Discourage 'drunk' lawyering: change the long hours culture in law firms

Lawyers operate within a profession where long hours are, to a certain extent, inevitable. However, more than a century of studies show that working long hours can have disastrous consequences for both the business and individual concerned.

Sleep deprivation has serious implications for knowledge workers. Research has found that productivity may be increased at 60 hours per week, but only for eight weeks, after which productivity reduces below that of a 40-hour week and staff become tired, angry and burnt out.¹

The University of Pennsylvania has also found that subjects who slept four to six hours a night for 14 consecutive nights showed deficits in cognitive performance equivalent to going without sleep for up to three days in a row. Worryingly, the subjects themselves reported feeling only slightly sleepy and were unaware of how impaired their thought processes had become.

Studies also show that being awake for 21 hours impairs drivers as much as having the legal limit of blood alcohol concentration.² So, effectively, lawyers working long continuous hours may be as impaired as drunk drivers. Multiple consecutive all-nighters will also dramatically increase the risk of negligence claims, the loss of clients and damage to the firm’s reputation.

Work-life balance initiatives

Law firms have increasingly been recognising that changes need to be made to their long hours culture, but not for the reasons given above. Demographic trends are increasing competition for the best graduates and, in a knowledge-based sector where the assets of the business are the employees themselves, firms unable to adapt and become employers of choice will fail to thrive.

Firms hope that by introducing work-life balance initiatives they will be able to give employees more control over where, when and how they work. Research indicates that, for 47 per cent of employees, such policies are the most highly valued benefit, scoring much higher than either pay or bonuses.

Several professional services firms (including Eversheds, Accenture and PriceWaterhouseCoopers) which previously operated a long hours culture have tackled this issue through different measures. These include:

• removing from the induction pack the right to opt out of the maximum 48-hour week under the Working Time Regulations (1998), to send a clear message about working hours;

• training those involved in project planning and bidding in resource management, to ensure demands on staff are realistic and appropriate;

• ensuring failure to buy into work-life balance policies adversely affects the performance ratings of managers/partners; and

• supporting a wide range of flexible working arrangements, including annualised/monthly hours, fixed-term working, reduced days, reduced hours, home-based working, job sharing and sabbaticals.

Long-term benefits

Not surprisingly, given the culture of the firms involved, the response of partners to the new policies was sometimes hostile and take-up was slow. But attitudes changed as personal and business benefits were noticed.

The firms involved monitored changes and noted an increase in satisfaction with work-life balance, in commitment levels and in retention rates (with a corresponding reduction in both staff turnover and recruitment costs).

PwC saw an increase from 40 per cent to 92 per cent in the return rate of employees who took maternity leave. It also noted that people working flexibly were no less productive in terms of their chargeable utilisation levels than those working to a more traditional pattern.

Given the potential cost to both the firm and the individual of working extended hours and the positive results that can be achieved when adopting a more flexible approach to work patterns, isn’t it time that all firms reviewed their cultures?

If there is a silver lining to the cloud of recession, perhaps it is that clients have insisted on law firms moving away from billable hours and adopting more creative ways of charging for their time. This creates an opportunity for firms to jettison hours worked as a simple measure of performance and to shift toward more accurate reflections of value added contributions. It also helps to remove the principal cause of the macho long-hours culture within firms.

fiona.severs@lexingtongray.co.uk

Endnotes

1. See Scheduled Overtime Effect on Construction Projects, Rep. C-2, Business Roundtable, 1980 and ‘Effects of Scheduled Overtime on Labor Productivity: A Quantitative Analysis’, H. Randolph Thomas and Karl A. Raynar, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, Vol. 123 No. 2, June 1997

2. See ‘How do Prolonged Wakefulness and Alcohol Compare in the Decrements they Produce on a Simulated Driving Task’, JT Arnedt, GJS Wilde, PW Munt and AW MacLean, Accident Analysis and Prevention, Vol. 33 Issue 3, May 2001