Everyone Should Have Black Friday Off
Don't be a Grinch. It just makes more sense in most cases.
Everyone in the legal profession understands that people should not be expected to perform work on certain holidays. Christmas and New Year’s Day are definitely two such holidays. Thanksgiving, which most of us recently celebrated, is another holiday when people are generally not expected to be billing hours. The day after Thanksgiving, which many people now call Black Friday, should also be a day when legal professionals and others should have off from work since individuals usually have obligations that reasonably prevent them from working.
I always assumed that Black Friday was some kind of established holiday since I was used to taking time off during it. However, Black Friday is not a bank holiday for many financial institutions. In addition, the mail is delivered during Black Friday. It does look like the stock market only has a partial day on Black Friday, which must be a welcome treat for financial professionals.
Many law firms do (officially or unofficially) recognize Black Friday as time off for attorneys and staff. I worked at law firms which explicitly list Black Friday as a time when the office would be closed. I also worked at law firms that did not explicitly list Black Friday as a holiday, but people were not expected to show up to the office nor to perform work related to their jobs.
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However, some lawyers definitely work on Black Friday. This past Black Friday was pretty busy for my law practice. As a self-employed lawyer, I do not at all mind working on Black Friday, since the flexibility of being self-employed is more than worth needing to work during periods when other lawyers might have off. But I noticed that some of my counterparts who work at law firms both big and small were working during Black Friday. Some of the tasks these attorneys completed on Black Friday could have definitely waited until Monday, when most people returned to work after the Thanksgiving holiday.
Of course, some attorneys do not mind working over times that attorneys usually have off. Lawyers might need to bill extra hours before the end of the year to meet requirements or earn a bonus. Even when I worked at a law firm that had Black Friday off, I did not mind billing hours over the Thanksgiving weekend to make sure I qualified for a larger bonus by the end of the year.
However, law firm managers should rarely require people to work on Black Friday if there are no emergent matters that require attention. The work-life balance has degraded in recent years since the work-from-home revolution has blended the lines between everyone’s work and personal life. Thanksgiving weekend is usually a time when people reconnect with family and friends in ways that might not be possible during other parts of the year. Moreover, many people travel during Thanksgiving to be with friends and family, and it is unfair to require these individual to perform work when they might not be able to efficiently complete work tasks.
Also, it is highly problematic to require attorneys and staff to perform work on a day that is between a holiday and a weekend. I think I wrote about this topic before, but generally if a holiday falls on a Tuesday or a Thursday, it is generous for employers to give workers the extra day off so they connect the holiday with the weekend to have a longer time off. It is hard to imagine that employees can be very useful if they just celebrated Thanksgiving and have the weekend to look forward to, so it usually make sense to just give workers time off for Black Friday.
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In any case, if law firms have not explicitly added Black Friday to their list of recognized days off, they definitely should. Cutting workers a break over Black Friday helps lawyers and staff enjoy their Thanksgiving and helps preserve the work-life balance that has been under attack in recent years.
Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothman.law.
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