Managing Time: The complex relationship between lawyers and the clock

In a world that runs faster everyday, where we never seem to have enough time to fullfil our needs and expectations, time has become probably the most precious and limited resource. How to deal with time and manage it is one of the main challenges faced by all tupe of organizations.

But lawyers have an even more special relationship with time, which started before the Internet and all the modern changes that are affecting society nowadays. Probably the single most important element in this regard was the establishment of the hourly-billing system, which was established strongly in the US market back in the 70´. This system proved so successful that firms grew substantially and became very profitable, specially since the 1980´s, and ever since became the normal standard in the international legal market.

I will not get here into the pros and cons of the hourly system as an adequate business model for law firms –which I have discussed before in this column-, but rather analyze the more complex cultural and organizational impact of this method.

Time as Value and as Culture

In the beggining, hours were probably a fairly good method to measure value. Clients assumed –and trusted- that a certain amount of hours worked by a lawyer in a certain firm represented the economic and professional value represented by those hours. So both the quantity and quality of the hours was a good proxy for value. But as Michael H. Trotter expresses (“Profit and the Practice of the Law: What´s Happened to the Legal Profession”): “Somewhere along the way many lawyers began to confuse their role in selling legal products and services with selling time, and they began to divorce considerations of quality, efficiency, and results from the hours invested in the effort.”

This dependence on the hours and the loose relationship between time and value created some cultural paradigms that were strongly assumed by firms and lawyers. If what makes you good as a lawyer is the amount of hours you work since that is what you bill clients for, irrespective of their value, the ideal type it proposes for professional development is the “workaholic model”. So firms specialized in business law and serving companies and banks adopted this model, since it addressed the most essential aspect of their business model: billing hours. Of course you will say that working a lot was not enough to be successful: you also have to be a good lawyer! Obviously that is true and lousy lawyers probably would´nt make it in good firms; but the question is what happened with good lawyers that found it hard –for various reasons- to adapt to the heroic “workaholic model”.

The 24/7 workplace and the “always available” culture

The June 2016 edition of the Harvard Business Review has an article by Erin Reid and Lakshmi Ramarajam about this topic (“Managing the High Intensity Workplace”). This type of organizations (law firms, medical organizations, investment bankers, consultants, etc.) effectively expects from their workers a total commitment to their work. That means a constant connectivity and the will to postpone any other interest in their lives (family or personal) if work so requires. An “ideal worker” –as they define it- is willing to pay that cost in exchange for exciting work, recognition and reputation, and good money.

The fact is that only a limited portion of workers adopt wholehartedly this model, at least for long periods of time. This only works for people that have the ability to waive without conflict other projects in their lives (a healthy family or personal interests, like sports or culture) and accept pressure as a constant element in their jobs. But a majority finds it very difficult and resorts to a variety of strategies to survive.

The article mentions three strategies used by people:

• Accepting: Some of them just give in and accept the rules of the game, but if they are not in the group described above -that actually enjoyes living like that-, they end up in a crisis.
• Passing: People in this group spend time in other activities out of the office, but they find a way to conceal them from work. It is a complicated strategy –and a streesful one too- since you need to hide aspects of your personality and interests from your workplace; and also there is a risk that you might get uncovered. But some people prefer this strategy because, if it works, the trade-offs may not be so high.
• Revealing: In this last group you will find people who are not willing to either accept –give in- or pass –hide-, so they pay the price of pursuing their interest in the open light and not hide them from the firm. The study indicates that, almost always, workers following this path pay a price in their careers for trying to make compatible their personal lives and an “always available” culture at work.

 
The truth is that non of the above strategies work in the long run in law firms. The tension they create provoke crisis either in the lawyer´s life –that push him/her out of the firm seeking a more balanced alternative- or in the relationship with the firm which affects the lawyer´s career, motivation and productivity.

Is there another way?

Culture is hard to change. Paradigms in an organization or in an industry become strong reference points for workers and leaders in organizations. But some essential things are changing in the legal profession that might allow other points of view.

• The hourly-billing is in crisis as a business model. Although still used as the main method, the truth is that a majority of lawyers (both clients and partners) recognize that this billing system has deep flaws given that it has lost it´s function as a proxy for value. All the wrong incentives that hourly billing produces, will push progressively to change the system.
• The flexible workplace that is evolving as a consequence of technology, makes harder and inneficient to tie workers to long hours in the office, since work can be done at home or elsewhere and at different hours of the day –or night-. Efficiency, rather than amount of time, will drive results more and more.
• The need to adapt to talent management and diversity demands will require a more flexible and open view about ideal workers. The “workaholic model” might continue for some –and may even be those at the top of the ladder-, but other alternatives will become also valuable and possible. Women with maternity and family requirements –in Latin America they still bear the main responsibility in that regard- and Millennials will be main actors in these changes.

 
The HBR article gives some suggestions for companies to improve this problem. Some are related to the need for firms to give more respect to employees´ personal lives, but the most important for me is to try to minimize time-based rewards. As long as any substantial portion of the lawyers´ remuneration is based on the time they bill to clients it will be difficult to change this culture. Firms need to understand that there are other more fundamental elements of value than billing time, and they have to incentivize lawyers to develop those while keeping an adequate balance between their lives and their work. The “workaholic model” will need to be revisited as the only viable alternative for a successful career.