Niki Black’s new blawg, Women Lawyers — Back on Track, is dedicated to the proposition that life and lawyering are not mutually exclusive for women.  Niki drafted a statement in the February 2008 NYSBA Journal on behalf of NYSBA Gender Equity Task Force Commission:

Historically, legal employers have been steadfastly and notoriously reluctant to change the way business “has always been done” despite a growing outcry from associate attorneys struggling to balance their professional and personal lives. “It will affect our bottom line” is the oft-repeated refrain, offered to justify employers’ resistance to altering the traditional workplace structure.

As the statement goes on to explain, this isn’t merely a sexism issue, but one affecting all young attorneys.  The bottom line is that the level of commitment that older lawyers have stuck in their head is changing, whether they like it or not, and they better start to adjust or else.

The Gen X and Y male lawyers are unwilling to sit in the library until 11 pm every night.  They want a life, and the big salary isn’t enough to convince them to forgo it.  They start out miserable, and end up leaving.  Biglaw pays for the next group to fill the constantly changing shoes. 

For women lawyers, the issue isn’t merely a matter of preference.  If they have a family, there are demands that can’t be ignored.  It’s not a matter of going out during the week to hang with friends, but coming home to feed the kids.  Those darn kids want to eat.  Every day. 

One easy answer, let the daddies feed the kiddies, has given rise to retro-sexism.  After all, if the women don’t want to do it, why should the men? 

Edit:  See also Marc Randazzo’s post at the Legal Satyricon , with this great quote from David Brooks in the Atlantic Monthly: 

It is as if millions of American men—many of them well educated—took a look at the lifestyle prescribed by modern feminism and decided, No thanks, we’d rather be pigs.

And women have come to accept the proposition that living a male lifestyle isn’t nearly as good as it looked from the outside.  In other words, nobody was having a party at the expense of the other.  As Niki realizes, the impact may be much harder on women, but the problem exists for everyone.

Dan Hull at  What About Clients? also brings up this dilemma.  Not because he disagrees in concept with Niki, but because he fears that there’s no solution.

But then comes commerce and work. And then what? Even the most touchy-feely clients don’t care for longer than a second if you are pregnant, whether you have 1 kid or 10, what you favorite color is or whether your best 2 associates have the flu or worse. They care, in the final analysis, about their families, their businesses, their projects and their issues. It’s the way things are–and most of us are not in the business to make people evolve. Law and business are hard. Do it, adjust, or leave and teach–or sell women’s shoes…

Nor should they.  They don’t pay lawyers for the opportunity to bond emotionally, to share in our feelings and issues.  They pay for our professional services.  They hired a lawyer.  Not a man or a woman.  Not a human being.  A lawyer.  Our problems are just that: ours.  They just want us to handle their legal needs, without the baggage of our personal lives.

As lawyers, Dan is obviously right.  We are paid to service our clients, and that’s what we are rightfully expected to do.  But as a profession, Niki is right as well.  We can accomplish much greater balance in life without sacrificing or shifting our lives onto the backs of our clients if only the business of lawyers comes to grips with a changing attitude toward how we service our clients. 

Will we achieve the perfect balance? Unlikely, but we can do a whole lot better than we do now.  But the resistance to change, as well as the negative attitude that goes along with any begrudging change, remains intact.  My take is that older lawyers feel that they paid their dues, so younger lawyers have to suffer like they did.  They view the miserable lifestyle as a rite of passage, proving the young’un’s unworthiness to join the club.  They view those who promote change as whiners, incapable of toughing it out and unworthy of the rewards at the other end. 

I’m not suggesting that Gen X and Y lawyers are completely in the right, by the way.  If it was up to them, they would collect their paycheck and play video games all day.  There is a lot of the slacker and the slovenly there.  They are not interested in sacrificing their desires for the greater good.  So the generation gap extends to the polar extremes, making everybody unhappy with each other.

When a litigator is on trial, there is nothing else happening in her life.  This is a concession that every litigator makes to the job.  But when not on trial, there are many ways to accommodate lifestyle while getting the job done.  Today, with the internet, online law libraries, email and ECF submissions, we have opportunity to get work done from anywhere in the world at any time of the day or night.  Using these tools is not a sign of weakness, but adaptability.  Refusing to understand change, as so many law firms do, is a plain stupidity.  It’s available for the using, and it’s no longer cute to reject anything that wasn’t done “that way” in your youth.

The last piece to this balance puzzle is the courts.  Judges have little motivation to accept change or be concerned with an attorneys’ work-life balance.  Courtrooms run today largely the same way they ran 30 years ago.  A few new gadgets, but the demand that you be there on Tuesday at 9:30 am remains, and then sit there for 2 hours awaiting your 30 seconds before the judge.  Judges have the authority to make demands, and few really care about much of anything beyond the efficient operation of their courtroom, no matter how much of pointless burden they place on lawyers in the process. 

Until we get it into our heads that we are all in this together, and there is no reason why misery has to be a rite of passage for lawyers, we won’t make real headway on changing the way lawyers do their job.  But as Niki’s new blawg proves, the push for change has been around for a while now, and every little has been accomplished.  Maybe in another generation or two, we will start gaining an awareness that change can make life better for all of us.  But I wouldn’t hold my breath.