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Why not just not have 70-hour work weeks in the first place?
Hot take: there shouldn’t be 70-hour workweeks and all the mandatory education about mental health is meaningless as long as they allow firms to require minimum billing requirements that force associates to work more than 40 hours a week. It shouldn’t be allowed.
This. Mandatory mental health education is a waste if the underlying issue (70-hour workweeks) isn’t addressed.
This type of stuff is difficult to “learn” in a class room setting. For instance, you can learn how to become a leader, but you don’t actually become a leader by taking classes.
It really should be on the firms and employers to develop those types of skills and set boundaries to protect mental health.
Yeah this is also how I largely feel about things like mandatory wellness or DEI CLE. If someone needs it or wants it, they or their employer can find a solution that works for them specific to their circumstances. But being talked at for an hour about it (or lectured and tested on it in a classroom) doesn't really translate to anything meaningful.
Law school doesn't give anyone any practical tips, if you just take the bar specific courses. If you're lucky enough to do a clinic or internship, you gained some practical skills.
Personally, I think there needs to be some sort of leadership/how to be a boss course. I'd also love to see some business-focused courses to teach students the basics of running a business. It would also be helpful if there were some sort of course to teach you how to deal with office politics, HR issues, etc. Boundary setting could also be part of that course.
Wait — you learned how to write a brief in law school?
You entered a field that is well known to be high pressure and long hours, and you entered law school when you were at least 21 and entered practice at 25+.
If you're having a difficult time managing things, the issue lies with you, not with law school.
Grass of all professional schools (law, medicine, business) have first jobs with awful hours and expectations. It’s the learning curve in order to make a rookie economically worth hiring. Firms are not the extension of school where you get to chose when to study, etc. Firms have to make a new hire profitable as soon as possible, and recent grads don’t know anything. Suck it up, buttercup!
lol the education system was only ever set up to produce good little worker bees. The only people who make real money are those who own a business or inherit generational wealth
It’s called getting job experience before working here
I think this would be hard because it’s so group/office/who you work for dependent. For example, I usually don’t respond to emails after 9/10 PM unless I’m in the middle of a closing drill. If it seems particularly urgent, at most it’ll usually get a “will do.” This is completely acceptable in my group because someone emailing me that late usually does not expect me to answer.
But, at my last firm, I would regularly get CALLs from partners at 9-11 PM on non-urgent matters. It was the expectation that I answer and I was chided if I didn’t.
So a course on setting boundaries wouldn’t have been helpful, because those boundaries would have only been OK/acceptable at one of my firms, but not the other
I agree that there should not be 70-hour workweeks, but the problem is that many of us on this discussion point can testify to times when there were litigation deadlines and little to no help available (due to illness, vacation, low bandwidth based on other tasks, etc.) to delegate certain tasks. What happened? Unless you obtained a last minute extension, the work still needed to be done. Who winds up doing the work? Many times, it was one of us!!! Thus, the long days and working into the midnight hours happened and is still happening!
I agree! Relatedly, just imagine how much better our work culture/environment would be now if generations ago attorneys took at least one managerial course that went over running a practice group, mentorship, and other supervisory obligation, it may not end the 70-hour work week, but it would probably make it a bit more bearable with leadership competent in more than just law. Just thoughts!
Probably in the minority, but a vehemently disagree.
Investing six figures of debt and 3 years of my life into this, I want my time and money spent on things that are going to make me a better and more valuable attorney, not be compelled to do some wannabe yogis *guided meditation" hour while she repeats buzzwords like "mindfulness" and "wellness".
If you find that appealing, more power to you. But you should pursue it on your own time and dime.
Nothing drives me crazier than these "mental health is about breathing slowly" types
I believe that it’s important for law students to have hands on experience through various internships during the regular school year, in addition to the summer. Yes, it would require students to be better managers of their time, especially if they are full time students.
I worked in the public defender’s office in CA as a 2L. I was a full time student and worked two afternoons per week in juvenile hall. I was in court arguing before the criminal judge advocating for kids ages 10-17 charged with felonies. As I was learning evidence and more criminal procedure in class, the active cases in the PD’s office allowed me to put my knowledge to practice.
Many students are not choosing this route. Their three years are mostly about book knowledge, but by the time they pass the bar and land in the real world, it is a culture shock for them because they have not been in the active litigation environment. Many new grads are not ready for the time pressures associated with it. Yet, once they enter the zone, they are ready to leave law practice altogether.
So, I tell students who are starting law school wanting to be litigators after graduation: after your first year, work on obtaining an internship. This will prepare you for the real world. Litigation is not for weak, the lazy, disorganized or the indifferent. The classroom environment may not teach you much, but the courtroom and law firm environments will.
This is just one example. Students can choose to work in law firms, doing legal research and writing as well. The point is to place yourself in the real world before you graduate. That way, you will not be caught off guard after the license to practice is obtained.
Your life is your own and you do not have to work 70 hour weeks if you do not want to.
So much is context-dependent. The dirty truth also is that many partners don’t want boundary-setting (or, at least, not something as inflexible and vanilla as what would be taught in a law school class). No law school class would want to say it’s unreasonable to go to yoga every week and be out for two hours in the middle of the day, but I assure you that if that is the only two-hour window for some major client call you need to be on or something, you don’t want to tell the VIP partner that they can field it for you so you can go to yoga. That’s just one example of hundreds we might explore. There is an art, and are various contextual aspects, to boundary-setting.
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Who comes out knowing how to brief a case? You know to read decisions. In addition to LSAT we should have to work with attorneys for a semester so we can bail out before it’s too late