Professor Bainbridge compares an article from The Economist showing a steady increase in Americans' leisure time over the past 40 years with a story from the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin reporting on how over-worked lawyers are:

"The survey showed that how much money a lawyer makes corresponds almost exactly with how much work reduces family time. In the open-ended responses, lawyers said over and over again that achieving a high level of success in the profession simply demands putting in long hours."

To be sure, the Economist shows that less-educated workers have made even greater strides in gaining additional leisure time than more-educated workers:

But this doesn't answer Bainbridge's question: 

"But if lawyers can (and do) make more money by working more, why isn't that equally true of other professions whose practitioners seem to be enjoying more leisure? And why hasn't the market made available options for lawyers who would be willing to take a cut in pay to work fewer hours?"

What's going on here?

My hypothesis is that it's the product of the nasty intersection of the billable hour with increased productivity elsewhere in the economy. This quote from The Economist piece makes this point obliquely:

"There has been a revolution in the household economy. Appliances, home delivery, the internet, 24-hour shopping, and more varied and affordable domestic services have increased flexibility and freed up people's time.

"So women are devoting more hours to paying jobs, but have cut their housework and other burdensome tasks by twice as much."

In other words, assuming that homes are just as clean, or just as dirty, as forty years ago, that the refrigerators and laundry hampers of America are equally full or empty, etc., the productivity of household-work has doubled.

Meanwhile, in the "for-pay" part of the economy, or what the good economists who produced the study call work, productivity of everyone from pharmacists to Wal-Mart clerks to FedEx drivers has shot up tremendously--up 36% since 1992, so we can easily assume it's doubled or even tripled since 1965.  Most workers have split the additional income created by their productivity gains between increases in take-home pay and increases in leisure time—which is simply another way of saying that the more you can earn per hour, the more choice you have between working as hard or harder for more money or working less for the same money.

But lawyers have (a) increased their hourly productivity far more slowly than the average across the economy; and (b) remain all but universally tied to the billable hour, which creates a tremendous correlation between recorded hours worked and income.  For example, apropos the recent round of associate salary pay hikes at large firms in New York and California, would anyone in their right mind hypothesize that these firms will not expect equal or greater annual billable totals for their largesse?

Add in the ever-increasing visibility of, and pressure to maximize, profits-per-partner, and I'm not surprised lawyers are working harder.  

From a micro-economic perspective, the only way a law firm can meaningfully increase its profits, on a sustainable basis, is to increase revenue.   The costs of a law firm—almost entirely salaries plus benefits, and office rent—are not, realistically, expense categories where serious savings can be achieved.

So to increase revenue, firms can raise their hourly rates (which they are doing, to be sure, but there are short-run limits to this strategy), or increase the number of hours billed.   If we lived in the land of Alternative Fee Structures, there would be other options, but we don't so there aren't.  (Even in Alternative Fee Land, I question how effective the other options would be:  There is as yet no way to materially increase the productivity of a lawyer by adding in capital, as firms from Intel and Dell to FedEx and Wal-Mart can do with their employees.)

Finally, there's what I characterize as the "plasticity" of what the actual day-to-day of providing legal services amounts to. By "plasticity," I mean that one can always do more:  Research more case-law, comb through the acquisition agreement one more time, review a witness's proposed testimony yet again, rework the opening paragraph of an appellate brief, etc. By contrast, most tasks confronting other workers are finite: Lunch is served, the house is framed out, the exam is graded, the prescription is written.

This means that not only does the profit imperative demand more billable hours, their supply is inexhaustible. 

And as to why we don't have Alternative Work/Life Balance Land, where lawyers could trade, say 20% of their income for 20% of the hours they work, we have, as Point of Law nicely puts it, a "collective action problem."