I Am Not a Lawyer

Law21’s Jordan Furlong made a great post today on “work/life balance,” both the concept itself and the way the legal industry looks at it. Unlike most people who talk about this issue, he took the trouble to distinguish between billable hour requirements themselves and the market forces behind them — concluding that the problem isn’t market forces themselves as much as how law firms react to them. (Or maybe the problem is market forces themselves, but they ain’t going away.) Good stuff.

Back in California, our very own State Bar president has a column in the California Bar Journal calling billables “a practice that is threatening the capacity of lawyers to serve the public effectively[.]” He criticizes both the effect on lawyers’ lives and the effect on the attorney-client relationship: It incentivizes lawyers to be inefficient and clients to be distrustful. Bad stuff! If only calls to action translated to actual action, the LA City Council could stop murder. But still, I hope it’s worth something to have high-profile people calling for change.