Law firms need a sense of balance in their work ethic expectations

"My family and friends think I am mad!" I was told by a young lawyer recently. Fairly new out of law school after attaining two degrees, he leaves home for the office at 5.30am to miss the traffic and is in the office until at least 9pm each night. He also works most weekends. In his firm, the expectation is for hard work and long hours. By contrast, I was nearly knocked over in the rush for the door at about 6pm at a larger firm recently, where moderate productivity has recently resulted in mediocre results.

There are no rights and wrongs here, but I cannot help feeling that some lawyers desire both an easy life and high rewards - an equation which does not sit easily with managing partners. So, what is the right balance?

Client expectations

What is not often done is to look at the position from the point of view of the client. I recently conducted some in-depth client interviews, and from these, I draw four rather generic insights into issues that touch upon the time and effort commitments of their lawyers.

1. Clients increasingly demand more for less from their lawyers and match high expectations for work quality with sustained pressure on fee levels. Sophisticated clients justify their fee pressures by pointing to the need for systems, processes and efficiencies to avoid wheels being reinvented at their expense.

2. Clients want their lawyers to provide value for their fees by dedicating themselves responsibly to clients' matters. They also want lawyers to be both responsive and accessible, sometimes at unreasonable hours of the day and night. But, they want their lawyers to be fresh and attentive and not exhausted and distracted. A client would never want a lawyer to produce slipshod work or to be too tired to think straight.

3. Clients expect their lawyers to delegate responsibly and effectively so that work can be done at the right level, but are always reluctant to pay for the internal conferences and engagement strategy sessions that will enable appropriate discussions of client objectives. In the same vein, I recently heard in-house lawyers complain that an external law firm was over-delegating work to junior lawyers, with the result that work fell short of the mark and had to be redone.

4. Clients do not want to see their matters over-lawyered and they resist over-academic approaches which result in long and tedious recitations of the law. In short, they want their lawyers to do work that they consider worth paying for.

All of these issues require a sense of balance in the work ethic expectation of law firms.

Achieving balance

While there can be no one rule that fits all firms, I offer five principles that may assist.

1. Subject to employment regulations, a time commitment of 50 hours a week for lawyers at all levels is about right. This level of commitment allows for an appropriate work-life balance and also for lawyers to be able to commit time to non-chargeable matters (such as team development, mentoring, business development and client relationship management). Start-up law firms, however, often require even greater work efforts and input.

2. Law firms (which are increasingly and rightly becoming much more gender balanced), must offer flexibility for lawyers who have family and children commitments.

3. Utilisation averages of around 1,100 hours per annum of chargeable time is arguably too low an expectation for any profession that prides itself on having a hard work ethic. Most regional and commercial firms ought to be able to achieve an average somewhat higher than that, and individual targets of 1,600 or more chargeable hours per annum for lawyers at all levels ought to be achievable, provided that the pipeline of work exists to allow such levels to be achieved.

4. In an environment in which many firms are operating at considerably less than full productivity, the alignment of volume and mix (both with appropriate staffing levels and sustained business development efforts) becomes one of the biggest management and leadership challenges. This challenge simply does not get answered by default or serendipity, but requires sustained management control and intervention.

5. Effort must be balanced by value, and wasted time must therefore be reduced or eradicated by efficiency measures wherever practicable.

It is true that nothing comes for nothing. There are many ingredients to the successful (and profitable) law firm, but a hard work ethic seems to be a necessary prerequisite.

Nick Jarrett-Kerr advises law firms worldwide on strategy, governance and leadership development (www.jarrett-kerr.com)