Biglaw, Billable Hours

Lawyers Work Too Damn Much

That all-nighter you pulled is, in the grand scheme of things, truly meaningless.work-

By  
on

Slogging along in Biglaw can be its own kind of hell. Work — deemed essential by a partner “working” from his Hamptons beach house — seems to multiply like Gremlins caught in a rainstorm. Stuck inside the system, it is easy to rage against the futility and injustice of it all, but sometimes difficult to know if those desperate screams echo outside the hallowed halls of Biglaw.

Columbia Law professor Tim Wu hears you. In fact, he uses the example of Biglaw attorneys (of the litigation variety) as the example, par excellence, of how American white-collar workers work too much, far beyond what is necessary, in a New Yorker article.

What counts as work, in the skilled trades, has some intrinsic limits; once a house or bridge is built, that’s the end of it. But in white-collar jobs, the amount of work can expand infinitely through the generation of false necessities—that is, reasons for driving people as hard as possible that have nothing to do with real social or economic needs.

So yes, that all nighter you pulled is, in the grand scheme of things, truly meaningless.

Consider the litigation system, in which the hours worked by lawyers at large law firms are a common complaint. If dispute resolution is the social function of the law, what we have is far from the most efficient way to reach fair or reasonable resolutions. Instead, modern litigation can be understood as a massive, socially unnecessary arms race, wherein lawyers subject each other to torturous amounts of labor just because they can. In older times, the limits of technology and a kind of professionalism created a natural limit to such arms races, but today neither side can stand down, lest it put itself at a competitive disadvantage.

The arms race of billable hours is certainly one motivating factor; cold hard cash is the other.

A typical analysis blames greedy partners for crazy hours, but the irony is that the people at the top are often as unhappy and overworked as those at the bottom: it is a system that serves almost no one. Moreover, our many improvements in the technologies of productivity make the arms-race problem worse. The fact that employees are now always reachable eliminates what was once a natural barrier of sorts, the idea that work was something that happened during office hours or at the physical office. With no limits, work becomes like a football game where the whistle is never blown.

Sponsored

Partners might not be “happy” with the hours they work (or those they demand associates work), but they sure benefit financially from them. With the stock market’s recent decline and seasoned lawyers still experiencing night terrors over the legal market’s ’08 crash, no amount of sternly worded New Yorker (or ATL) articles will change Biglaw’s “bill at all costs” mantra.

You Really Don’t Need To Work So Much [New Yorker]

Sponsored

Topics

, , , , , , , , ,