When both David Childs of Clifford Chance and Tony Angel of Linklaters say something's a serious problem, I pay attention.

The issue du jour (or should that be du decade?) is retaining associates who find the time demands and general stress of large law firm life insupportable.  Angel says it's "one-dimensional" to expect that munificent pay alone will be sufficient to stop attrition—and Linklaters provides emergency childcare and other benefits, including a concierge who can "meet the plumber" or take delivery of your new washing machine.

This is surely progress from what Angel calls the firm's "almost Dickensian" state of a few decades ago, but clearly he does not believe it's enough:

"The firm has set up working groups in Hong Kong, New York, Paris, Frankfurt and London to try to grapple with a question preoccupying much of the industry: "What is a law firm going to look like in 10 years' time?"

"Some critics of the profession also say the big firms are still failing to do enough to attract and cater for members of ethnic minorities and women, even though 60 per cent of newly qualified solicitors are female."

And David Childs takes the matter equally seriously:

"People work very, very long hours," acknowledged David Childs, managing partner at Clifford Chance. "There is an issue: is this model sustainable in the long term?"

Then, we have the story of an Allen & Overy associate who left at age 30 to go inhouse, first at Deutsche Bank and now at Bank of America because his father had died young and the "excessive hours" kept him from "looking after myself a little bit more."

He puts the challenge to law firms bluntly:  Despite their booming profitability, they "need to work out a new deal for all the lawyers below partner level." 

I'll confess I have no glib answers to this; it's a structural difficulty created by client expectations for responsiveness, combined with the ineluctable financial arithmetic of the billable hour, colliding with women's prime biological and sociocultural child-bearing years, and with everyone's desire that life consist of more than the four walls of the office.  Even Caitlin Griffiths, the always-voluble and always-opinionated editor of The Lawyer, is at a loss for a snappy quote, despite her belief that:

"the profession is in danger of "eating itself". "I think people are quite freaked by that," she said, "because they have no answer to it.""

Ironically, I was asked just yesterday to help write a whitepaper explaining how a particular technology could make lawyers more "responsive" by increasing their ability to be reached 24/7. 

Until the day when senior leaders of our profession are prepared to take a stand—and a fairly united one it would have to be—and insist to clients that there are values other than and superior to "responsiveness," such as thoughtfulness, reflection, creativity, and distilled insight, both Tony Angel's and David Childs' worry about the sustainability of the current model are exceedingly well-placed.