Lawyers and Vacations

      Check out this brief ABA Journal piece, “Vacation or Not, Lawyers Should Be Available via E-mail, Cleary Partner Says.”  “An ‘out of office’ auto-reply saying that an attorney is unavailable is acceptable only in rare circumstances, such as when a lawyer is on an international flight in a different time zone and a colleague, for some reason, is unable to cover...”  This is followed by a survey with three possible responses to the question of whether lawyers should be reachable by email while on vacation: 1) I can always be reached; 2) I’ll check a couple times a day; 3) no, cutting myself off from work is the whole point.

    What strikes me about the clip and the survey is that there is zero attention to context: the attorney’s level of responsibility, the type of cases one is working on and the extent to which they are time sensitive (eg, contrast work on a preliminary injunction with work on fairly slow-paced and predictable appellate briefs or document review); not to mention the particularities of one’s family situation.  Absent context, it’s very difficult to tell whether this sense of 24/7 availability has anything to do with client service at all.

     My first summer in practice at a large firm I stupidly giving up the chance to be present at a three-day retreat which had always been important to me because I assumed that as the most junior on the totem pole I should make myself available to “cover” the case while a large chunk team was out in August.  Later I realized that I was responding not to realistic client needs (the litigation was fairly slow paced), but my own fears about firm expectations, which in that case were ungrounded.  I probably should have been reading a little more Laborem Exercens or Dies Domini for a better sense of perspective.