If you have those things, you can achieve something akin to work-life balance.” It definitely becomes more intense once children come in.”įor Todd-Gher, maintaining work-life balance hinges on three things: “flexibility, working with people you trust, and choosing your life partner very, very carefully. “As a first-year associate at a big firm, it may mean taking time for yourself every day: doing yoga, going for a run, reading a nonlegal book for a half hour. “Work-life balance means different things at different points in your career,” says Amy Todd-Gher, a new mom and a partner at Valdez Noor Todd & Doyle. Finding that balance is an intensely personal effort-what works for one lawyer may not work for another. And even attorneys who don’t have kids still want robust relationships outside of the law. Work-life balance 2.0 is, therefore, a gender-neutral effort in which the lines between breadwinner and caregiver are blurred.
That may be particularly true in the legal profession where “part time” usually adds up to a forty-hour week. A Pew Research Center report found that half of working fathers find it very or somewhat difficult to balance work and family life. Men-particularly in this generation, which focuses more on cooperative parenting than ever before-want choices too. These days, work-life balance is no longer just a women’s issue.
Many attorneys insist that work-life balance can only be achieved with supportive clients, the right firm environment (which may mean no firm at all), an amenable practice area, and a personal resolution to set boundaries. Technology, it seems, is almost always key, as is having true partners both in law practice and in life. Between Marissa Mayer’s family unfriendly edict prohibiting telecommuting at Yahoo!, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In revolution, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s proclamation in The Atlantic that women can’t have it all, and a New Republic article titled “ Sympathy for the Stay-at-Home Mom-An Argument about Work, Life, and the Modern Calendar” making the rounds on Facebook, work-life balance has been getting as much attention lately as marriage equality.įor lawyers on the ground, work-life balance takes many forms, and both women and men use a variety of tools to achieve it.
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