Jennifer Saskatoon, a third year associate at High & Gungous, thought she had it all figured out. Her plan was to work as little as possible for her first couple of years as a practicing attorney, assuming that it takes at least three or four years before the pressure to bill hours really gets serious. Then she’d get pregnant sometime during her third year, play the new mommy card the following year to keep her hours down, then get pregnant again.
Beautiful. She dubbed her scheme “Plan P”.
“The way it worked out on paper, I could get by on fifty hours a week for at least five years, maybe even six. That’s fifty hours total—maybe only about 35 or 40 billable hours out of that,” Saskatoon told us. And she even knew how to thwart any premature pressure to bill that might occur in the meantime.
“I started talking about getting pregnant the minute I walked in the door, so there was always a rumor going around that I was already pregnant. No one would try to fire me or overload me with work, or else I’d just throw the PDA in their face.”
No, Saskatoon was not going to sling her Blackberry at her boss. “PDA” in the world of cunning female associates eager to game the system stands for the “Pregnancy Discrimination Act,” and it’s what law firms get for being bastions of liberal hypocritical whiners too scared to tell women that their implacable desire for pumping out babies is unworkable under the current big law model and too two-faced to actually retool that model so that it works for people who are narcissistic enough to want to become parents.
But we’re not judging.
Saskatoon did her homework, and her “Plan P” is reportedly modeled on the success of a friend a few years ahead of her.
“My friend Amy Kimberly followed her own Plan P, and she actually made partner this way. I was like, ‘Amy, you will never make it,’ when she told me she was preggo with her third baby the year she was up for partner. She’d never billed more than 1600 or 1700 hours, ever. [ed. note: the norm for making partner at large law firms is around 2000-2200 at a minimum, with another 600 of nonbillable hours on top of that.] And she was always gone by 6:00 p.m. because she had to pick up her other kids from daycare. But she was like, ‘Oh, they’ll make me partner alright. It would make them look pretty bad if they denied partnership to a pregnant woman.’ And you know what? They did make her partner.”
But that was way back in 2004 when H&G was vying for a spot on Fortune’s list of “100 Best Places to Work in America”, which includes just a small handful of law firms. In 2008, staying out of the red is trumping H&G’s lobbying efforts for a ranking on a list that, let’s face it, serves only to increase a firm’s volume of resumes from the laziest and least productive members of the bar. Things aren’t going quite as swimmingly for Saskatoon as they went for her underperforming friend.
“It’s Bush’s fault. It’s the economy,” she laments. “I’m just a third year, and I’m pregnant, and they’re already like, ‘You’ll never make partner at this rate. You need to be averaging 180 a month at your level.’ And I’m like, ‘180? You want my kid to come out all retarded from excessive production of stress hormones?’”
More bad news for Saskatoon came when three women who were up for partner last year at H&G—and each of whom had had a child in the years leading up to the year they were up for partner—were made counsel instead, spurring rumors that the firm’s “family friendly” policies were being set aside in favor of the bottom line.
Imagine that. It’s almost as if H&G were trying to run a business instead of a fantasy camp where mommies get to trot around all day in Christian Louboutin heels and get discounted express shipping on all their returns from lunchtime impulse purchases from Neiman-Marcus online.
“I just think it’s really unfair,” Saskatoon tells us. “I mean, it’s hard being pregnant. I’m tired all the time and I have to stop what I’m doing every ten minutes just to go pee. It’s going to be even harder being a working mom. Who came up with this billable hour thing, anyway?”
To be fair, the current model of snuffing the enthusiasm and pleasure out of living by demanding that associates dedicate 16-20 hours of their day to lining the pockets of balding, paunch-bellied, Viagra-popping, German car-driving philanderers grew up in the halcyon days of stay-at-home moms and Phil Donahue. When the Ponzi scheme we now call “big law” was being developed, no one ever imagined that women would want a piece of the action. Why kill yourself billing hours when you can stay at home all day in a Valium stupor in front of the TV and wait to collect that fat, law firm-funded life insurance benefit when your husband dies prematurely of a heart attack? Yet women decided that they, too, wanted a lifestyle that would force them to neglect their children and become alcoholics.
Problem is, women haven’t bought into the whole package yet. Sure, they’re willing to become alcoholics, but big law hasn’t yet convinced them to neglect their children, too. Linda Harschmann, a staunch advocate of working women, has no patience for women who aren’t thrilled with the idea of tossing their children in daycare 12 hours a day. In response to Saskatoon’s question of who designed the billable hour structure, Harschmann replies, “Oh, boo-hoo, Saskatoon. A better question might be: ‘Why the heck did you make your parents shell out a hundred grand for law school if you knew you just wanted to stay at home and wipe smelly brown paste off your kid’s butt?’”
But Saskatoon is determined. “They haven’t fired me yet. I just got a warning. I’m going to see this thing through.”
Good for you, Saskatoon. Given that we have a bit of an anarchic streak in us, we’re curious to see how you do. We’ll be watching you and updating our readers.
07/30/2008 at 2:13 am Permalink
Ha- very funny! Laughed out loud at the “brown paste” reference.
I am going to subscribe to your site. Lucky I found it