Biglaw Firm's Great New Benefit For New Parents: Bill Less
This program helps new parents get acclimated to their new responsibilities.
Balancing being a new parent with the demands of a Biglaw job is challenging. Rather than just shrugging and telling parents to suck it up if they intend on having an elite legal career, more and more Biglaw firms are actually providing benefits designed to ease the delicate balancing act of parenthood. Duane Morris is the latest firm making concrete policy changes to help the attorneys at their firm.
The firm’s program allows primary caregivers to have 16 weeks paid leave with the option of an additional 4 weeks of vacation time and another month of unpaid leave if they choose. When they return, they can opt into a 30 percent reduced schedule for a month, tapering to a 20 percent reduction in the second month back and a 10 percent dip at month three before returning to full strength at month four. All without seeing a reduction in their base salary.
As reported by Law.com, Duane Morris vice chairman Tom Servodidio said the program is an effort to become a “family-friendly law firm” and help new parents transition into their roles:
“This is all designed … to help balance those demands of home and work in a way that hopefully gives you a better transition in and out of the birth or adoption of a child,” Servodidio said.
And Servodidio is very aware of the unique pressures law firms present for new parents:
“A client service industry has its own unique pressures because we want to be delivering the absolute highest quality service for our clients,” Servodidio said. “Trying to figure out ways in which we can try to ease that tension I think helps us to continue to meet our primary objective of excellent client service, but at the same time do it in a way that’s perhaps less anxiety-producing, and helps us to retain talent long term at the firm.”
Kudos to the firm for trying to create an environment where employees can be parents and attorneys at the same time.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).
