The legal profession is notoriously family unfriendly – long work weeks, unbelievable billable hour burdens, advancement through face-to-face networking all combine to make it a challenging career for anyone considering a family, and of course, for women. It’s a long-standing truism, and many of our fellow MTs have commented on this before.  One anecdote that I think probably stands as an avatar for a lot of young ex-lawyers’ experiences:

Grace,* 31, has the kind of résumé any prominent law firm would salivate over. She was Phi Beta Kappa as a Stanford undergrad and she graduated with distinction from Stanford Law School, where she was awarded a prestigious Ninth Circuit clerkship during her third year. Her accolades landed her a job at one of San Francisco’s most elite law firms, and in her first year there, she won a Fulbright scholarship to do research at Oxford. The next step, which she had every reason to believe she’d take in eight or nine years, was up into the hallowed ranks of partner.

But she describes the nearly three years she spent as an associate as the loneliest time she could imagine. She used to think she was lucky to not have a life—no boyfriend, no kids—because at least she didn’t have to feel guilty about working about 80 hours a week. The other associates were no consolation. Everyone fought so valiantly to prove they did have a life outside the firm—that they knew the latest events in Iraq or knew what had happened on last night’s Grey’s Anatomy—that lunch became a pressure-filled hour of one-upmanship. The final straw was when she looked at every single partner in her office and decided that, even though each of them earned around $1 million a year, there wasn’t one whose life she envied.

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In one year alone, 2005, one in five associates in the nation up and left his or her firm. Of associates with about five years’ experience, an astonishing 78 percent are no longer with their original firm (up from 60 percent in 2000). These attrition rates are the highest ever recorded, and by anecdotal report, they are higher in the Bay Area than just about anyplace but New York. And while some of these attorneys are moving to other big firms, many are going out on their own or leaving law entirely. Kramer says that Stanford law graduates are defecting from big firms after three or four years at a much higher rate than they did five years ago. And more and more of the profession’s very best students are not going to big firms in the first place.

Well, it’s possible that the legal profession is finally sitting up and taking notice that many people are simply dropping out of the profession, abandoning the law for careers with more flexibility and better work/life balance.