INTRODUCTION

The struggle to effect a balance between work and‘life‘ on the part of lawyers chafing under the constraints of billable hours and the long-hours culture has resulted in high levels of stress and dissatisfaction in traditional legal practice.This has contributed to the haemorrhage of lawyers, particularly women, which encouraged me to consider whether alternative ways of lawyering might better contribute to lawyer wellbeing.

The introduction of flexible work policies for employees was a response to the feminisation of labour in the late twentieth century. Despite their entry into full-time employment, women were nevertheless still expected to take responsibility for the preponderance of housework, childcare and elder care. The introduction of flexible work policies coincided with the neoliberal turn, which emphasised profit maximisation and promotion of the self through entrepreneurialism, a theme on which Foucault in particular elaborates. Indeed, competition became a central plank of Australian government policy under the Keating Government in the mid-1990s, as illustrated by the passage of the Competition Policy Reform Act 1995 (Cth). A cluster of significant reforms that took place around the millennial turn hastened this imperative. Most notably, these reforms included the incorporation of legal practices, listing on the stock exchange, and the amalgamation of the leading Australian national firms with elite London-based firms. Not only did these reforms emphasise the new mantra of ‘law as business‘ that had begun to animate private practice, but they also assisted in transforming legal practice into a lucrative legal services ‘industry‘ that irrevocably altered the norms of legal work.

Historically, an employed lawyer or associate in the typical law firm could expect to become an equity partner after a few years, but the bureaucratised character of the new global mega-firms meant that the chances of partnership became increasingly remote. Nevertheless, the idea of a partnership as the ultimate prize continued to be dangled before associates, encouraging them to work ever harder and longer. The longhours culture became the norm as associates represented the crucial source of profitability for their firms, which was effected through billable hours.