[I]n a world where billable hours are the only real measure of success, it really is difficult to create balance. Every hour out of the office is an hour not billed. Furthermore, and I saw this happen repeatedly, women who decided to have families were written off immediately. The women who redeemed themselves were the ones that created full work flexibility by finding full-time coverage for their kids. In my role as staffing coordinator at a large firm, I often was faced with resistance when partners were asked to work with people who had flexible arrangements or who wanted to make it home for dinner with their kids but were then available to log back on and work from home, one of them even offering to come back to the office after putting her kids to sleep. This woman would have been out of pocket for two hours and back online, but many partners were unwilling to work with her on these terms…. [T]he billable hour issue really is, at the heart of it, a feminist one. Maybe it’s the one we should all consider tackling first.
—Melanie Heller, Vice President and General Manager of Bloomberg Law, giving the keynote address from the first-ever Women in Law Hackathon, participants of which included 54 law firm partners, 18 diversity experts, and 9 law students. If law firms are serious about having more women at the top of firm hierarchies, their business model must be challenged.
(Read Heller’s full remarks here.)