Contract Attorneys

No Snow Days For Contract Attorneys

Snow days may be fun for kids and full-time lawyers, but they're brutal on contract attorneys.

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Now that the holiday season has come and gone, we’re left with the coldest, darkest part of the year. And welcoming in the the new year, yesterday Mother Nature graced the East Coast with its first snowfall yesterday. While the accumulation wasn’t bad, after the snowy, polar vortex of a winter that was last year, you could feel trepidation in the air (along with the snow). Last year’s winter weather was no fun for anyone (read: adults — I’m certain the snow ball fights, snowmen and sledding made plenty of kids happy) and that’s especially true for contract attorneys.

No, as far as I know, no law firm has yet demanded that contract attorneys shovel the entryway in some sort of final acknowledgement that document review is in fact the Charlie work of the legal profession. But all of the snow and the subsequent time off really hurt contract attorneys.

To be fair, the winter storms had a tremendous financial impact on lots of businesses last year. But with cushy salaried jobs, and the widespread ability to telecommute, the legal profession can lose sight of that reality. When review projects close the office for snow, that’s lost wages for contract attorneys making the miserable weather even more miserable.

I am sure that when project managers make the call to close the review space for inclement weather they have (at least in part) altruistic motivations and genuine concerns about the safety of the reviewers. But watching weather reports hoping the storm misses your area so that there will NOT be a snow day just irks the 10-year-old kid in me.

And that’s a real shame. I have fond memories of snow days as a kid, days where the neighborhood children would all take turns going down the hill on a sled or work together to build a massive snow fort. The phrase “snow day” used to illicit such uniformly happy feelings that I’m resentful the phrase now triggers worry that I’ll be late (again) with a student loan payment. I get that I’m a grown up now and that means all sorts of winter worries: shoveling the walkway to make sure no one slips and falls, checking to see if this polar vortex finally killed the car battery, and making sure pipes don’t freeze. But the added financial strain adds insult to our old friend injury.

I know the likely refrain to this complaint — it’s the same one every time something goes wrong for a contract attorney — it’s the nature of the business. No work is guaranteed and you have to roll with the punches. I know that. Anyone who has spent more than a week as a contractor knows that.

That knowledge just doesn’t make it suck any less.

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