Demanding Balance by Rejecting the Blackberry?

For 3 years the New York State Bar Association's Special Committee on Balanced Lives in the Law has been holding forums and collecting data on their members' work lives, expectations, and quality of life - essentially their ability to be anywhere but the office on the weekends. As noted on the front page of the New York Law Journal, the resulting report makes some interesting observations:

• Attorneys feel they have less time for volunteer and pro bono work than earlier generations
• Increased demands of child rearing compound the strain put on families with no primary care giver
• Female attorneys have expressed their expectations of maintaining personal commitments outside the office to a greater extent than men have - those who don't work towards greater flexibility in traditionally demanding work environments opt for practice areas with greater leeway
• Flex-time is offered as a reward to the most desirable associates to increase retention
• New communications technologies have increased pressure on attorneys' personal time
• Collegiality within the profession and between lawyers and their clients is on the wane

The report also outlines best practices for implementing more flexible time requirements and recommends that law schools engage students in discussions about work-life so that their expectations for their workplace commitments are realistic and so that they can career plan accordingly.

Of all these observations the one I've been thinking about all day is that new telecommunications technologies (i.e. Blackberries) have exacerbated the imbalance between legal career and personal life. Constant vigilance of a Blackberry inherently disrupts every conversation and activity because you are interrupted not just with urgent emails but with every email - the automatically generated ones, the ones that can wait until Monday, the ones on which you were just cc'ed and to which no response will ever be required.

I was with a couple friends this weekend who kept their blackberries out throughout our time together - if a partner or client needed them they wanted to be sure not to miss the email. Makes sense to me. Only for all the checking of the Blackberries none of these folks ever had to leave or cut short our time together to work. Still they were constantly distracted by the continual flow of info to their PDAs.

Another friend has refused her Blackberry - she figures if it's that important then someone will call her.

Childcare = Superwoman's Big Secret

I stumbled on a great little article about a lawyer mom who is “keep[ing] the scales in balance”, posted on The Chicago Tribune. It’s a nice read except for one glaring omission: any mention of childcare arrangements. The focus of the article is a full-time patent lawyer, Sharon Hwang, who gives credit to her husband, her sister, her parents, and her firm for helping her keep her life balanced.

Mommie knows best?

When we found out we were pregnant approximately one month after we were married and about four months before my husband was set to start his MBA in a different city than my job was located, I knew life would never be the same.

A shift in focus from the "opt-out" to the "opt-in"

Both Lawjobs.com (via law.com) and NYLawyer.com have recently reported new programs at Hastings and Pace University which are designed to bridge the gap and ease re-entry into the legal market for professionals who have taken a year or more off of work.

Not surprisingly, most of the individuals enrolling in such programs are women who have taken time off to have/raise kids.

The Motherhood Experiment

Today's New York Times featured an interesting article discussing the problem of low fertility rates in several developed countries. It touches on an issue important to many of us: achieving work-life balance and juggling motherhood with a career. While it's no secret that women's employment is one of several key factors to declining birth rates in the developed countries, what is interesting is its discussion of efforts by a few of these countries (mostly Scandinavian) to increase their birthrates by making it easier for women to successfully manage the balancing act.

Sure, you passed the bar, but are you relationship material?

Valentine’s Day has already passed, and this is therefore coming late, but I was interested in this post two weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog entitled “Lawyers in Love” (this was the second part of a two-part series; the first was the lyrics of a 1983 song by Jackson Browne, which I will spare you).

A lot of the more “life” posts at this blog and others are frequently externally oriented, by which I mean they are focused outward (towards employers, towards institutions, towards spouses or significant others) with their observations and comments. I don’t mean to criticize or call a halt to this, since I think many of these targets have certainly been giving women less than a helping hand for a while.

The Work-Life Balance Sales Pitch

Wallflower is a 3L at NYU School of Law

It's hard to imagine any law student making it out of law school without being bombarded with talk about the extended hours attorneys work and the difficulty many have in maintaining both a happy home life and a successful career. Long hours, stressful working conditions, and having little time for social lives are challenges most attorneys face. In my experience, however, the work-life balance issue is most often discussed as a problem that primarily affects women or parents, and in my opinion, this does a disservice to all attorneys.

During my 2L interview process, seven of the eight firms with which I had callback interviews emphasized how woman-friendly the firm was. At these seven firms, I had face time with female partners; at one of them, two of the three partner interviews and all of the associate interviews were with women. Also at these seven firms, I heard about policies regarding flex-time and part-time opportunities (brought up without prompting from me), pro bono programs, and mentoring programs for female attorneys.

The UN as a Family-Friendly Employer

By a Second-Year Law Student

On "Balance"

[The following is an email sent out over an NYU Law listserve. It references an event sponsored by a religious organization at NYU, which featured a white, male, Mormon attorney with five children and a stay-at-home wife speaking about balancing work and family.]

Rebecca writes, "Nor does it address the fact that, whether you intend to or not, when you say that Mr. Belnap can't speak for women on the work-life balance issues, you implicitly depict the issue as mainly a woman's issue. Work-life is an issue neutral to gender and neutral to having children or 'family'. And while women can debate that the issues disparately affect us, to claim dominion over the entire debate departs from a debate about equality. Everyone has a right to talk about the issues of work-life balance, and the more they do, issues that affect women disparately in the workplace may be more equalize. "

Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable

The following is the text of the graduation speech given by Callie M. Vivion-Matthews in December of 2006 at Texas Wesleyan University School of Law.

Her speech can be watched at http://smith4.net/Callie_0002.wmv

Introduction

Many of my fellow graduates told me that they voted for me to speak today because they think I am funny, and in fact, have demanded that I be so today. No pressure, right?! They want to laugh – laugh away all the anxiety and stress and craziness that has consumed so much of these last three and half years as a law students. They want me, I think, to put this law school journey into some perspective.