Work-Life Balance
A Job Jolt Could Change Life For the Better
Posted Jul 12, 2009 7:01 AM CST
By Becky Beaupre Gillespie and Hollee Schwartz Temple
Mitch Kempker
Photo courtesy of Mitch Kempker
Economic meltdown, thousands of lost lawyer jobs, big-firm careers teetering on the brink: What could be worse for an attorney trying to build a successful and balanced life? Or, really, what could be better?
Economic collapse is perhaps the ultimate wake-up call, and experts say this year’s crisis has created a unique opportunity for lawyers to re-examine priorities and create a better balance between work and life. While transitions are admittedly uncomfortable and disruptive, for the many lawyers experiencing what psychologist Ellen Ostrow calls “life on a conveyer belt,” job insecurity or loss can provide a life-changing jolt.
“They put their heads down, and it’s relatively infrequent that they peek up and ask if this is where I really want to be today,” says Ostrow, a certified career coach in the Washington, D.C., area.
A layoff or transition forces a reassessment of lifestyle choices: Do I really want to work this much? Do I really need to make this much money? And this, experts say, is where the upside emerges.
Read the full story "Letting It All Hang Out: Job jolt could change your life for the better" in the July ABA Journal.
- How B of A’s GC Got Fired: Leave Now, and Leave Your BlackBerry Behind
- Schools Ranked by 'Super Lawyers' Produced
- Law Firm Price Wars Break Out as Some Try ‘Loss Leader’ Bids for Work
- Five Questions for Law Firms Abandoning Lockstep Compensation
- Judge Jails 2 Attorneys for Contempt in 4 Days
- Reed Smith Will Ask Nonequity Partners to Pony Up Possibly 15% of Pay
- Court Deputy Ordered to Apologize or Face Jail After Taking Lawyer's Paperwork
- Skadden Jumps on the Bonus Bandwagon
- ABA Executive Director Resigns
- Nasty Attitude to Co-Worker, Naughty Word in E-Mail Cost 2 Their Jobs
Should Supreme Court Justices Be Able to Review News Accounts Before Publication?
Comments
jim s
Jul 12, 2009 11:54 AM CST
looks like the law school industry is putting out some more smiley-face propaganda to spin the bursting of the law school bubble
Flag this comment
jm
Jul 12, 2009 4:08 PM CST
“Do I really want to work this much? Do I really need to make this much money?”
Oh yeah, I just have SO MUCH MONEY! Don’t make me laugh. Most lawyers I know are living pay check to paycheck with $100,000+ student loans, and a layoff is a disaster…not an opportunity to decide if I will retire to Tahiti or Hawaii to do part-time surfboard litigation.
Flag this comment
B. McLeod
Jul 12, 2009 8:47 PM CST
The paycheck-to-paycheck thing is just pervasive in this country now. Not just among lawyers, but in every profession and trade.
This is the source of the Bushville tent cities (still growing, but not spoken of in the network news). People are basically spending their entire disposable incomes on the minimum monthly payments for their leveraged debt. Take away the job, and the resulting lifestyle difficulty is in tents.
Flag this comment
James
Jul 12, 2009 9:25 PM CST
Um Bushville Tents? Obama’s raised the deficit that we’ll have to pay back to over 4 times what Bush’s deficit was. Now quit eating everything the network news gives you.
Flag this comment
B. McLeod
Jul 13, 2009 12:29 AM CST
Completely wrong. Remember that everything to the breakover in January ‘09 was (and is) Bush’s. The Bushvilles sprang up long before the election results were even final.
It is amazing that thousands have been reduced to traveling between tent cities, yet the media blind-eyes it.
Flag this comment
Tim
Jul 13, 2009 5:57 AM CST
Obama has spent more money in 8 months than every president before him combined. We have to keep working to pay off Obama’s spending spree.
Maybe Obama’s 5th or 6th trillion dollar stimulus will create a few jobs?
Flag this comment
sumpump
Jul 13, 2009 7:36 AM CST
McLeod: I share, to some extent, your thoughts on this issue. It is interesting however that the tent cities are not mentioned in a Democratic administration but almost undoubtedly would have been all over the news if McCain had won. As a life-long Democrat and not prone to media conspiracy theories, I still am convinced that the news media follows “story-line” journalism. Tent Cities just don’t fit into a neat story-line with a populist, Democratic admin., yet in a Repub. admin they can harken back to Hoover. The same happened with the “homeless crisis” that materialized with Reagan but immediately left the media consciousness once Clinton came into office. (It wasn’t because the homeless disappeared).
Flag this comment
B. McLeod
Jul 13, 2009 8:33 AM CST
True. I suppose LA must be up to about 100,000 homeless by now. The media seems to be focusing on happy talk, trying to make people believe the economy is getting better.
Flag this comment
James
Jul 13, 2009 11:19 PM CST
Oh the economy is getting better in certain sectors… thought it’s not for anything that our bumbles#$@t president has done. And I agree Bush was an idiot. However, unlike what many drinking the Obama koolade think, he became an idiot right around the time he abandoned Regan principles and started to believe that government spending would bring a country out of a recession. In short he became an idiot for precisely the same reasons Obama’s an idiot. However the mainstream media would have us think they had totally different ideas, and that in and of itself shows the liberal bias.
Flag this comment
B. McLeod
Jul 14, 2009 4:49 PM CST
Yes, it was somewhat noticeable during the election that the main candidates held hands on both the bailout and immigration, so that the voters had no choice whatsoever as far as those issues were concerned (although the polling on both was mighty clear).
For all the partisan folderol, this is what politics in the U.S. has come to. Some candidates may be personally better qualified than some other candidates, but on the major issues, they are thralls to the same vested interests.
Flag this comment
Add a Comment
We welcome your comments, but please adhere to our comment policy.
Commenting has expired on this post.