Louisa's blog: Can there be another way?

I am not a lawyer, though I aspired to be one in my early teens until a careers-advice session with my sister, two years older than me and hell-bent on becoming a barrister (which she duly did) and thus claiming the law profession as her own, swiftly put paid to that idea. So banking & finance it was for me, albeit with an eye always to what life may have been like on the other side of the deal.

There have been many, many moments in recent years when I denied being part of the banking profession, so scalded as it has been by the credit crisis – mostly at dinner parties, but once memorably in a taxi crossing Dublin in early 2009 – when the question ‘and what do you do?’ required a careful answer (unless I wanted to spend the rest of the evening defending the entire industry or, in the taxi example, simply reaching my destination in one piece).  In those moments almost invariably I wished again I were a lawyer, or one of the many other professions in the City that seem to avoid the same degree of social spotlight.

But over the past two years, as the growth of Citymothers and Cityfathers has connected me with over 5,000 working parents in City professions, around half of them lawyers, I confess that my envy has dissipated and my confusion at the way in which lawyers do business, and why, has increased.  I question a business model that requires its intelligent and productive employees to work a 70 or more hour week as a matter of course, routinely including weekends and often involving missed holidays and important personal occasions. I understand that lawyers are service providers who must respond to demand, but if they are fully utilised on a regular basis, every time a “big deal” comes in - as it inevitably does quite frequently – the workload goes through the roof (not forgetting the non-chargeable work - pro bono and training - that may occur on top).

During my 6 years spent in investment banking doing sell-side research, such hours were the product of truly exceptional circumstances and certainly not routine. But when I met a friend – a female, 30yo associate at a mid-size firm - last week for a 15-minute mid-afternoon coffee – her exhaustion was palpable. “I’ve worked past midnight for the past 6 days”, she sighed. “I don’t know how much more I can take. But I can’t complain – there’s a partner in my team who hasn’t had a weekend since August”, as if such an example was to be aspired to.

And then there’s our lawyer blogger Tom, who talked last week of 6hrs sleep a night on a good day, and 4hrs on a bad day, and James, who wrote in his emotive blog last month, “I managed to persuade my employer to allow me to work part-time, dropping down to four days a week to allow me to look after my daughter one day each week.  What this seems to mean, however, is that while I previously used to work seven days a week and get paid for five, I now work seven days a week and only get paid for four.  I'm writing this at 11:30pm on a Sunday evening having only just finished work for the week”.

Working in the banking sector, my experience of law firms was largely as a client, and I so when I read comments such as the above, I can’t help but wonder - do clients know what law firms are putting their employees through to deliver on their deals? Do they endorse or ignore? Or maybe they assume it’s the norm (if it ain’t broke don’t fix it), a product of the relationship between fees charged and hours worked. Certainly, one respondent to a survey carried out earlier this month by Citymothers & Cityfathers wrote, “Client deadlines are my biggest challenge. They often require very late nights/all night working to achieve (and then the work often remains on a desk for several weeks or even months!). It just seems to be a chest beating exercise that we can all achieve the impossible, and quality of life (through sleep deprivation) suffers hugely. It’s hard to see any good reason for these ridiculous deadlines. I think it is a work culture barrier we need to breakdown. It's a hard one, when bidding for work, you commit to these deadlines in order to win the work, and you don't want to lose out to a competitor on this point.”

Law firms know their clients demand great and responsive service – but how logical is it for this to derive from one or two individuals working 18hr days, than 3 working 12 hr days? They are in general highly profitable businesses, so is it wrong to place a higher emphasis on staff welfare and morale? After all the attrition rates in law are well documented, particularly amongst women but also men, who may reach point in their lives at which working hours required become incompatible with any form of ‘other’ life, including but not limited to parenthood.

We know that someone who is stressed and regularly sleep deprived is cognitively less effective than someone who is over the drink-drive limit; we know that more diverse workforces, those which are the product of more family-friendly working practices, are safer workforces. So aren’t we right to ask – can there be another way? Rightsizing positively rather than negatively, looking at alternative billing structures and, ultimately, creating a work environment that allows employees and partners to leave the office after a 12hr day.  It’s time to put to bed this enemy of wellbeing in the City.

Louisa Symington-Mills is the founder of Citymothers and Cityfathers. Louisa works full time but flexibly in finance, and lives in Kent with her husband Mark and two young children aged 16 months and 3yrs. She runs Citymothers & Cityfathers in her spare time.