Law.com Blog Network

  • An Affiliate of the Law.com Network

    From the Law.com Newswire

    Sign up to receive Legal Blog Watch by email
    View a Sample

« Lauren Stiller Rikleen Launches New Website for Institute Focused on Helping Laws Firms Attract and Retain Women Attorneys and Other Professionals | Main | Starting Law Firm Associate Salaries Rising Towards $200,000 »

Monitoring Assignment Disparity in Attorney Flextime Arrangements

The Project for Attorney Retention continues to add to its list of attorney retention best practices. An earliest post on PAR's "best practices" list discussed the benefits of attorney job sharing arrangements. More recently, PAR has recommended that firms offering flextime arrangements monitor the quality of assignments being given to part-time attorneys.  PAR shares stories of part-time attorneys being passed over for "plum" assignments, being relegated to tedious document reviews, and being shifted to assignments involving extensive rote work. Such disparity in the quality of work assignments causes frustration, unhappiness and a sense of second-class citizenship among reduced-hours attorneys, and thus seriously undermines the effectiveness of a flextime program as an attorney retention and recruiting tool.

The reasons for the disparity in the quality of work assignments between full time and part-time attorneys varies. Sometimes it's an innocent assumption by partners who believe that part-time attorneys don't want assignments that may, for example, involve tight deadlines, while on other occasions there's a deliberate effort by certain attorneys to make reduced hours arrangements unpalatable.

PAR offers several tips to determine whether work assignment disparity is a problem, and if so, what to do about it. These include checking billing records for the past couple of years to see if the same type of attorneys are always getting the best assignments.

Submit Comments to This Post

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83455666169e200e54fbb17668833

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Monitoring Assignment Disparity in Attorney Flextime Arrangements:

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.

Search This Blog


Sponsors

Resources

ABA Top 100 Blawg

Subscribe By Email


  • Join the over 30,000 attorneys who receive either daily or bimonthly email updates of the latest posts added to the JD Bliss blog. You can unsubscribe at any time and your information will be kept strictly confidential

    Option #1: Daily Updates

    Enter your email address:

    Option #2: Bimonthly Updates

    Enter you email Address:

Questions? Get Answers!