Work-Life Balance is Just a Number (of Clients)

One strain of work-life-balance thinking seems peculiar to lawyers. It's the idea that lawyers' duty to their clients is absolute and therefore any attempt to "balance" something against this duty is fundamentally illegitimate. According to this view, lawyers should know when they enter the profession that "life" must always take a backseat to "work."  Here, for example, is lawyer Scott Greenfield blogging along those lines:

But you have things you like to do, prefer to do, more than practice law?  That's cool, but then you've chosen poorly. Law doesn't happen at your convenience. Judges rarely ask whether the brief they demand tomorrow will interfere with a great band playing at a local club. It's not wrong that you want to go, but that you enter into a responsibility thinking your good times trump duty.  The client, who sits awake at night believing that there is a professional working diligently to save him from ruin, has things he would rather be doing too.

I agree it's reasonable and correct to expect that lawyers will not let their "good times trump duty." I agree with this because everyone agrees with it. It's banality masquerading as straight talk. No one actually thinks "work-life balance" means asking a judge for an extension on an overnight brief (which, in real life, happens only in the middle of trial) to make time for partying, or even for junior's soccer game.

The work-life balance problem is not a battle between noble lawyers demanding duty to clients and feckless lawyers fighting for their right to party. All lawyers agree that direct conflicts have to be resolved in favor of the client. The disagreement, really, is about how many clients a lawyer should have, and how often those conflicts actually occur.

This is especially true at bigger firms. Associates who demonstrate competence will quickly find themselves in high demand. Partners will find more and more work for them to do. Usually, the culture of the firm will make it hard to turn down work without harming your prospects for partnership—even for associates who are meeting their billable hours requirements. This culture creates many lawyers who really just have too many clients. They aren't working 80 hours a week because it's what's required to professionally and properly represent a client or because it's required to earn a decent living. No, they're working 80 hours a week because it's required to properly represent 20 clients, all at once.

The solution when that happens is pretty obvious: get two lawyers to represent 10 clients each, and they'll each get to work 40 hours a week. The push for work-life balance in law firms is essentially a push for that sane solution. It is a push against a culture that rewards those who hoard work and punishes those who refuse to represent too many clients at once. That's all. I also happen to think that it is a pro-client movement, because overworked lawyers are less likely to produce top-notch work.

Lawyers have a duty to zealously and competently represent their clients, and this sometimes requires sacrifice. But there's no duty to have 20 clients at a time. In fact, there's probably a duty not to have so many clients. When I hear stories about lawyers with two hearings scheduled at the same time—offered as an example of how hard a lawyer has to work—I can't help thinking that one (or both!) of the clients is getting screwed. But I have to agree that it sounds pretty macho.

What's driving this? Simple greed. What really pushes big firms to require their associates to take on too much work, and what pushes solo practitioners to take on too many clients, is just lust for money. A solo practitioner with two or three good clients can make a very good living. In-house lawyers tend to do quite well for themselves representing a single client while punching a clock. But many lawyers want, and feel they deserve, more than a decent living. They want, and feel they deserve, to be rich.

I have a saying: getting rich is the easiest thing in the world—you just have to work all the time. This applies to lawyers as much as anyone else. A good thing about being a lawyer, though, is that if you're smart and organized you can be quite well-off without having to work all the time. In practice, this means making sure you never have too many clients.

Or, like me, you can go with Plan B, which is to marry well.

Justice Breyer is very unlucky.

The New York Times reports that Justice Breyer had to have a shoulder replaced on Saturday following a bicycle accident. The article notes that in 2011, Justice Breyer broke his collarbone in a bicycle accident and also punctured his lung in a "bicycle crash" in 1993. I wonder if there is a difference between accident and crash. Does crash suggest intent? Maybe Justice Breyer had so many accidents that the writer wanted to use another word for accident just to break the monotony.

Three bicycle crashes involving broken bones seems like a lot to me. Add in the time that Justice Breyer got robbed by someone wielding a machete, and one might reach the conclusion that Justice Breyer is the victim of some bad luck. 

Rest in peace No-Show

America has lost one of its great singing voices.  George Jones died today.  As Waylon Jennings once put it, "If we all sounded like we wanted to, we'd all sound like George Jones."  Given his propensity for skipping concerts during part of his career, Mr. Jones probably kept a lot of lawyers busy on breach of contract claims.

Here's a clip of Mr. Jones from the old Johnny Cash Show. 

Blogging judges and unctous lawyers.

Richard G. Kopf, a United States District Court Judge for the District of Nebraska, has a blog called Hercules and the Umpire in which Judge Kopf posts about the role of the federal trial judge.  It is worth a look.  I particularly enjoyed this post about Mr. Torvik's fellow Packer fan Paul Clement.  The lick-spittle way that Mr. Clement tries to re-ingratiate himself with Justice Sotomayor after insulting her is a nice example of why people dislike lawyers.  It is also a reminder that some very accomplished people have the social skills of a fencepost.  Anyway read the post and then insert your own joke about Packer fans here.

I'm glad to learn of Judge Kopf's blog as it is nice to know that Mr. Torvik and I can continue this blog once President Obama rectifies his inexplicable failure to nominate us to the federal bench.

The only constant is change

When I worked on an assembly line, one of my coworkers would sometimes say the title to this post. It was kind of ironic because on an assembly line things do not change very much. But he had worked there a long time and could remember when the assembly line was run much differently.

I reflected on this saying when I read the New York Times obituary for Edward de Grazia. As the obituary notes, Mr. de Grazia first became prominent in the 1955 when he sued the United States Postal Service over its seizure of a rare volume of the play Lysistrata. The Postal Service wanted to destroy the book because the play was “obscene, lewd and lascivious" according to then-Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield.  The obituary notes that the Postal Service also banned Candide by Voltaire. As a result of Mr. de Garzia's efforts the Postal Service released the seized volume before trial.

Our long national nightmare is over.

Back in November we indicated our displeasure with Maryland and Rutgers joining the Big 10. As if to show that there is a silver lining to every cloud, ESPN reports that once Maryland and Rutgers are in the Big 10, the conference will stop referring to its divisions as "Leaders" and "Legends." Instead the Big 10 will have divisions based on geography. Importantly, the proposed Big Ten West will include Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. Ohio State and Michigan will be in the Big Ten East along with Rutgers and Maryland. The only guaranteed football game between East and West will be Indiana/Purdue.  

The public safety in Boston.

NBC reports that suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has started answering questions posed to him by authorities.  The article says that a "a special high value detainee interrogation team will question" Mr. Tsarnaev without advising him of his Miranda rights.  It is unclear whether this team is already at the hospital or Mr. Tsarnaev is answering questions posed by different authorities.  It may be unintentional but the report makes one wonder what is the difference between answering questions and being interrogated.

Losing custody of one child but keeping three. For whom is this a good success rate?

Parenting is hard work.  It is also rewarding.  People probably do not give a lot of thought to parenting being hard work because everyone has parents and most people end up having kids.  Also, the rewarding parts of parenting often make the hard parts seem worth it.

Has the Beverly Stayart Saga Ended?

Devoted Reader(s) will recall Beverly Stayart's lawsuits against various companies seeking redress for alleged damage to her online reputation.

We last covered this saga back in February. At that point, dismissals of her latest federal claims were awaiting affirmance at the Seventh Circuit, but her remanded state law claims were still pending in Wisconsin. The state law claims had been brought to my attention by a rude anonymous commenter to the earlier post:

Judge Randa authorized Stayart to go forward with her lawsuit in state court, which is exactly what she did. You apparently make up the "facts" as you go along. Your posts are riddled with lies.

A Grudge

I am a pretty happy-go-lucky kind of guy, but I do hold a few grudges. “Grudge” might not be quite the right word, but it’s the word I’m using so you’re just going to have to live with it. I’m talking about things that happened to me long enough ago that I should have forgotten about them, yet which still float up into my consciousness and bug me at fairly regular intervals.

Let me give you an example. Like many of my stupid grudges, this one is related to referees. I have a slight scar on the back of my hand from being slapped so hard during a men’s league basketball game that a blood vessel burst (or something—I’m not a doctor). To my ears, the sound of the guy viciously slapping the back of my hand rang out like a gunshot. But no foul was called. Instead, the other team gathered up the loose ball and took it the other way for a layup. Sometimes I see this strange little scar on the back of my hand and I get really angry. Not at the guy who slapped me, but at the referee. How could he not call that? Grrrwaraaah!

That was to give you an example of how trivial these grudges of mine are. Objectively, this is a stupid thing to have any emotion about fifteen years later. But it’s there.

Now here’s one I wanted to write about today, in the hopes that writing about it would expel the lingering bad mojo. This one starts on September 11, 2001. As you may recall, that was the day when the henchmen of Osama Bin Laden, one of history’s biggest assholes, hijacked a bunch of planes and used them to murder thousands of Americans. Those events led more or less directly to two wars and serious restrictions on our civil liberties, particularly at airports.

On January 1, 2005, I was at the airport in Minneapolis dropping off a friend who had come to visit. I was driving my wife’s car because my car became trapped in the garage when one of the garage door’s gigantic, industrial-looking springs snapped for no reason. (This is the kind of stuff that happens during the winter in Minneapolis.) Turns out those ancient garage doors weigh about 7,000 pounds. Luckily, my wife had been out running errands at the time, so we didn't need to call the garage-door fixer on the holiday.

After I dropped my friend off at the airport, I headed home. Just as I was pulling onto the highway, I saw an airport police car’s flashing lights in my rearview mirror. I had been in the process of merging left-to-right onto the highway when I saw this, so I continued that process. As it dawned on me that I was actually being pulled over, I merged over the other two lanes and came to a stop on the right shoulder.

The airport cop eventually approached. She was clearly angry at me. “Why didn't you pull over to the left?” was her important initial query.

“I was taught to pull over to the right,” I responded, truthfully. I was really confused. For a moment I thought that I had been pulled over for not pulling over correctly. The word “kafka” flashed through my thoughts.

“No,” said the airport cop, “you pull over to the nearest shoulder. What you did was unsafe and I could ticket you for it. You could have caused an accident!”

Now I was pissed. So many possible responses occurred to me. This will surprise you, but I am kind of a smart ass. Unfortunately the presence of police officers seems to bring this trait out rather than suppress it. Here’s what I went with:

“Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t have much practice getting pulled over.”

Needless to say, this didn't go over so well. But I was being pulled over for the dastardly deed of driving a car with expired plates. (You’ll recall at this point that this was my wife’s car. We were able to save the marriage.) So I was not in great legal jeopardy.

Here’s what still bugs me about that day. Our nation was fighting wars that day in two different countries. And those wars traced their casus belli to hijacked airplanes. And this was an airport cop, presumably tasked mainly with helping ensure that the events of 9/11 could never recur. But here she was, training her attention on ... the color of the tabs on my (wife’s) car! How could this be justified?

How can this be justified? The question rings out whenever I think of airports, or airplanes, or cars, etc.

I mentioned above that my grudges are over trivial matters. In writing this one out, though, I see now that it truly is a tale of abhorrent injustice. The amazing thing is that I manage to live my life at all, having been so wronged.