Does Your Career Take a Hit if You Work as a Contract or Part-Time Attorney?

 Although firms often insist that flex-time and part-time does not mean less opportunity, it is only natural that people who are perceived as being less committed to the firm get tapped less often for important projects. Thus, women on these reduced time career tracks experience high barriers in building the relationships with senior associates and partners necessary to climb higher in the firm. Fortunately (or unfortunately), staff and contract attorneys are already maligned or ironically self-identify as "coders," people who do the mindless paper shuffle necessary in the discovery stages of a lawsuit. With already no hope of promotion into a full-time associate position, one supposes that staff and contract attorneys have less to lose in terms of missing opportunities. However, at the end of the day, to have firms market these dead-end positions as an attractive alternative choice is simply adding insult to injury. The legal profession was traditionally a respected occupation, one in which a certain prestige and status attached regardless of where you were employed. The fact that we now have a class of attorneys working in firms that often don't even respect them as adult members of society should be something the legal profession should be concerned or ashamed of:

 As a contract attorney, I did not have to be told where I stood on the totem pole. All I had to do is look down, and see the ground beneath me. Yes, there were times I was talked to like a third grader. One time, our entire project team was put in timeout. Yes-just what you're thinking. Timeout: as in, when toddlers are told to go sit in a corner and be quiet. Our team was told to sit at our desks in silence. Because of the misdeeds of one or two attorneys who had no business being on that project, or any other for that matter, we were all punished as a group.[1]

 How exactly does this square with the idea of contract attorney life as a more relaxed and fulfilling career track?

[1] Gabe Acevedo, Biglaw's Status Issue, Above the Law, Mar. 4, 2010, http://abovethelaw.com/2010/03/biglaws-status-issue.

Building a Better Legal Profession (BBLP) is an organization based at Stanford Law School.   BBLP is a national grassroots movement that seeks market-based workplace reforms in large private law firms. For more information, visit BBLP's Web site at www.betterlegalprofession.org.