Flex Success: The Lawyer's Guide to Balanced Hours

Part-time schedules and professional success do not have to be mutually exclusive. Strategic career moves and careful avoidance of common obstacles can lead reduced-hours lawyers to the top of the legal profession. Drawing on lessons learned from a decade of the Project for Attorney Retention’s research and work with successful part-time lawyers, this book provides step-by-step directions for proactively managing a part-time career toward advancement and financial rewards. Topics covered include how to plan and negotiate a reduced-hours schedule, tools for making the schedule work, overcoming hidden bias against reduced-hours lawyers, and positioning one’s career for advancement. Examples, tools and tips are included throughout, such as a planning worksheet, conversation starters, sample agreement, and practical solutions for addressing bias.

Cynthia Thomas Calvert is a lawyer, consultant, speaker, writer and researcher with over 25 years in the legal industry. She was a partner in the D.C. litigation firm of Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin, LLP and thereafter had her own employment law practice in which she counseled businesses on compliance. She founded the Project for Attorney Retention with Joan Williams in 2000, and served as its co-director until 2010. During her tenure, she and Williams led groundbreaking research projects involving the advancement of women in the legal profession and work/life issues for lawyers, and authored Solving the Part-Time Puzzle: The Law Firm’s Guide to Balanced Hours (NALP 2004). In addition, she was deputy director of the Center for WorkLife Law, PAR’s parent organization, from 2003 to 2010. WLL pioneered the research behind family responsibilities discrimination, and she and Williams authored the only legal treatise on the topic. She continues to work with both PAR and WLL as a senior advisor. She has written numerous articles, has been quoted widely, and speaks across the country to bar associations, law firms, and client groups. For more information, please visit www.ctcalvert.com. Joan C. Williams is a distinguished professor, the 1066 Foundation Chair, founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, and director of the Project for Attorney Retention. She is the author or co-author of seven books and over seventy scholarly articles, and was awarded the Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award in 2006. With Cynthia Calvert, she has authored a series of influential studies of work-family balance in the legal profession, including the path-breaking “Balanced Hours” (2000), “Better on Balance?” (2003) and Solving the Part-Time Puzzle: The Law Firm’s Guide to Balance Hours (2004). Williams has run four working groups on stereotyping and cognitive bias. The first founded the study of “maternal wall” bias in social psychology, and led to a special issue of the Journal of Social Issues (2004) (edited by Monica Biernat, Faye Crosby & Joan C. Williams) that won the Distinguished Publication Award of the Association of Women in Psychology. Follow her on her Huffington Post blog. The WorkLife Law website is www.worklifelaw.org.