For lawyers, work-life balance can mean many things. For example, some understand “work-life balance” to describe spending time with their family or raising children. For others, work-life balance may apply to spending time on any activity outside of the office.
Some experts suggest an alternate term: work-life conflict. It’s not about achieving parity between your career and the rest of your life, these experts say. Instead, it’s about recognizing the tension between the two.
For attorneys, this new term may resonate because lawyers know conflict. They know its costs and the value of a good resolution. And they know it’s better to prevent conflict than clean up its aftermath.
To a certain extent, law firms are stressful because the practice of law is stressful. Law is adversarial by design. From criminal convictions to custody battles to corporate takeovers, the stakes often are high. And clients expect a win every time. So a baseline of stress is expected. But beyond that, it’s up to firms’ leadership whether firms encourage stress or well-being.
For decades, most firms chose stress as Big Law transformed into Big Business. In 1985, the top 100 American law firms had a combined gross revenue of $7 billion, according to The American Lawyer. By 2022, the top firms’ revenue had skyrocketed to $131 billion. And they did so by pushing attorneys to generate more revenue than ever before.
Many firms now expect attorneys to bill more than 2,000 hours a...
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