It's not really about billable hours

I'm preparing a pro bono matter for hearing and I don't have much time to post my own commentary on the work-life balance aspects of the New York Times article that ran today titled "Why do so few women reach the top of big law firms?" (NYT registration required, I'm sure.)

Instead, I'll just point to David Giacalone's comments on the article, which appear here. The conclusion I found most incisive was this:

Life will not get more balanced for associates, male or female or male, if the regime of billable hour quotas is discarded, unless it becomes perfectly acceptable for the young lawyer to generate less income without it affecting future partner status. Indeed, if not, and the firm management still expects each lawyer to produce the same amount of billed income, it might get even more stressful -- the associate won't know how to keep score; won't know if he or she is keeping pace for the year. That might be especially true if fee contracts with clients are based on some post-completion assessment of the "value" or the performance to the client.

In other words: It's not about billable hours. It's about money, the tradeoffs people are willing to make for it, and the social and economic contexts in which those tradeoffs happen.

By highlighting the question of partnership eligibility, David identifies an important factor at play. It's not enough that there are many associates (and some partners) who would be willing to trade off lower salaries for lower billing requirements and, thereby, more time to spend on other aspects of their lives. There have to be workplaces that can and will accommodate that trade over the long term.

Many associates actually want to work less and would be willing to make less; yes, they keep asking for salary increases, but in many cases that's because it's considered much more acceptable within the firms to ask for salary increases than it is to ask for free time.

An associate attorney making $115,000 might be happier making $100,000 and cutting her or his workload by a proportionate amount, but if no employers offer such an opportunity, the associate's desire to make the tradeoff doesn't matter. The associate may not even bother asking for the opportunity if she or he thinks it will lead to being branded an unprofessional slacker. (Make what you will of the salary figures I chose as illustrations. Young associates in large national firms tend to make much more than that, while associates starting off in smaller, more local firms make less — sometimes much less.)

These issues have many facets, but I can't pretend to be informed enough to discuss them all, and for now I don't have time — I have to get back to preparing for that hearing.