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Judith, you nailed the efficiency vs. availability conundrum. I'm sure there is room for law firms to dethrone The Hour—and here's a good recent Slate piece by Lisa Lerer explaining why the push for them to do so is coming from their clients. Perhaps most law firm work could be judged in terms of who does good work fast instead of who posts the most 12-minute increments. But for reality's sake, I feel compelled to recognize that sometimes, availability is the golden egg. Some clients see premium value in being able to reach their lawyer at all hours, and that's why the firms cater to this demand. It's possible that the market overvalues availablity—I'd like to think so—but I'm not sure. (Anyone got any good evidence on either side?)
One more point: In her new book The Sexual Paradox, Susan Pinker writes about studies of academia that mirror the finding that intense career paths play out differently for men and women. In a large study of the University of California system, Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden found that married male scientists have a productivity edge over married female scientists, and over single people. For one thing, many more of the men have stay-at-home spouses.
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Dear Emily,
Once, at a dinner party honoring the retirement of a friend of my father-in-law, I sat next to the law firm's former managing partner. You would have heard of the firm; it's one of those with huge offices in New York and Washington and all over the world. And perhaps because this man was himself retired, he was unusually frank about things. One thing he was frank about was the way law firms treat women.
He wasn't going to talk to me about sexism or harassment or anything like that, he said. His complaint was a structural one. Given that half the graduating classes of the top law schools are women, he said, and that as many women rank at the top of their classes as men, law firms that want to stay competitive in their recruiting have to figure out how to make their workplaces more appealing to women. I was thrilled to hear that the young women he had been interviewing had been very clear about wanting to have families and very forward-thinking in the way they negotiated before they even took a job. I don't remember my generation—my college classmates—being so realistic. We were going to muddle through, and in the end vast numbers of us dropped out. Young men were also asking about the firm's family policies, he said. They saw their female counterparts negotiating deals that would let them spend more time with their children, and they wanted deals like that, too.
But, my friend said, law firms are never going to be able to keep their promises not to discriminate against lawyers who turn into caregivers, are never going make their workplaces truly family-friendly, unless they change the way they do business. The billable hour, he said: That's the problem. As long as the measure of productivity is the billable hour, lawyers fighting to get home to their children will always look less productive than lawyers who can work all night. Said my friend the managing partner: We all know lawyers who can get twice as much done in the same time as other lawyers, but those lawyers are not rewarded for their efficiency, or, at least, they're not rewarded enough—because they're not bringing in money. And we all know women who become twice as productive in the same time after they've had children, because they know they've got no slack at the end of the day. They're not rewarded, either. To take an obvious example of how status is allotted to the lawyer with the most available hours, he said, imagine you're a partner who has to pick someone to head up an important case. You are never going to chose someone who goes home at 5 p.m. Your team leader will to be a person who can put in as many hours as it takes, both to keep the client happy and to keep the firm's bill as high as it can be.
In other words, he said, in the through-the-looking-glass economy of the law firm, efficiency is a lesser criterion than availability. The irony of this upside-down ethos, my friend observed, is that it costs clients quite a lot of money. Imagine, he said, that law firms billed by the project, rather than by the hour, and that they bid against each other for projects. And now imagine how much lower a bid a firm could make if it rewarded its lawyers for working quickly rather than giving them incentives to work slowly. Clients would save money, law firms would be more competitive, and efficient lawyers would advance to the heads of their firms. All this is quite obvious to everyone involved in managing a law firm, he said. But for reasons too complicated to get into here—though the word "inertia" appears in each of them—no one wants to change the way things are done. Or maybe they don't want to be the first to do so. And yet until they do, he said, the needs of law firms and the needs of families will always be at odds with each another.
Now that's just one man's rant, of course. But it struck me as worth repeating.
Best,
Judith
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When law firms institute family-friendly policies (flex hours, reasonable work loads), who benefits? That depends how you measure it. Mothers at these firms are neither more nor less productive than mothers at other firms, as measured by billable hours, according to a new study of 670 lawyers in Alberta, Canada, by sociologists Jean Wallace and Marisa Young. But fathers at family-friendly firms are less productive than fathers at old-style firms. At the same time, fathers with help at home, like stay-at-home wives and weekly cleaning services, increase their productivity at work, whereas women with stay-at-home husbands and cleaning aren't more productive.
What's going on here? Wallace and Young argue that fathers tend to consider breadwinning an all-important family contribution, so when they have more help at home, they respond by working harder. Also, men are far more likely to have a stay-at-home spouses than women are. Women, on the other hand, seem to sink more time into their kids, if they have it. The happy spin from the authors is that the family-friendly policies aren't hurting the firms vis-à-vis their women employees, which makes the policies seem less costly. The finding about the men working less, though, throws a wrench into the discussion, doesn't it? The authors ask, "How are men using their free timeas a result of working fewer hours?" and then cites other evidence that men may plow their time into more leisure activities. Is that perfectly understandable, or is it shirking? Who's modeling the good behavior here? It's hard to tell, but the gender split is there to be mulled over.
Over at Legal Blog Watch, Carolyn Elefant argues that billable hours are a bad measure of productivity. That makes sense to me as a reason that this study may not translate to other professions in which parents can argue they work more efficiently, squeezing more work into less time. But it doesn't seem like a salient criticism of these findings, since hours are firms' explicit measure of productivity.
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