The Lawyer reports that Ward Hadaway is encouraging staff in its property department to take 13 days unpaid leave during the summer in a bid to keep staffing costs down. And Legal Week reveals that Dundas & Wilson has asked its staff to consider taking 18 days of unpaid leave after the firm posted an 11.8% drop in revenues for the financial year. The list of firms introducing such cost cutting measures continues to grow…

Avoiding more redundancies is certainly a good thing and unpaid leave might even please some individuals. For anyone struggling to match their spending to their income each month, it will be a stressful choice to have to make. But for those with plenty of spare cash at hand, it could be an opportunity to restore the fabled work-life balance, temporarily anyway. As Mark Bennett an American criminal defence lawyer explains in, Work-Life Balance, Explained :

The lawyer who can strike a healthy balance between clients and family, between career and avocation, between work and life is going to be happier and more fulfilled than the lawyer whose personal life is in smoking rubble because of his monomaniacal fixation on being Lawyer.

Could be just what the doctor ordered then, and…

Here’s news for the slackeoisie: you did not invent this question. Lawyers running law firms have sought and found the point of diminishing return, at which the cost [of] you [having] more control over your lives is no longer justified by the benefit of your being more balanced lawyers. They will allow you work-life balance right up to that point, and no further.

Don’t like it? Unlike the other mules, you’re always free to leave the mill.

Or in the case of unpaid leave skip out temporarily until the mill is back up to capacity. Not convinced, click here for the full post.