Finance

Legal Nonprofits Could Lead In Nuking The Counterproductive Mythos Of The 40-Hour Workweek

Just because lawyers in private practice have a garbage culture around work-life balance and must suffer the albatross of the billable hour doesn’t mean that everyone else should have to.

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I sit on the board of directors for a local legal nonprofit. At approximately the beginning of the pandemic, the board approved a 33.75-hour workweek for staff (without a reduction in salary or full-time benefits).

By all appearances, the change has been a resounding success, even amid the challenges of the last year. People were able to more easily transition to a mostly remote style of work. Productivity actually increased modestly. It’s harder to track happiness than it is to track productivity, but I imagine employees liked having a little more time to themselves every week. Still, I wasn’t surprised to see some resistance among fellow board members in extending the reduced 33.75-hour workweek indefinitely.

We ultimately agreed to extend the reduced workweek a few months more, and to revisit the issue. And I get the reticence. Boards of directors are not supposed to make hasty decisions. Plus, the type of people who sit on the boards of legal nonprofits are often people like me: well-off lawyers in private practice who have the luxury of being able to sit on nonprofit boards. Another thing well-off lawyers at private law firms tend to have in common is that for them personally, 33.75 hours of work sounds like an average Monday through Wednesday.

But just because lawyers in private practice have a garbage culture around work-life balance and must suffer the albatross of the billable hour doesn’t mean that everyone else should have to. Study after study shows that reducing worker hours from 40 (or more) per week actually boosts overall productivity. Workers who put in closer to 30 weekly hours than 40 are better-rested and waste less time; organizations, in addition to getting more productivity out of their workers, save on things like electricity costs.

On the other hand, large-scale longitudinal panel studies suggest that regularly working long hours (say, 48 hours or more per week) leads to exhaustion, burnout, occupational stress, depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders. It also “impedes the ability to care for oneself.” I’m sure none of that sounds at all familiar to my fellow lawyers out there.

A handful of companies have experimented with shorter workweeks in the recent past, to mostly good results. Microsoft Japan gave workers a four-day week, while still paying them the same rate they were getting for five days, and reported a productivity boost of 40 percent. Several U.S. software companies tried shortened workweeks and saw great returns in the form of recruitment and retention.

Still, a recent survey found that in the U.S., 39 percent of workers themselves express a distaste for the four-day workweek. There’s no real reason for it, other than that most human beings resist any type of change whatsoever, and the inertia of having been doing five-day, 40-hour workweeks for about a century (having a 40-hour workweek is itself only because we went from a one-day to a two-day weekend when early 1900s employers started to recognize that making people work six days per week was awful).

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The five-day (or six-day, or seven-day) workweek isn’t going anywhere anytime soon in private law firms. The billable hour incentivizes the inefficient use of time (for the billers, anyway), and until the legal profession finds a better way to charge, the mental rot endemic within the private sector will be with us. But in the public sector, and especially in the world of legal nonprofits where there is a little more room for innovation and open-mindedness, there is no solid reason to oppose shorter workweeks.

Beyond the productivity and worker happiness benefits that seem generally applicable across industries, shorter workweeks are one of the few benefits that legal nonprofits can provide but private sector legal entities cannot. Legal nonprofits have a difficult time attracting and retaining talent because such organizations cannot match the pay workers of comparable experience could make in the private sector. Part of resolving this issue is doing something about crushing law school student loan debt. Another part, though, is offering workers something they can’t get elsewhere, something tangible, like more of their lives back (spending your days helping people who need it and can’t afford to hire an attorney on their own probably offers some warm and fuzzy feelings too, but feelings don’t let you spend Friday at the zoo).

It’s something to think about. Shorter workweeks for people at legal nonprofits would benefit the employees, the organizations, and the underserved populations they’re trying to help. And, just maybe, in lieu of our lawyerly standard of lagging behind the rest of society by 20 years on everything, it would allow at least part of the legal profession to be a workforce leader on something important.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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