When both David Childs of Clifford Chance
and Tony Angel of Linklaters say something’s
a serious problem, I pay attention.

The issue du jour (or should that
be du decade?) is retaining associates
who find the time demands and general stress
of large law firm life insupportable.  Angel
says it’s "one-dimensional" to expect that
munificent pay alone will be sufficient to
stop attrition—and Linklaters provides
emergency childcare and other benefits, including
a concierge who can "meet the plumber" or
take delivery of your new washing machine.

This is surely progress from what Angel
calls the firm’s "almost Dickensian" state
of a few decades ago, but clearly he does
not believe it’s enough:

"The firm has set up working groups
in Hong Kong, New York, Paris, Frankfurt
and London to try to grapple with a question
preoccupying much of the industry: “What
is a law firm going to look like in 10 years’
time?”

"Some critics of the profession also say
the big firms are still failing to do enough
to attract and cater for members of ethnic
minorities and women, even though 60 per
cent of newly qualified solicitors are female."

And David Childs takes the matter equally seriously:

“People work very, very long hours,” acknowledged David Childs, managing partner at Clifford Chance. “There is an issue: is this model sustainable in the long term?”

Then,
we have the story of
an Allen & Overy associate who left at age 30 to go
inhouse, first at Deutsche Bank and now at Bank of America because his
father had died young and the "excessive hours" kept him from "looking
after myself a little bit more."

He puts the challenge to law firms bluntly:  Despite
their booming profitability, they "need to
work out a new deal for all the lawyers below partner level." 

I’ll confess I have no glib answers to this;
it’s a structural difficulty created by client
expectations for responsiveness, combined
with the ineluctable financial arithmetic
of the billable hour, colliding with women’s
prime biological and sociocultural child-bearing
years, and with everyone’s desire that life
consist of more than the four walls of the
office.  Even Caitlin Griffiths, the
always-voluble and always-opinionated editor
of The Lawyer, is at a loss for
a snappy quote, despite her belief
that:

"the profession is in danger of “eating
itself”.
“I think people are quite freaked by that,” she said, “because they have
no answer to it.”"

Ironically, I was asked just yesterday to
help write a whitepaper explaining how a
particular technology could make lawyers
more "responsive" by increasing their ability
to be reached 24/7. 

Until the day when senior leaders of our
profession are prepared to take a stand—and
a fairly united one it would have to be—and
insist to clients that there are values other
than and superior to "responsiveness," such
as thoughtfulness, reflection, creativity,
and distilled insight, both Tony Angel’s
and David Childs’ worry about the sustainability
of the current model are exceedingly well-placed.