"Long hours, missed family vacations, and significant burnout" — Leigh McMullin on a job so unpleasant there's a cottage industry helping you escape it.
It's a culture problem: even when law firms tell people to go home, they won't, lest they be seen as incompetent or lazy by peers.
Large, corporate firms have tried implementing part-time schedules in order to relieve some of their overwhelmed employees, but to no avail. One reason that's failed is what Joan Williams, the director of the Center for WorkLife Law at U.C. Hastings and the lead author of the report, calls "flexibility stigma," which refers to the association of reduced hours with "negative competence assumptions." The second is "schedule creep," the phenomenon of a part-time job slowly warping back into a full-time one, without a corresponding raise in pay. "Slapping an alternative-schedule option on top of a full-time face time culture," the report says, has not worked.
At many large firms, lawyers often bill 40 or 50 hours a week even if they are actually working 60 to 70.
