There Is No Work-Life Balance

• Author: Hon. Bridget Mccormack and Len Niehoff
• Position: Hon. Bridget Mary McCormack is the chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. Len Niehoff is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and of counsel to Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn LLP, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Both are associate editors of Litigation.
• Pages: 30-34

Published in Litigation, Volume 46, Number 1, Fall 2019. © 2019 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be

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There Is

No Work-Life Balance

HON. BRIDGET MARY MCCORMACK AND LEN NIEHOFF

Hon. Bridget Mary McCormack is the chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. Len Niehoff is a professor at the University of

Michigan Law School and of counsel to Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn LLP, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Both are associate editors of Litigation.

We often find ourselves speaking to audiences of law students

and new lawyers who are trying to figure out what their future

as practicing attorneys will look like. At some point, typically to-

ward the end of our remarks, a hand goes up and a dreaded ques-

tion—as reliable as the law of gravity—lands with a thud: “Do you

have any advice as to how to achieve the right work-life balance?”

People talk a lot about work-life balance. A really, really lot. It

has become the stuff of articles, of lectures, of books—indeed, of

cliché. A quick Google search of the term yields 1,870,000,000

results. To put things in perspective, that’s roughly twice as many

as you get if you Google “Michigan,” the state from which we

both hail.

Yogi Berra once remarked, “I wish I had an answer to that

because I’m tired of answering that question.” And we’ve grown

a bit weary of trying to field this one. In part, our exasperation

stems from the huge gap between the extent of the question and

the time usually available to address it. It is as if the inquirer

asked: “In the two minutes remaining, would you mind giving

me your prescription for my personal happiness?” Don’t put us

in the lightning round and then ask us to play Socrates.

But our more important objection is that the question does

not make sense. It assumes that we can describe what such a bal-

ance would entail, that someone can achieve it, and that doing

so would be a good thing. We have serious doubts about all three

assumptions. We think that’s because they’re wrong.

Our objections don’t end there, however. Not only do we think

the conceptual model that frames the work-life-balance question

is confused; we think it is pernicious and destructive. It invites

people into unnecessarily conflicted patterns of thought. And it

sets them up for failure. That’s probably why law students and

young lawyers routinely ask how to achieve this mythical balance.

They’ve already come to suspect that it can’t be done.

We further believe that the work-life-balance formulation has

become so pervasive that it prevents people from entertaining

other—and, in our view, more productive—ways of thinking about

how to achieve happiness in the context of a famously demand-

ing profession. Better models for aspiring toward a fulfilling and

well-rounded life in the law exist. Most of our inquisitors just

can’t see them because they’re too busy trying to make sense out

of the senseless concept of work-life balance.

Further, in their zeal for a tidy prescriptive answer to the

work-life-balance question, these folks often miss an important

point about the question itself: It is a great privilege to have the

chance to ask it. Many, perhaps most, people in other lines of

work—certainly those who need to work multiple jobs just to

keep food on the table and a roof over their heads—do not have

the luxury of pondering work-life balance. It seems strange to

start from a position of concern about a profession that affords a