Extracted from Law360
The kitchen table is covered in packs of sharpened pencils and brightly colored folders, and every ad features excited kids with fresh haircuts dancing into their new classrooms. After a long, hot summer, it's finally here — back to school!
As teachers across the country deliver their annual beginning-of-the-year speeches to students on what it takes to be successful in the classroom, the time is ripe for us lawyer-parents to do the same.
Your lawyer-parent syllabus may be jam-packed with client deliverables, meetings, court dates, filing deadlines and business development goals — targets that frequently shift and require a score of 100% on all assignments. But the good news is you've done the summer reading.
Some of the most valuable skills you need to develop a deep, meaningful and successful legal practice are the same ones you've honed as parents.[1] This article offers our best advice for working parents to build sustainable legal practices.
Learn to utilize all that stress conditioning.
Picture yourself working from home on an unexpected snow day, handling a long line of phone calls while your newly mobile toddler narrowly misses every sharp corner of each piece of furniture in your sight line. Just then, you notice that your client has entered the Zoom waiting room, so you set up your wandering toddler with a snack cup to occupy their hands and mouth.
Without missing a beat, 10 seconds later, you're delivering feedback on your client's planned strategy. You're used to living in these moments of uncertainty without it interrupting the high-stakes task at hand.
Perhaps on another occasion, the elementary school nurse calls you out of a strategy session with colleagues to inform you that your child has a low-grade fever and needs to go home. Your brief needs to be filed with the court by day's end, and the respective stakeholders haven't returned comments.
These competing needs and tasks require your urgent attention, but in the time it takes you to say, "Cancel my lunch," you have a mental list of what needs to be done, and in what order. Walking to your car, you've made an appointment with the pediatrician, texted a sitter to make childcare arrangements for the next day and are back to your regular work emails, all in less than 30 minutes.
In these scenarios and countless others like them, parents benefit from routinely managing multiple priorities. Competing tasks and needs don't derail us.
As in parenting, unflappability is essential in any legal practice. We have to think on our feet, prioritize overlapping assignments and projects, and not curl into a ball when the court, client or opposing counsel throws us a curveball.
So, how do we leverage all this stress conditioning in our legal practice?
Quiet the voice telling you it's too much.
When you face the inevitable overlapping demands on your time at work, take a beat and remember that the feeling of discomfort will pass. Working parents have handled competing needs before — every day, in fact — and you can do the same in this instance.
Take comfort in being underestimated.
Ever walk into a key deposition in a high-profile case, and a particularly snide opposing counsel thinks they're giving you a hard time with obnoxious speaking objections and talking over their own testifying witness, trying their best to rattle you?
Well, what counsel doesn't know is that this isn't even close to the hardest part of your day, so you keep your cool and think, "Better luck next time, pal."
Work through the freeze response by just starting.
Sometimes we get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what needs to get done. But just like we do when we walk into a kid's bedroom that looks like a tornado hit, we have to break things down to the smallest tasks and tackle them one by one.
Start by picking up the clothes on the floor, so to speak, before moving to toys, the wall graffiti, etc. Before you know it, you'll have those work projects tackled!
Remember to give yourself grace.
As parents, we learn that sometimes, we mess up and have to repair and reset. We can do the same at work. Don't linger on things that didn't go exactly as planned. Don't make the perfect — and short-lived — legal practice the enemy of a good and lasting legal practice.
Use time elasticity to your advantage.
A robust legal practice often leaves you at the end of the day with more on your to-do list than you started with. You sit down for lunch, get pulled into calls and emails, and look up just in time to realize that if you had left your desk 15 minutes earlier, you would have only been 15 minutes late for your child's soccer game. Oops.
But as a lawyer-parent, you know that emails that could take an hour could be done in 30 minutes if you have to focus and finish so you can see the second half of the game.
You are someone who can take the 6 a.m. flight to make a court appearance, conduct a Zoom pitch for new work, register your kids for baseball from an Uber, entertain at a client dinner and scramble back home without missing your allotted hour to be mystery reader at school.
To provide what each client needs in the 24 hours allotted to us each day, we have to be able to lock in and do things on a compressed timeline.
On the flip side, parents develop a deep well of patience that's critical in our role as trusted legal advisers, confidants and counselors. Who among us hasn't army-crawled out of our kid's room after lying in the pitch-dark to calm them down after a bad dream?
All lawyers have represented clients who necessitate long, laborious meetings or calls to hash out complicated issues. Opposing counsel or other stakeholders sometimes like to hear themselves talk. But meetings that drag on are nothing in the comfort of your office or conference room when you've waited for a 25-minute tantrum to subside so you can leave the park.
To quote a memorable phrase from Matthew McConaughey's character in the first season of the HBO show "True Detective," "Time is a flat circle" for us parents.
How do we use this time elasticity in our day-to-day practice?
Don't waste a minute.
Parents are A+ at efficiency, and this is a trait that is also lauded by clients and colleagues alike. Identify where you are spending more time and energy than necessary, and see if you can win some time back in the day.
Go to your zen place when things drag on.
Sometimes we have to tap into our reservoir of patience to achieve the best outcome for our clients. Whether it's staying focused during a meandering deposition or through the 13th iteration of a deck until it's just right, being patient through the slog will pay dividends.
Keep on keeping on.
All those times you raced to the airport the millisecond a deposition ended, changing to an earlier flight while en route, giving up your hard-earned upgrade for a middle seat in the last row by the bathroom — just to make it home five minutes before bedtime so you can get that much-needed goodnight hug — means you have practice doing the tough, uncomfortable things that are part of any legal practice. Keep up the good work.
Prioritize what matters to you.
Most of us parents don't want to have it all — we just want to have a satisfying legal career and to be good parents. Our advice? Figure out where you're essential. What work do you need to do yourself at home and at the office, and what work isn't the highest and best use of your time and can be delegated?
For some parents, it's essential to handmake their kids' Halloween costumes, but they're very comfortable outsourcing transportation to daily sports practices and appointments. For others, it matters the most to be present for the first practices of the season and doctor appointments, but the costumes can be ordered from an online store at midnight on Oct. 30.
Don't stress yourself out by trying to do it all because you think others do. Focus on what actually matters to you.
And while achieving a healthy perspective about the role of work and career in our lives is by no means limited to parents, parenting itself forces us to assess our values and grapple with what our legacy will be. After all, our kids are the likely successors to the lives we build — financially, emotionally and spiritually.
With this outlook, we can ask similar questions to figure out what will make our law practices meaningful, including:
What kind of work brings me satisfaction and leaves me energized when I leave the office?
Do the people I work with for many hours of the week have the character and integrity it takes to make my workplace a place where I can thrive?
What sort of financial compensation do I need from my work to support the life I want for my family?
What schedule, pace, travel and [insert your obligation of choice] allow me to remain integrated in my family and community?
Are there ways to expand my opportunities for business development without feeling limited as a working parent? Do I have a client prospect who would jump at the chance to take their kid to the "Frozen" musical with me and my child instead of doing another three-hour steak dinner?
Returning to questions like these ultimately allows us to focus on building careers and practices that are satisfying and sustainable. And there's even a big perk. People — including our clients — are drawn to those who are centered and satisfied, and who think about others' needs and wishes. Satisfaction breeds satisfaction. Win-win, right?
Conclusion
It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the competing claims on your time and energy during the back-to-school madness. We urge you to take a breath and remember that some of the skills you're developing as a parent can make you a better attorney, and vice versa.
Oh, and that report card for us working parents? "Skilled juggler. Conflict resolution specialist. Multitasker extraordinaire. Master negotiator with emotionally volatile stakeholders. Doing hard things seven days a week from 6 a.m. to midnight."
Looks like straight A's again.