Law.com - A ‘Balanced Life’ Is Increasingly Rare for Lawyers, Concludes N.Y. Bar Report

A ‘Balanced Life’ Is Increasingly Rare for Lawyers, Concludes N.Y. Bar Report

Committee chair says biggest surprise was how many firms allow flexible schedules, at least on paper. But they don’t get used
Joel Stashenko
New York Law Journal
April 9, 2008
M. Catherine Richardson says she has a message for young associates she finds working at her firm’s office on Saturdays.

Their presence at their desks means they are not spending free time with their families. It is time young attorneys may think they can spare but which they really cannot, as her own life proved, she said.

“My dad died when I was 15 years old,” Richardson said. “If my mother had not put her foot down that, ‘Weekends are for your family,’ we wouldn’t have known my dad at all.”

Richardson said the cherished time she did get with her father, George Richardson, a one-time city of Syracuse corporation counsel, informed her work as chairwoman of the New York State Bar Association’s Special Committee on Balanced Lives in the Law.

The committee’s report, adopted unanimously by the Bar’s House of Delegates on Saturday, concluded that being an attorney is an ever-more demanding profession in which practitioners are finding less time for families or for the citizenship activities that have been the traditional obligation of lawyers.

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