Recently in Work-Life Balance Category

In the current of law school and legal practice it can be easy to become wound up in your world.  For law students it is classes, tests, keeping up and trying not to fall behind.  And for working J.D., it is doing your job and balancing in life's demands that keep the spotlight focused on you.  But the practice we are part of asks more from us than we may ask of ourselves.  In fact, the American Bar Association encourages law students and attorneys to invest their time and skills to causes beyond themselves, suggesting that lawyers engage in 50 hours of pro bono legal work per year.

So why should you pro bono?

Amidst economic downsizing, resizing, and other tricks of the tailor trade, law associates may find that they have one more thing in common with their in-house counterparts.  Yes, the cubicle.

If your firm, agency, or non-profit is making the shift to cube farms, we want to help you ease into the transition.  So you can be the cool new cube kid on the block...the associate that everyone wants to meet, the one who knows all the best new legal jokes, and who can charm the fellas or ladies with ease.

That's right, associate, it's time to pimp your cubicle.

Considering the delicate state of the economy, the recent announcements of cutting back (or completely cutting out) of summer internship programs, layoffs in law firms and legal departments as a norm and not an exception, and the somehow constant economy-proof stream of lawyer jokes, we hear the incredulous rumble of law associates across the legal spectrum---"can we catch a break around here?!"

When life gets rough, pitch a tent. And when you have a goal, think beyond big. 

The recent exploits of founder and CEO of internet marketing firm OvercomeAnything, Tellman Knudson, are catching peoples' attention and remind us that sometimes it's just mind over matter.  And sometimes getting a new perspective is all about taking your shoes off.

Over at Law21, Jordan Furlong has composed an elegy of sorts for the oft-scorned term "work-life balance." He suggests that, though the work-life balance movement was already receiving considerable criticism, the concept as such is a dead letter in the modern law firm, undone by an economy that requires would-be associates to accept pretty much any terms of employment that a firm is willing to offer. The debate ends when associates lack the leverage to make any demands at all of their employers.

To be sure, not everyone has received Furlong's message that the debate is, at the very least, back-burnered in the current recession. As noted here and elsewhere in the past few weeks, Gen Y-ers and Boomers, in the personae of Adrian Dayton and Scott Greenfield, have been engaging in an online slam-fest over why partners don't get Gen Y, how Gen Y is full of "slackoisie," the evils of old-school requirements like face time, and the partners' prerogative to use associates as profit centers.

You might see some old stories and recurring themes popping up in this week's links. What can we say? The great themes never change, and some discussions just have to keep on going and going...

Work Life: Everyone Is Still Unhappy

• Semantic Drift needs you to understand just how much effort is required for a 2L to land a summer gig this year.
• Above the Law expounds on Curtis Mallet's odd attempt at humor in explaining its business-casual dress code.
• The National Law Journal reports that would-be public interest lawyers are annoyed that so many deferred BigLaw associates, armed with firm-subsidized salaries, are taking their jobs. Who saw that coming?
• Generational debates never get old, and they never change: the young people today are always ruining it. Defending People has the latest entry in a Boomer/Gen Y dispute that we originally linked to two weeks ago.

Law School: Everyone Still Cheats

• Want to go to a public law school in Illinois? Get yourself a connection, as at least one would-be UI student did, according to TaxProf Blog.

Last week brought a flurry of legal-blog postings about a new (and Greedy-sounding) book by an attorney/author who goes by "ZZ."  China High: My Fast Times in the 010: A Beijing Memoir is ZZ's memoir of living large in Beijing in the early 2000s, indulging in a no-holds-barred sex-and-drugs lifestyle after being posted to Sidley Austin's Beijing office.  It may be a coming-of-age story, a fascinating expose of modern China, and a cautionary tale about the horrors of the Chinese prison system (where ZZ apparently has a brief stay during the course of the story), but what we really want from this book is a sort of combination career/travel guide for the aspiring international associate.

We admit that we have not read China High yet, but, in true blogger fashion, we are willing to speculate wildly based on whatever meta-information we can glean from the internet, which in this case means book reviews from Bloomberg and the Far Eastern Economic Review.  Here, then, are the questions we would be most interested in if we were actually sitting down to read China High:

There's a little something for everyone in this week's links.  Just find the heading that best describes you, follow the links, and learn:

Summer Associates

• Lawyerist says the summer program is on its way out.
• The WSJ Law Blog thinks it's about time summer programs stopped being fun.  In other news, the WSJ has never been a big fan of fun.

Junior Associates

• Old lawyers and young lawyers gleefully overgeneralize about each other in a panel discussion.  (WSJ Law Blog)
• Time, like everyone else, can't quite believe how much a new BigLaw associate can make for not coming to work.
• E-mail gaffes you don't hear about every day: according to Above the Law, this first-year associate actually meant to reply-all when he decided to call out a firm partner over his choice of legal causes.  In a supposedly unrelated development, said associate is fired the next day.

Sartorially-Challenged Associates

The ABA Journal reports on two sides of the courtroom-fashion coin:

This week's Greedy Links has the usual career advice of questionable utility; the standard article to induce panic in employment-deprived law students; and, inevitably, one teeny-tiny rankings-related link.  Also, the "greedy" label is applied to an actual attorney by a real court, and we all come to an understanding that there will be no math.

• Over at Indiana University, they have role-played the law firm of the future.  You can probably stop reading after "new associates would be paid less" and "there'd be fewer of them." (Am Law Daily)
• Partners behaving badly: FindLaw's Blotter sums up the story of the BigLaw partner who booted her kids from the car.
• Corporate associates take note: the ABA Journal reports that Wilson Sonsini is replacing you with a web-based term-sheet generator.
• Above the Law's Notes from the Breadline has a dose of the relentless optimism of lawyer-turned-career-development guru Ari Kaplan.
• The Complete Lawyer gets all Zen on work-life balance.
• The NYT describes the legal career path you wish you'd chosen: Pirate Defense!

The work-life balance question is nothing new to dedicated associates who want to excel in their careers while also occasionally enjoying the fruits of a satisfying social, intellectual, and personal life. It may not surprise you, though, to learn that at the top of the profession, there's ample time to pursue non-legal interests, like the question of who really wrote Shakespeare's plays.

This is according to today's Wall Street Journal, which reports on Justice John Paul Stevens's refusal to apply stare decisis to a question considered settled by mainstream academics everywhere. Stevens is apparently an advocate of overturning the "Stratfordian" consensus that Shakespeare was written by, you know, William Shakespeare, in favor of a dissenting theory that the works were in fact authored by one Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Stevens has been working on this proposition, and attempting to build a working majority of fellow justices, since the 1980s.

This week's hard-to-miss legal career discussion topic: Skadden's sabbatical program for its associates, which was highlighted yesterday in this New York Times piece.

According to the article, nearly ten percent of Skadden's 1300 associates have expressed interest in being paid one-third of their usual salary in exchange for disappearing for a year.  What they do with their time, says the Times, is up to them: although many are seeking the chance to do pro bono legal work, "the lawyers could . . . spend the year catching up on every episode of Top Chef that they missed during the boom years, or traveling around the world, 'all of which is O.K. by us,' said Matthew Mallow, a partner at the firm."

And with assurances from Skadden that even should it end up having to conduct layoffs in the next year, associates will actually be immune from termination during their sabbaticals, it's perhaps no wonder that so many overworked associates would welcome the chance to step off the big firm treadmill and take a deep breath.

So what drew readers' attention to this piece, and sent it to the top of the Times's "Most E-Mailed" list?  The mention of the $80,000 "reduced" salary the firm will pay the sixth-year featured in the piece.