Every lawyer should have a pet. It should probably be a rule.
Lawyers are very likely to suffer from burnout. While there’s a ton of advice out there about how to avoid it, taking one simple step will help protect you. Get a pet—a cat or a dog (or maybe both) or some other furry, warm critter. This is a real measure that can help you keep work from taking over your life.
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I sat across the table from my friend, a criminal defense lawyer. We were eating an early-morning breakfast in a St. Paul diner and chatting about what it takes to be a good litigator. Our food arrived—oversized portions of hash browns, eggs, cheese, you name it—and as we dug in, he let me in on a secret.
It had nothing to do with finding the right clients or managing your reputation or blogging to build authority. These things help. But blogging, for example, will not make you a good litigator.
What my friend told me, I realized later, was really the biggest success-killer for litigators.
I’ve concluded that one of the root causes of unhappiness for lawyers is that most of a lawyer’s skills are not always helpful outside law practice, and are in fact often not-helpful. Well, okay, often harmful.
This can be particularly true if you have kids. I’m not referring to the beaten-to-death question of “work-life balance”.[1] I’m referring to whether your lawyer brain makes you a better or worse parent when you are in fact at home and dealing with your kids. Lawyers don’t think like regular people, so I suspect they don’t talk to kids like regular people do. I know I don’t.[2]
But this can be a good as well as a bad thing.
Whether you’re catching up on work, waiting for a jury to come back, or avoiding a tumultuous home situation, you will likely end up spending a late night at your office now and again. Depending on your practice, it may happen more often than not. But you can make the experience a lot more bearable by making sure your office is properly prepared.
Starting a law practice is hard work, just like being a lawyer is hard work. There is a veritable horde of coaches, consultants, and gurus, though, who are peddling the fiction that you can build a law practice in four hours a week by “building a practice that works for you, not the other way around” and similar baloney.
Can you cut hours and take vacations in the long term (probably once you’ve taken on a small staff — virtual, if you like)? Absolutely, and you won’t need a guru whose only qualifications are owning a copy of The Four-Hour Workweek and reading that Esquire editor’s article about virtual assistants.
In the meantime, you need to work your ass off.
Much has been said on Lawyerist about the problems lawyers face with work-life balance. Generally, the way we measure whether we are working too much is by looking at how many hours out of the week we are at the office. But office hours are simply one part of the question. With the potential for constant availability no matter your location, and the capability to work on office projects from anywhere, the real question is: “when am I not working?” And to answer that question, you need to be honest with yourself about whether you are actually done with work when you leave the office.
Being a lawyer is hard work, but being a lawyer and a parent sometimes feels impossible. While there is a lot of information out there for “working mothers,” I believe that the same advice is just as applicable for “working fathers.”
So what can we “lawyer parents” do to survive and (maybe, just maybe) thrive as both lawyers and parents? Here are some tips:
It can be tough to be a breastfeeding lawyer. Heck, you now have two jobs, being advocate and counselor and being dairy cattle. In belated, what can I say I’m a mother of an infant, honor of World Breastfeeding Week, here are some tips for the breastfeeding lawyer.
Heading into law school is daunting and exhilarating. Keep perspective on what’s important to you to maximize your sanity and your academic success.
Three years ago this month I quit my decade-long gig with a small city government and headed back to my undergrad alma mater, this time as a law student. I had a three year-old daughter at home and had spent the summer as a single mom while my husband finished up an out-of-state internship. Most of my classmates were baffled by the idea of law school with a kid. I was often asked, “How do you do it? Do you ever sleep?” Insomnia aside, my life outside law school provided the most valuable tool for keeping me on task while studying and giving me total relief and distraction during study breaks: perspective.
Each week, I highlight what we’ve been up to in the Lawyerist LAB. Interested in being part of a growing law practice think tank? Join the LAB, a great place to network with peers and to ask colleagues and Lawyerist contributors specific practice-related questions. Here’s what we’re doing in the LAB.
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