Biglaw

Biglaw Is Turning Associates Into George Costanzas

Biglaw fetishizes overwork, and it’s destroying us.

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If you ask a Biglaw lawyer how work is going, you can basically guarantee they’ll respond with a variation on “I’m so slammed right now. I’m underwater. I can’t believe how busy it’s been lately.” Lawyers can’t talk about their work without making a point of how overloaded they are. It’s coded into our professional DNA.

In Biglaw, overwork means success. If you’re working at the office while your colleagues are at home with their kids, that means you’re bringing in cash, you’re pushing cases to resolution, you’re helping grow your practice. Plenty of firms operate on the unspoken rule that associates who aren’t working themselves to death aren’t angling for partnership. We share stories of overnight projects and weekend-long crunches like battered warriors showing off their scars. Talking about how exhausted and overworked we are is how attorneys bond, how we signal our worth, and how we try to shape others’ perceptions of us as valuable, in-demand attorneys.

And it’s also killing us.

Work Hard, Play Hard (So Long As You Get Right Back To Work)

Biglaw’s work-to-death mindset is destroying our profession’s ability to grow and change to adapt to the next generation of attorneys on their way up the ranks. The much-maligned Millennials are already reportedly suffering from high levels of imposter syndrome. Millennials, on the whole, are wired to want to contribute to their teams in meaningful ways from a much earlier stage in their career than the Boomers and Gen Xers expected. The Biglaw environment is ill-designed to facilitate this. Biglaw is designed to train up attorneys on low-risk, high-hour projects that are hard to fail at, but also hard to see as important or impactful. New associates may find themselves working on doc review or basic legal research their first few years, feeling like all the drive and initiative they demonstrated to get their job is going to waste.

That feeling creeps into one’s psyche over time, to the point where some young associates start to wonder if the reason they aren’t being given chances is that they don’t deserve it. Associates that don’t get early chances at substantive work start to worry they’re too far gone, and won’t be able to ask for help when that opportunity finally arrives without looking foolish and underqualified.

Succeeding All The Way To Failure

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Too many in Biglaw are following in the footsteps of George Costanza. In a classic Seinfeld episode, when George found himself in a lull at work, he perfected the art of seeming busy, annoyed, and stressed out at all times to prevent his colleagues from knowing how busy — or not — he actually was. This is not unlike many in Biglaw, where lawyers talk endlessly about how hard they work and how much responsibility is being heaped on them at all hours of the day. Hearing this, what’s a new associate who already feels like an imposter waiting to be found out supposed to do? For too many, the answer is to start trawling the job boards in search of a way to escape the toxicity.

As long as Biglaw continues to incentivize and fetishize overwork, it’s doing itself and its attorneys a disservice. Don’t get me wrong, I believe a strong work ethic is important. But we need to take a longer view of our profession, and a more humane view of one another. An associate grinding day in and day out makes their firm a lot of money, yes, but for how long? Does that associate burn out and head for greener pastures? Or does that associate let their personal life atrophy, tamp down their expectations of personal happiness and fulfillment, and commit to a work-first lifestyle that contributes to our profession’s high incidences of depression and substance abuse? These are both sad outcomes.

A Different Duty of Candor

Simon Sinek, a speaker I’ve referenced in this column before, has a TED talk called Why Good Leaders Make You Feel Safe. In a nutshell, Sinek notes making people feel safe in their jobs, trusted, and respected, is one of the primary keys to developing a team that excels. I ask you, is there any class of professional on earth who feels less safe in their job, less trusted, and less respected than Biglaw junior associates? And if that’s the case, why are we allowing it to continue?

Change starts at the top, and it starts with moving past the outdated concept that we all need to be in a constant state of stress, panic, and exhaustion — or that we need to project that we are even if we are not. Being a lawyer is hard. We shoulder tremendous responsibility, to ourselves, our firms, and our clients. We can and will expect to go through periods of overwork, be it trial prepping, crunching through a gigantic deal, or just getting lucky and having lots of clients ready to throw money at us all at once. But we shouldn’t use overwork as our sole criterion for success, nor should we equate evidence of healthy work-life balance with professional failure.

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Let’s build workplaces where our young associates feel safe coming out and admitting that they’ve been getting good quality time in with their friends and loved ones. Let’s create environments where associates trying to figure out their careers can come to us and voice their concerns honestly. We all remember from the MPRE that lawyers owe a duty of candor to the court; why would we owe our colleagues, partners, and mentors any less? Let’s encourage attorneys who are heading toward burnout to be honest about it, and treat them moving to a more sustainable workload as a success in personnel management rather than a failure in revenue generation.

Firm culture isn’t something law firms have — it’s what law firms do, day in and day out. When we reward unsustainable, broken behavior, and cultivate expectations that healthy humans can’t meet, we create firms that few of us would actually want to be a part of. We owe it to ourselves, and to those of us that will come after, to do better.

James Goodnow

James Goodnow is an attorney, commentator, and Above the Law columnist. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and is the managing partner of an NLJ 250 law firm. He is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management category. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by emailing him at James@JamesGoodnow.com.

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