By Carlos Vera

Balancing the professional and personal life could be a difficult goal in the modern life. In some professions this could result almost impossible. One of the most demanding and time consuming professions is the law. In a first place, why law is so demanding?

There is a lot of factors and reasons for that but we can summarize the followings as the possible reasons why lawyers and legal professionals spend so many hours per week working:

• Financial pressure, debts!!! After law school, a lot of recent graduates keep a lot of debts on their shoulders, so, they need to work and make a lot of money, what is equal to more hours at the office and more cases to take.
• Competitiveness. If you are a recent graduate you want to be the best on your work, or if you have more years in the legal profession you want to show to the new ones that you know more than them and invest more time to be the best.
• Client pressure, the clients could be dictators of their time, and law professionals can find clients that can result in a real headache.

Now  we know some of  the reasons, but, what could be possible solutions? Here we have some:

1. Law firms can have some flexibility about the working hours, so maybe you can slip away for a couple of hours and share with your family an important event and come back later.
2. Negotiate parental leaving with your boss, you can choose (if you work in a law firm or an office) to work from your home, by digital media, so you can take care of your baby and your home and work at the same time.
3. Consider what is better for you in any time of your life, maybe at the beginning of your career you are single and you do not care about spending a lot of hours working, but at some point you want the time to build your family, so you can consider work by your own, work in a large or small law firm, or maybe work for the government, which tends to be more flexible with work hours.
4.  Do not put so much pressure over yourself, if you are trying to be the best mom or dad, the best lawyer at your firm, or take a lot of clients, earn a lot of money, go to the gym and have the perfect body , and be the best friend, the result it is going to be frustration! So, avoid to be the “perfect one” in all the activities of your life.

There is not a magic formula to balance your personal life and your profession, but, in any case, depends of you in try to find what is better for your life and what makes you feel happy and satisfied. We have to say, that nowadays women in law profession feel more pressure to be successful and good mothers, the “superwoman”, so women in law profession maybe need to be more relaxed and do not try to the better than men, just do the best you can and do try to be the best and better than your male co-workers.