Are We Closing the Book on Work-Life Balance?

Jordan Furlong wonders in a recent post at Law21 if "we’ll soon be closing the book on one of the legal profession’s most-used and least-understood phrases of the last decade: 'work-life balance.' "

With 10,000 law firm jobs lost in 2009, not to mention waves of announcements of pay cuts and associate deferrals, work-life balance has become a touchy subject.

"Even the most active WLB boosters have toned down talk that might earn them the dreaded 'entitlement' label," Furlong writes. "Realist observers like Dan Hull and Scott Greenfield have gained the upper hand in the WLB discussion," perhaps referring to a InsideCounsel SuperConference panel at which those two lawyers took on Millennials.

"Generation Y uses this term 'life-balance' as an excuse for their incompetence," Greenfield said at the conference.

Furlong writes that WLB demands during the economic bubble "came down to ... lawyers' rational response to market conditions." The demand for lawyers exceeded the supply "such that lawyers could start to dictate the terms of their availability to employers and sometimes even to clients."

The script has clearly flipped since then. Furlong thinks that work-life balance advocacy was misguided when it targeted law firms to change their business models for no other reason than their lawyers' well-being, when lawyers to a certain extent have the facts about the kinds of jobs available to them and can make choices accordingly. "If WLB stood for anything, it was for the fact that we all have the right and the obligation to make that tradeoff on the terms we want."

But Furlong agrees with work-life balance proponents that in their first few years of practice, saddled with increasingly high debt, lawyers understandably feel compelled to seek jobs with heavy workloads. And "billable-hour targets for associates at more than a few firms simply can’t be achieved without damage to one’s health or ethics, or both," he writes.

Furlong worries, that now its moment seems to have passed, "WLB will be relegated to the status of a mere generational quarrel during a freak economy."