Customer Reviews

The Lawyer's Guide to Balancing Life and Work: Taking the Stress Out of Success

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Veteran lawyer George Kaufman writes that the pressures of performance and demands of work create gaps between who we are and who our behavior says we are. He joins a small group of writers (of whom I'm one - The Happy Lawyer is also available on Amazon.com) who argue that lawyers are being harmed by their own industry.

Kaufman uses the course of his own career to make his points, and shows the sources of energy and hopefulness to be found in your own career. How we ignore the lessons to be gleaned from our experiences in practice, and how we grow accustomed over time to habits and patterns that gradually open up a conflict between our intimate inner life and our outer professional behavior.

But this is no anti-legal profession screed. The author with wit and wisdom sets forth remedy after remedy, without giving up on the practice, that you can use. How better to allocate your energy among work, family, health, self, and how to delve into ways to bring your life into a more balanced alignment. More than 20 exercises aid your exploration, and help you make an action plan.

Kaufman acknowledges that self-directed change is the hardest to make. But lawyers who wonder why life has lost its savor and are willing to put in the work will not have to wait to have change forced on them by divorce or disease, if they will pick up and use this gem of a book.

This book provides advice that could be useful to almost any busy professional, but it does not particularly address the challenges and trade-offs faced by a busy lawyer.

The author also appears to be writing for lawyers pre-internet, e-mail, and blackberry. For example, he describes how buying a week-end house gave him a place to go and leave the office behind. But for many lawyers today the week runs 24-7. The country house is just a slightly more awkward place to get work done.

The book provides almost nothing in the way of actual advice for lawyers. The last substantive chapter, chapter 11, is where we finally get to the "action plan." But even here we are offered only vague generalities and cute stories about how it is "all up to you." This is sort of like buying a book on woodworking or knitting and, in the last chapter, finding the sage advice "the wood is what you make of it" or "the yarn is very flexible, you can knit it into anything you want" with no instructions, models, guides or other practical advice. In other words, everything in the book is true, but it is not very useful.