Where Have You Gone, Work-Life Balance?

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.)  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:  Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac nationalized
• 14th:  Bank of America buys Merrill Lynch
• 15th:  Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, one of the largest in American history
• 16th:  Reserve Primary money market fund "breaks the buck"
• 16th:  Fed gives AIG $85-billion in exchange for a 79.9% equity warrant
• 22nd:  Investment banks go extinct:  Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley become bank holding companies
• 25th:  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:  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:  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:  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:   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:  One and the same firm cannot be both. 

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.