering to work for name-brand
firms for free (also a true story), then the balance of negotiating
power has shifted.
I offer as anecdote this
January 2008 story from the NYT, “Who’s
Cuddly Now? Law Firms,” celebrating that:
“There are things happening everywhere, enough to call it a movement,” said
Deborah Epstein Henry, who founded Flex-Time Lawyers, a consulting firm that
creates initiatives encouraging work-life balance for law firms, with an emphasis
on the retention and promotion of women. “The firms don’t think of it as a
movement, because it is happening in isolation, one firm at a time. But if
you step back and see the whole puzzle, there is definitely real change.”
The article also noted the efforts of the suddenly-invisible “Law Students
Building a Better Legal Profession” and their efforts to rank firms based on
how well they treat associates.
Both seem certain signs of a “market top” in WLB.
But I believe there’s something else even more important here.
As Jack Welch put
it last month with his trademark directness, “There’s no such thing
as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you
make them, and they have consequences.” He added that you shouldn’t
be surprised if you’re passed over for promotions if “you’re not there
in the clutch.”
I would only refine what he has to say slightly, to adapt it to the context
of law land:Â Â There are elite, high-performance firms, playing at
the top of the global game, and they are not “lifestyle” firms. They
never will be. Don’t kid yourself. Or, as the New York vernacular
puts it, “Fugghedaboutit!”
These firms, I hasten to add, are not for everyone. Neither are “lifestyle”
firms for everyone.
My point is simpler:Â One and the same firm cannot be both.Â
If you doubt me, the people (or at least readers of LegalWeek) have
voted:
But the fun is that you get to vote as well. We’ll keep
track of the results and have a followup piece in the near future.
Â
