Keeping your balance

ALL lawyers are obsessed by the clock, and maritime lawyers are no exception, says Louise Glover, a partner at Plymouth shipping law firm Davies Johnson. “Lawyers are almost unique in that time is the only basis on which we bill. Time is our raw material,” she explains. There are about 223 working days a year, and Glover reckons that 1,200 hours per annum is about the average demanded by most laws firms. This equates to about five chargeable hours per day. “The amount required can be anything between 8,000 and 2,000, though,” she says, and in fact, many city shipping firms seem to average somewhere between 1,400 and 1,500. Larger general practice firms often demand more, with somewhere between 1,600 and 1,700 billable hours per year fairly standard for the large city names.

Even where firms do not have a chargeable hours policy, lawyers can’t afford to sit back: “This is one of the only city firms not to have an official chargeable hours policy,” says a trainee at Freshfields, a Magic Circle firm largely known for tax work. “Unofficially it depends on how busy you are, so yesterday I was here until half past eleven at night.”

At least days like this are slightly more predictable in corporate firms, says Glover, whereas the caseload in maritime law can be totally unpredictable. “In shipping, the only guarantee is that if anything happens, it will happen on a bank holiday,” she says.

Quite apart from the issue of actually working the hours, and, just as importantly, making sure that they are actually recorded, there is the question of what exactly is and is not chargeable. If lawyers were to charge all the hours they spent on research, and unanswered telephone calls, which still take up a lot of time, there is no way clients would accept the bills. Equally, marketing and administrative tasks can be very important to the success of the firm, but do not appear under chargeable hours, and as such can be regarded as ‘less important’. That does not mean, however, that they should be neglected, as a firm which does not undertake some activity in this area will, eventually, suffer the consequences.

Glover believes the answer to this is to record non-chargeable hours as well, to give a better overall picture of how each lawyer’s time is used. “We have to recognise that chargeable time is not the only consideration, and that other hours are valuable as well,” she says. “At the same time, it allows you to see if a lawyer is spending too much time on other tasks, and the firm needs to get in more administrative support, for example.”

Where lawyers do feel that they have an unrealistic workload, a lot of pressure can be self-inflicted, particularly at lower levels. Law has a reputation for demanding ridiculous hours, and some juniors end up trying to conform to the myth rather than the reality, what Glover calls the ‘Grisham effect’.

One newly qualified lawyer in a London shipping firm, finding himself unable to get out of the office at the end of a long day, convinced himself that the doors were linked to the computer system, and would not open until the computer had recorded enough chargeable hours for the day. In fact, his keys had not yet been cut, as nobody expected him to be the last out in his first week.

“Everybody has heard of the long hours culture in law, and I think everybody starts with the impression that there must be something in it,” says Glover. “With hindsight, being a trainee was the most stressful part of my career.”

However, although expectations might become more realistic as a lawyer moves up the ladder, the pressure doesn’t necessarily ease off altogether. What it does mean is that the pressure comes from different places. During traineeship and as an assistant, desire to prove yourself and establish a place within the firm is probably the driving factor. Later, that pressure comes increasingly from clients, particularly as shipping law still relies very much on individual lawyer/client relationships. That can cause difficulties when a client insists on having a relatively minor matter dealt with by someone who already has a full caseload, says Glover. “Delegating is a real skill,” she says. “It’s only sensible to do so, but of course you must let clients know when you are delegating, and they have to be happy with that,”

Simon Tatham, a partner at Bentley Stokes and Lowless, agrees, saying that this can also be a problem where a client prefers to work with one particular lawyer even when someone else in the firm may be better placed to deal with the issues in that particular instance. The best way to solve this, he believes, is to accustom clients to working with teams, rather than individuals, giving more flexibility in the way the caseload is structured. But this can be a delicate task.

On top of client demands, of course, there’s an increasing realisation of the financial needs of the firm. “Do lawyers work too many hours?” asks Ken Scott, senior partner of the newly formed firm Winter Scott. “I wish mine would.”

Another problem, not confined to lawyers, is simply a question of logistics. Even if you finish your day relatively early, being stuck on an hour’s commute from Liverpool Street doesn’t leave too much time spare of an evening. For some lawyers, the answer to beating stress lies not in changing the amount of work that is done, but the place that you do it in.

“I think the amount of work remains about constant wherever you are, but what makes the difference is being home almost as soon as you step out of the office,” says Glover, who earlier this year gave up commuting to a London firm in favour of living within walking distance of Davies Johnson’s Plymouth offices.

London offices, particularly the larger ones, try to offer the same sort of convenience by having in-house facilities, including restaurants, gyms and even, in one case, a shopping centre, she says. But for her, at least, this cannot compare with the real thing.

As to opportunities for career development, being outside the capital certainly does not mean lawyers need to lose out in the way of work. “Many of our clients come from outside the UK anyway, as is generally the case for shipping clients, so it does not make much difference to them exactly where in the country we are,” says Johnny Johnson, senior partner at Davies Johnson. He says he has seen “no disadvantage at all” for his firm in being based in Plymouth. Visits to London are necessary for arbitration hearings on a fairly regular basis, but the stress caused by a one-day trip does not match that of commuting in on a daily basis. There are other factors forcing the pace, though, he suggests. “Modern communications mean people expect answers to queries instantly. Maybe we should insist that everything is handwritten, to force a slower pace.”

The answer to creating a work-life balance, it seems, lies in lawyers’ own hands. The busy and occasionally overworked lawyer is a fact of life. But, provided you are prepared to face up to problems and do something about them, the urban myth of the constantly overworked and exhausted lawyer should remain just that – a myth.