Work-life balance is increasingly an issue for burned-out lawyers of both genders, parents in particular. Law students interviewing at firms increasingly ask whether they’ll have a life once they have a job. Our roundup keeps track of this hot topic for you.

That student divided his summer between Covington & Burling in San Francisco and Faegre & Benson in Minneapolis. He says that, from his observations, billable-hour requirements really weren’t much of a problem: “While the associates will have to work late, or come in on the weekend on occasion in order to address an emergency, they did not appear to be working like that on a regular basis.”

That said, the very comfortable lifestyle that comes with being a summer has been known to skew the perspective of a law student or two.

Still, fighting billable hours was not the student’s primary motivation for joining Law Students Building a Better Legal Profession.

“What brought me to the group instead was an emphasis on professionalism and being a full person. And that means that not only are you putting in the hours at work and generating the quality of work you need to in order to serve your client well in the private practice, but that you have a public presence as well.”

He believes achieving that public presence through pro bono work is essential to being a good attorney, and it was this shared value that attracted him to the organization.

Another of the group’s members graduated last spring and also spoke anonymously because she recently accepted a position at an AmLaw 100 firm. Now that she’s out of school, she says she’s in a tough spot. “One of my concerns is, with the group, we don’t have the experience being on the other side, and now that I’m on the other side and I’m entering the work force, I don’t feel I can speak as a law student anymore.”

Though she still supports the group’s goals, she admits that, like a lot of lawyers, she’s “risk-averse” and hesitant to associate her name with the cause now that she’s affiliated with a big firm. “I haven’t really gotten their approval or anything,” she explains. Once she’s been on “the other side” a bit longer, she says, she’ll consider addressing the organization’s mission with the partners at her firm to see if it’s something they would support.

One charge that group members will adamantly dispute is that they’re just lazy.

“I want a family, and I think all of my friends want families,” says Bruck, who would consider working for a private firm if he could achieve a reasonable work-life balance there. “The law is about changing how we organize society,” he adds.

Considering the charts and spreadsheets littering the small Starbucks table, it’s also clear that Canter and Bruck have devoted a lot of time to their research. Combine that with the workload at Stanford, and the charge does seem a bit unfair.

“The great irony is that people working on work-life balance issues don’t have any work-life balance,” says Canter, referring to his near-absence of free time from working on the project.

That’s something Pat Gillette, a partner in Heller Ehrman’s San Francisco office, also knows all too well. Her two sons are now grown up, but when they were younger, Gillette put the pressure on herself to have dinner on the table by 7:30, all while billing more than the required number of hours.

Though she might have successfully played the part of Superwoman, Gillette still considers the billable hour to be “the enemy of women in the workplace,” as it often leads to lower retention rates for female attorneys. She spearheaded an effort called The Opt-In Project, which brought together leaders from various industries, including the legal profession, to brainstorm ways to keep women in the work force.

Gillette calls herself a “cheerleader” of the student group: “I think what these law students have done is they’ve said out loud what a lot of people in law firms have been thinking for a long time.” Billable hours, she says, “incite the wrong behavior. It incites people to bill more hours because they make more money, and it rewards inefficiency.”

Generation Y is not at all lazy, Gillette says: While “they want to make a lot of money, they also want to have a life.” Although that may not be a new concept, this generation might actually succeed in changing the marketplace, Gillette says.

SOLIDARITY

Joan Williams, a professor of law and the director of the Center for WorkLife Law at Hastings College of the Law, also counts herself among the group’s fans. She leads an initiative called the Project for Attorney Retention, which also emphasizes the shortcomings of the billable-hour system.

“I’ve been in legal academics for 30 years, and I’ve never seen a group like this,” she says. And she’s confident the students will see results: “The best way to change a major institutional player like a law firm is in solidarity with other people.”

The organization has no intention of slowing down once school starts. Its members are gearing up for a fall tour of 10 to 12 schools across the country, and so far, stops at D.C.-area schools Georgetown Law Center and American University’s Washington College of Law are tentatively planned.

Although changing the face of the legal profession seems an insurmountable task to most, for Bruck, it comes down to one simple belief: “Just because something always has been doesn’t mean that it always must be.”

Marisa McQuilken is a reporter with Legal Times, a Recorder affiliate based in Washington, D.C.