Lawyers On Call?

Deborah Epstein Henry, president and founder of Flextime Lawyers, proposes a model for making job sharing work in the legal field. If doctors can be "on call", she argues, then why can't lawyers? With job sharing, one lawyer might work Monday to Wednesday and the second from Wednesday to Friday. Work that needed to be done on weekends would be negotiated between the two job sharers. Clients would be told that they can call either attorney. Clients would not pay for any time that the attorneys spend updating each other before "signing out"; but team briefings that occur in the ordinary course of a litigation, for example, could be billed to the client.

The demand for these types of working arrangements is clearly already there on the associate side of the table. Law firms just need to catch up to other fields (and corporate law departments.)