Ottawa immigration lawyer Michael Bell has this warning for his colleagues in small or solo legal practices:
“If you don’t get away you go crazy, you get depressed, or you burn out. Or all three,” he says.
Bell, fresh from a two-week vacation to Beijing, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau, says it took him years to recognize vacations and down time are not negotiable.
“Now I look for a clear spot at least six months in advance,” Bell, 55, says. “I try to go away for one week, four times a year. If I’m going more than 10 hours on a plane, I take more than two weeks and I take the weekends on either end to stretch the vacation. I plan the trip so I’m not exhausted when I get back.”
Bell doesn’t answer e-mails while he is away—“it made me too anxious”—and he doesn’t see clients on his first day back in the office to allow him to catch up.
Sounds great, in theory. In practice—particularly in a small or solo practice—how do you make it happen?
Paul Allyjan agrees it’s all about planning, but says it was nearly five years before he was comfortable taking a vacation from his busy family law practice in Calgary.
“The amount of emotion in family law is probably substantially different from other areas of law,” says Allyjan, now 37. “Clients are demanding because it’s their lives. Or it’s their children and they’re going to fight tooth and nail.”
At first he took a week off, five times a year, but it wasn’t enough to “recharge his batteries.”
“First and foremost, like everything in law, it comes down to notice,” he says about planning breaks. “You write a with-prejudice letter and fax it to everyone telling them you are not available from this date to this date, please don’t bring any applications, and then I leave a list with my assistant of lawyers she can contact if something goes off the rails. You can never fully protect yourself but if you’ve got people you can rely upon who are competent and capable and who you can trust, if something happens my assistant has that list of contacts.”
He also recommends getting a feel for when your particular area of law typically slows down.
“The standing joke among Calgary family law practitioners is that there are three really busy seasons: pre-Christmas access season; pre-summer access season and the post-Stampede divorce season,” he says. “If you know the cycles, you know there are ebbs and flows so it really comes down to planning. As early as possible book your time off and protect that time with your life. If someone asks could you do a conference call, (say) no I am not available.”
Ottawa immigration lawyer Laura Setzer, 48, knows time off is crucial—especially now that she has three young children. But as a sole practitioner, it’s hard to implement.
“I’ve worked on my vacations,” she says. “I’ve had to have entire files forwarded to me and I’ve had to stop and work because what else are you going to do? If you’re on a three-week holiday and something pops up that’s due in two weeks, what are you going to do?”
She feels new lawyers in particular worry that work will go undone, or that there won’t be anyone keeping an eye on the store. Others stay on the treadmill because they can’t afford to get off.
“There is no vacation pay,” Setzer acknowledges. “But you have to bite the bullet and realize it is more important for you to take time off than it is to earn that money in terms of taking care of yourself in the long term.”
And if you can’t disengage completely, develop a buddy system.
“Number one you need to make arrangements with someone to be on top of things so they can bring stuff to your attention, either an assistant or a colleague who will open your mail and send you regular e-mails updating you. Then I will do the same for that person. You really can’t just walk away completely. I don’t think it’s possible.”
Vancouver lawyer Peter Edelmann recalls having to drop everything during an extended vacation in Pakistan.
“My client was about to be deported and we needed to file a stay application. I remember doing it over a very sketchy internet connection from Karachi.”
Now 41 and with a few years of practice under his belt, he says he wouldn’t put himself in that position again.
“With people being arrested or deported, if there are urgent matters to be dealt with, as a sole practitioner, it’s a question of having a network of people who could cover that kind of stuff.”
Edelmann now works in a small firm that solves the vacation problem by shutting the entire office down during predictable lulls in the legal calendar – a week in August and again in December between Christmas and New Year.
Another option is to hire a locum—a contract lawyer who will move into your office and handle your files while you’re away.
The Law Society of Upper Canada created a Contract Lawyer and Paralegal Registry in 2009 as a result of their Retention of Women in Private Practice study.
“We found that it was especially difficult for sole practitioners and lawyers in small firms to take parental or maternity leave for financial reasons, concern over losing their practice, etc.,” says LSUC equity advisor Josée Bouchard. “We thought it might be helpful if there were lawyers or paralegals available to provide services for brief periods of time. However the program applies more broadly. For example, if someone decides to take a sabbatical to study for six months, they can access our registry. Or if someone decides to go on vacation for four weeks and needs someone to maintain their files, they can retain someone on contract.”
Locums or contract lawyers and paralegals can be found through some provincial law society websites, referrals from colleagues, trade publications and other legal directories.
Still, the bottom line to taking a vacation is commitment, says Setzer. Commit to taking the time off, then, she jokes, “like everybody else, you work like a dog leading up to your holidays so that you think, why am I even going on holidays? This is going to kill me.”
Becky Rynor is a freelance journalist in Ottawa.