Small Firms, Big Lawyers: A Week Without You, Thought I’d Forget

July is turning into a cushy month for me in ATL Land (not a real place; more of a state of mind). The first Monday of the month was the Fourth, meaning a much-appreciated day off for my colleagues and me. Then there’s this post today, which is nearly half done and I haven’t even said anything yet. Then I’m off for two weeks on vacation, and back the last week of the month. Two more posts and another month in the books. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. (Yeah, I don’t know what that means either.)

Good thing I don’t get paid by the post. Wait, what? Really? Huh. OK, apparently I do. I’ll try and make this one count then.

It occurs to me as I pack for two weeks off that vacation is a difficult issue for small-firm lawyers. It’s easier at Biglaw: You get your four weeks a year, and there are armies of other lawyers to cover for you while you’re away. (Actually, that’s only half true; many big firm lawyers struggle to take all of their allotted time.) But in small firms, it’s much harder to take vacation or to get adequate coverage while you’re away.

It took me some time, but I finally figured out how to do it. Here then are my vacation-related tips for small firm lawyers, including the most important thing you can do to protect your vacation time….

The most important thing you can do to protect your vacation from intrusion by partners, clients, and opposing counsel — even judges — is to start telling everyone you’re going on vacation weeks in advance. Do it in person, do it on the phone, do it in emails. Sound like a broken record. “Hey, just to let you know for scheduling purposes, I’m going to be away for two weeks in the middle of July.” This does several things. It warns people far enough in advance. It sends the message that you take vacation seriously (as you should), and that they should, too. And it shows that you’re being considerate of their needs by warning them of your impending lack of availability. I’ve found that people will be very accepting of it if you’re upfront about your vacation. They all want to take vacation too, at some point, and they now know that you’ll be respectful of theirs.

Your vacation schedule is inviolate and immutable, even if it isn’t. If you get all namby-pamby about your vacation — “Well, I guess I could change it if I have to…” — you might as well forget about it, because it will get changed. I’m not saying that you should necessarily lie here, but you don’t need to give the whole truth when you’re talking about your vacation plans. If you had nonrefundable tickets to Bora Bora, you certainly wouldn’t cancel that trip just because a partner wanted you to pick up a piece of paper from his desk and move it to a different corner on his desk. But if you were just going to the beach, or the mountains, or the country, or whatever other generic vacation-style geographic category, you would cancel those plans? Nonsense. Act like you have nonrefundable tickets, and watch other people’s unreasonable requests to ruin your vacation disappear.

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Don’t use out-of-office email auto-responders. Some firms require you to do this, but they’d better have a really good spam filter. An auto-responder tells a spammer that it has hit a valid email address, guaranteeing you a bunch more spam. Instead, figure out a better way to deal with your email. If you have an assistant, have him or her review your email and only notify you if there’s something legitimately urgent. Otherwise, he or she can send out the equivalent of an out-of-office response.

Don’t be that guy on the beach talking loudly into his cellphone like he’s too important to be on vacation. I’ve been that guy. I hate that guy. That guy sucks. And his family doesn’t really like him either. Face it: we’re not really as indispensable to our jobs as we like to think, even if we’re running our own firms. Instead, figure out a way to get someone to deal with your problems while you’re gone.

Get someone to cover for you, even if you’re a solo practitioner. Make a deal with another solo that you’ll trade vacation coverage. Plan ahead with your colleague and your respective clients. If you’re not a solo, work with your coworkers to make sure that you’ll support each other during vacation time. What goes around comes around.

Set real vacation rules and live by them. If you can’t avoid checking your email or voicemails, fine. But minimize the times you do check. Say once a day at a certain time. We all need to break the habit of checking our iPhones every five minutes. (Or your BlackBerrys, assuming they still make those.)

Bonus tip of extreme awesomeness: Take two weeks together. You know, contiguously. (What? It’s a word.) This is the smartest vacation thing I ever learned, besides how to steal Wi-Fi. (Kidding.) (Kinda.) There are two good reasons for this: one is work-related, and one is weather-related. The work reason is that most lawyers take a few days to switch out of work mode and into vacation mode. Then, as the vacation draws to a close, most lawyers start worrying about work again. If it takes three days to get into vacation mode, plus two days at the end worrying about work, a one-week vacation really feels like a two-day vacation. But a two-week vacation still works out to a nine-day, “real-feel” vacation. Much better.

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The meteorological reason is this: if it rains for four days on your week-long summer vacation, you only have three decent days to enjoy. But if it rains for four days on your fortnight-long sojourn (why am I suddenly writing Jane Austen here?), you get ten days of sun-filled goodness to bask in. My wife and I learned this the hard way when our kids were four and one. We took a week at the end of August and rented a house on the Cape (no one around here says “Cape Cod,” just like no one ever says “Beantown” or “Bosox”). It rained six of the seven days, and there’s nothing to do on the Cape in the rain when you have little kids. We’ve done the two-week Cape trip every year since.

Did you know that The Go-Go’s “Vacation” was the first song ever released in the U.S. as a cassette single (or “cassingle”)? Yeah, me neither. I feel like I once owned a cassingle by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but I’m sure I can explain that away.

By the way, the 1982 video is really horrendous. And I don’t think they were really waterskiing.

The title of this post is a line from “Vacation.” I’ll leave you with the more-appropriate next lines:

Two weeks without you, and I still haven’t gotten over you yet.


Jay runs Prefix, LLC, a firm that helps lawyers learn how to value and price legal services. Jay Shepherd also spent 13 years running the Boston management-side employment-law boutique Shepherd Law Group. He writes the ABA Blawg 100 honoree The Client Revolution, which focuses on reinventing the business of law, and Gruntled Employees, a workplace blog. Follow Jay on Twitter at @jayshep, or email him at js@shepherdlawgroup.com.