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Monday, June 04, 2007

Commuting and consuming, or, The "work-life balance" thing, again

One of the subjects that comes up most often in my conversations with current and former students is the challenge of "work-life balance."  Students understand, it appears, and worry that, the practice of law -- at least, in the sectors of the profession where they expect to practice -- is increasingly in tension with the project of constructing a balanced, integrated, happy life.  When students express their worries in this regard, what should / can I say?

I had to confront this question, again, this weekend, reading Sunday's Washington Post, in which two relevant and interesting pieces appeared:  First, this article, "Driven to Extremes," about the increasing number of people in the D.C. area who are commuting more than four hours a day -- drawn by "cheaper housing and better pay", but "at what price?"; and this one, "Breaking Free of Suburbia's Stranglehold," about some families who have "simplif[ied] [their] lifestyles in quest for meaning that constant hustle obscured."

I hope that our graduating students will read and reflect on these two pieces.  Sure, many of these talented and blessed late-20-somethings will go live, without spouses, SOs, or children, in hip urban neighborhoods in lively and interesting cities (and bill several hundred hours each month), and so might not -- at least, not yet -- face the kind of trade-offs and challenges described in these articles.  But, before too long, many (most?) will.  My advice?  For what it's worth:  Start thinking now about cultivating a life that is not going to put you on a hard-to-exit trajectory toward four-hour commutes, strained marriages, drive-by parenting, and a dis-integrated life.  (Easier said than done, I know.)  A question:  How could the law schools help?

Posted by Rick Garnett on June 4, 2007 at 03:30 PM in Teaching Law | Permalink

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Comments

Colin -

With respect to St. Louis, the answer is yes. Every city has its plusses and minuses, but I think there are significant differences in commutability in small cities.

Posted by: Mark McKenna | Jun 5, 2007 11:57:09 AM

Having spent my entire short life in either baltimore or college park, I have one question. Is it easy to have a nice house, a city job, and a short commute if you live somewhere far away from i-95/california? Are places like St Louis, Minneapolis, Phoenix, or Chicago actually major improvements in terms of commutability?

Posted by: Colin | Jun 5, 2007 10:01:41 AM

Amen to that. My wife and I moved way out into the DC suburbs when our daughter got old enough to need the space that our urban high-rise didn't provide. Having lived there a year, I still think we made the right choice to move to a quiet, safe neighborhood far from DC, but the daily commute (90 minutes each way) is horrible. Those three hours were my gym time, play-with-the-kid time, and major chore time during the week.

All in all, it offers yet another reason to want to escape DC and return to the Midwest.

Posted by: Adam | Jun 4, 2007 5:59:11 PM

The home office - or at least working from home a couple of days a week (if doable) is the answer.

Posted by: Venkat | Jun 4, 2007 5:41:28 PM

Good post, Rick, and very timely given the recent law firm salary increases. I think law schools really don't do a very good job with this issue. On the one hand, you hear people talking about "balance" quite a bit. On the other hand, I don't see "balance" particularly well represented during on-campus hiring season. It's just not clear to me who is driving this issue. We might think that law students are not well-informed about what life will really be like for them if they take the big firm route, and that perhaps we should push them more to law practices that offer a chance of a balanced life (perhaps by working harder to get those types of employers on campus to interview). But I think students expect law schools to try to attract the biggest and "best" law firms so they can get fancy jobs. And the reality is that, given the amount of debt most students graduate with, it's hard to argue with them. Financial considerations played a huge role for me personally in my decisions during and immediately after law school (particularly since my oldest son was born while I was in law school).

So one thing law schools could do a much better job with is making it easier (financially) for students to take those paths by offering more robust debt relief and showing them more models of different career choices.

Posted by: Mark McKenna | Jun 4, 2007 4:49:37 PM

I know this will be controversial, but in my view, neither article is all that relevant to graduating law students except in the broadest sense that we should all be thinking about what we really want in life.

Both of those articles are, in large part, about people who are financially squeezed by the expensive DC housing market. "Driven to Extremes" is about people who have multi-hour commutes because they can get a pleasant single-family home for an affordable price by driving from West Virginia (or the like) to the DC area; "Breaking Free of Suburbia's Stranglehold" is largely about being "overwhelmed by debt and oversize mortgages."

One of the virtues of high-billing big-firm legal jobs is that they pay really, really well. That's a big part of why people take them. Certainly they cause stress, difficult choices about work versus personal/family time, etc. These issues are real, challenging, and important to those who face them.

But few big-city attorneys have to endure four-hour commutes or worry about how to pay the mortgage; they're the people who can afford to buy up all the nice homes closer to town.

(Yes, I recognize that not all attorneys make big bucks. But I think it's safe to say that most of those who don't either live where the cost of living is lower, or else have made a conscious choice to make sacrifices to serve the public.)

Posted by: David Krinsky | Jun 4, 2007 4:45:31 PM

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