Many firms have flexible working policies, but take-up remains relatively low. Is a decent work-life balance possible in the legal profession?

There is often a time lag between policy and reality. Despite legislative changes and the fact that many firms now have work-life balance policies, the number of lawyers choosing to work flexibly remains relatively low. It appears that the legal profession remains an inflexible field.

Flexible facts

  • Strong desire among solicitors for more flexible working options
  • Research claims flexible working leads to greater loyalty from employees
  • Vast majority of flexible working arrangements arranged informally

Of firms contacted by the Gazette, the number of fee-earners working flexibly is only between 10-20% (there are no sector-wide figures – and this may be part of the problem). Yet all of these firms have extensive flexible-working policies, sabbatical policies and many other work-life balance practices available to employees. As Fiona Fitzgerald, chair of the Association of Women Solicitors (AWS), says: ‘There has been a lack of take-up, which we have picked up from our members. Flexible working isn’t where it ought to be.’ This expectation gap between what firms are offering and what is actually happening suggests there are real barriers to fulfilling those policy dreams. The issue is whether or not those barriers are fundamental – whether, in fact, a true work-life balance for many is possible or even desirable within the legal profession.

There are a number of people who (and many arguments which) will testify that flexible working most definitely is desirable. Certainly ‘generation-Y’ (the tag applied to those born after 1978) think it is desirable, if not necessary.

Elaine Emmington, HR director at City firm Charles Russell, says: ‘We are seeing a change of attitude. Generation-Y thinks: "I’ll work hard, but what’s in it for me?" They think you can and should have both – work and a life outside work. If you work hard, there has got to be something on top of that; money is not always enough.’

Or take a flexible worker like me. I practise as a lawyer with one of the new firms made up of independent, self-employed lawyers – I choose my clients, my hours, my location. This allows me to have another career as a journalist and spend time with my child. Do I find this desirable? In a word, yes – I get to have my cake, eat it and have seconds.

But maybe these are not the right people to ask; maybe we should find out what employers think. Working Families, the work-life balance campaign organisation, recently published a survey in conjunction with Cranfield University’s School of Management, exploring the effect of flexible working on performance. The researchers talked to a number of managers and colleagues of flexible workers, as well as the workers themselves. The survey found that flexible working is perceived by the workers to have a positive impact on the quality and quantity of work, which means that employers should want it too.

The research also found that flexible workers were more committed to the organisation than those who do not work flexibly, which challenges the assumption that flexible workers are avoiding work. These higher levels of commitment mean that organisations that allow their staff to find that equilibrium between work and life will, in return, get loyalty – loyalty equals retention, and retention is cost-effective. Some firms definitely understand this.

When the Law Society launched its Quality of Life debate last year, it conducted a survey to study the link between the benefits offered to staff in firms and retention. One finding was that ‘there are many more facets beyond tangible benefits which contribute to an employee’s satisfaction with their job and thus their desire to stay with a firm’. When asked to rank effectiveness of benefits, firms felt that retention was more effectively achieved by opportunities for career progression, part-time and flexitime schemes, rather than ‘soft’ benefits, such as gym membership or childcare vouchers.

Good for businessSo work-life balance practices can improve retention rates as well as performance. Some would go further and say that work-life balance practices have positive effects on an organisation as a whole. Monica Burch, litigation partner and diversity champion on the governance board at Addleshaw Goddard, says: ‘It gives very good management skills, people have to think differently. They have to think about work product not presenteeism, how people manage their work and manage their clients.’

Carolyn Lee, diversity manager at Herbert Smith, says: ‘It has a positive impact on autonomy and respect for people if you let them work flexibly. Business is maturing.’

Desirability is recognised by both fee-earners and their firms, yet turning a work-life balance into a reality is harder than simply writing a policy about it, otherwise there would be many more of us performing these work-life balancing acts. The most important downside is that it may be bad in the long term for the health of your pay packet and career path. The Law Society’s 2007 Salary Survey found that there is still a large discrepancy between male and female pay of about £19,000 – the medians being £60,000 and £41,000 respectively. Why this is? The survey says that the differential is partly to do with ‘part-time working and interruptions to careers’ by women.

Fiona Visser, a researcher at not-for-profit organisation The Work Foundation, conducted workshops with professional services for a report for the Equal Opportunities Commission (as was) in early 2007. She says the workshops revealed that ‘people working different patterns are less visible, but managers promote people they see, so it is important to measure people on outcomes, not on visibility and presenteeism. This takes effort’. If this is right, a work-life balance is never going to become acceptable to the majority of hard-working, ambitious lawyers.

Perhaps it is also true that having lawyers enjoying a work-life balance only suits certain areas of law. Steady advisory work is one thing, but months of intense High Court litigation is another. Client pressures are certainly different between specialisms. Corporate transactional work is often cited as the one area where working flexibly does not fit. But this may be because we tend to think about flexible working as simply doing reduced hours, which is incorrect.

A few years ago, Addleshaw Goddard’s corporate division looked into the perceived incompatibility of work-life balance and corporate transactional work. ‘Corporate was a very male-dominated and exclusive environment,’ says Burch. ‘They looked into staff working from home, made possible by big changes to IT at the firm. They found that fee-earners could be working on a deal, perhaps into the night, but that they could do this at home.’ Clients do not know or care if someone is in the office or not. The deal is most likely being done over the phone or by email anyway. But for the fee-earner, being at home can be a huge bonus. ‘When people do have those pressures, you can make a real difference by allowing them to work in a way that considers their needs,’ Burch adds.

In this way, striving for work-life balance is about firms being accommodating in a multitude of ways. For Visser, the answer to whether you can fit it into each and every area of law is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Organisations and departments ‘need to do their homework. It is about being flexible about flexibility’.

For some employees, being flexible about flexibility can be about being able to do volunteer work, such as volunteering for the Territorial Army (TA). Simon McMenemy, a partner at Charles Russell, has been in the TA for 15 years and is now a Major. The firm gives him time off to attend training and would release him for operations should the need arise. In a more general way, firms such as Herbert Smith offer their fee-earners a certain number of paid ‘volunteering days’ (at Herbert Smith it is 24 hours, the equivalent of three working days) where they can be involved in charitable or community projects. For others, flexibility is about getting a bit more time and space just ‘to manage life’, says James Davies, joint head of the employment and incentives department at Lewis Silkin and a member of the firm’s flexible working group. Anyone can identify with this – a little bit of flexibility, and a culture where these extra-curricular commitments are welcomed, can bring to a firm the benefits a work-life balanced workforce can deliver.

Breeding resentment?Another problem sometimes attached to flexible working is the resentment a flexible worker can allegedly create in a team. But it is difficult to establish whether this is reality or a perception. Fitzgerald says: ‘We need to understand if there is a prejudice against people who want a work-life balance and choose to work flexibly.’

Solicitor Molly Smith job-shares at Herbert Smith’s real estate department. She and another fee-earner each work three days. She admits to ‘a sense of guilt about the team,’ even though no one has ever actually said anything negative about it to her. She says this sense of responsibility means that she does check her BlackBerry on her days off. In contrast, the research by Working Families showed that colleagues did not feel this resentment, particularly if the policy was open to all employees and was not just for parents of young children.

This ‘open to all’ approach is key to getting people to think more widely about work-life balance – it undermines the perception that wanting and achieving a work-life balance is solely the wish of mothers of young children. Almost all firms’ policies are now available to everyone, going far beyond what the government intended with its flexible working legislation in 2003 and 2006. Firms no longer want to know why someone wants to work flexibly – the emphasis is on whether the working pattern they have suggested fits in with the business, the clients and the team.

It may be, however, that the profession is just not in the mood for new modes of working. Visser’s rather depressing conclusion is that the legal sector is not sufficiently ‘in crisis’ to change. ‘Flexible working works where it is a solution to a business problem,’ she says. ‘If supply outstrips demand, then there is no pressing need to change.’ Certainly, firms have to be genuine. You cannot have a policy and then not seek to make cultural changes within your organisation. Some firms have introduced policies because they think that without them they will be uncompetitive, offering work-life balance solutions because they have to. But it is hard to see how taking that view of flexibility will let new ideas breathe.

There is probably a lot more we need to understand before we can move forward, which is why two important pieces of research into the legal sector and flexible working are being undertaken. The AWS, in partnership with King’s College London, is surveying its members and their law firms, while Working Families is studying 13 of the top firms, including the sponsors of the research, Addleshaw Goddard. The research may tell us that firms are offering work-life balance opportunities but are not calling them that – or not formalising them at all. The Working Families research already undertaken in other sectors showed that a staggeringly high figure of informal arrangements existed in the organisations they contacted. Of the people who worked flexibly, almost three-quarters did so informally.

But perhaps obtaining a work-life balance is just looking at things the wrong way – putting the two in opposition to each other as if your working life is not really ‘life’ but is instead just getting in the way. This negativity stems partly from the demands and pressures that modern work brings. Perhaps what we are looking for is not a work-life balance, but a workplace that recognises its role in our lives alongside other preoccupations – it is always going to be predominant, but does it need to be all-consuming?

Polly Botsford is a freelance journalist

Bridging the gap Jeremy Alton

Balancing work and life can be just as important later on in one’s career as we move towards retirement. Jeremy Alton is one of two partners at a small firm based in London, Whitehouse Gibson & Alton. After 40 years in practice there, and having just turned 60, he has chosen to work at home one day a week.

‘Over the course of last year, I found travelling less and less appealing. Working from home avoids an hour-long commute twice a day.’ But that is not all. He says this also allows him to change the way he delivers his services to meet his client’s requirements: ‘I see local clients at their home or at mine. Many of my clients are elderly, they prefer not to have to go into town, and often would rather not leave the house, or they are business people who only have the time to see me in the evening.’

Changing the way one works at his stage in life is also about preparing oneself: ‘Retirement is a huge challenge and one answer is to ease up on work rather than cut it out altogether,’ he says. ‘Otherwise it is too dramatic a change.’ Alton says that he would think about part-time working, but his wife still works full-time. ‘If one of us is working and the other isn’t, then there is an imbalance. You have to work with your partner to synchronise your retirements, to slow down in tandem’.

Family time Michael Bradshaw

Getting lawyers to work in different ways is also about having senior staff – and men – try it out. Michael Bradshaw is a partner in the employment and pensions group at City firm Charles Russell. He does a four-day week, spending the fifth day looking after his children. What appealed to Michael about the arrangement was to have sole responsibility of the children on that one day, which is a very different thing to sharing care of them at the weekends.

This has worked well, he says: ‘Working as part of a great team helps tremendously. It is about trust: about me trusting other members of my team to keep things moving – or to escalate it up to me if something needs that; and the team knowing that I’m there if needed. It is about the client trusting you to be there if they need you and to be able to talk to another fee-earner if the need arises.’ He says telling clients can be a difficult message, ‘but many responded positively. Others were just happy to know that they would still have the service they needed’.

The week does feel short, however. ‘There is a lot of pressure on Tuesday morning and then on Friday [Michael’s day off is Monday] because you seek to set matters up to take them through to Tuesday. It can put pressure on your time at work and you have to be even more organised than usual.’