Everyone’s definition of success is affected by their life experiences
IDR Law was founded with the goal of creating a law firm that enabled those working in it to not lose sight of the importance of life outside of work – home, children, spouse, dogs, partners, pastimes, and general health. Too many law firms (by which we mean most) are built to support progression only if a high personal price is paid – presenteeism (despite the COVID reset), ever increasing billable targets requiring more an more time recorded at work and the additional burden of creating a “value add” to high billing levels to warrant career promotion to higher levels within a practice. Partnership pathways hot house lawyers to bill at existing high levels but in addition, to deliver team management results, BD successes and financial management – all of this (if they are lucky) provided through training but without any reduction in the responsibilities they were already carrying! Sound familiar?
Whilst an equity partner in a £24m turnover firm in 2009, Martin’s wife (also a lawyer) had a brain stem stroke – at the time they had 4 children all aged under 7 years of age. Naomi made an amazing recovery over the months that followed but never returned to work. What they now call their “stroke of luck” resulted in them having to move home and schools to make life practically possible. Whilst dropping from two salaries to one was always a challenge, the experience brought into clear sight the fundamental impossibility of balancing home and work in any kind of meaningful way whilst still trying to maintain a successful career however that is defined. If you can only advance a legal career by billing more and more year on year, then firstly that comes at a price too high to pay and secondly law firms’ structures and succession planning is such that it is incredibly hard to reduce or step away from those huge workloads without a huge negative impact financially.
And so Martin vowed that if he ever got the opportunity to create a law firm it would be done different. It needed to be flexible in its operation – fully digital, strong IT systems, outsourcing of tasks that could be done by externally for sure, but fundamentally it needed to move away from presenteeism and accept (as COVID forced others to try 2 years later) that working from both home and work was entirely possible and could be more productive with the saving of travel time. To address the concept of more and more billable hours being a requirement for advancement, a pledge was made that no lawyer would ever be required to work more than 25 hours billable hours per week – this remains in place to this day. Familyflex was created to enable a greater degree of flexibility for attending home/school needs. Strong benefit packages were brought in to support each of the IDR Law team members in health and wealth success. The story continues with regular inward assessment of how all of this is working and suggestions to improve things always debated.