Building on Joan’s personal reflection about her time in practice and stemming from a conversation with a student this week, I decided to post (and solicit comments) on the BigLaw practice areas that are most/least conducive to part-time work or work while raising children. While no practice areas in BigLaw are well known for being incredibly flexible, it did appear that certain practice areas were more flexible than others.

In my view, tax appeared to be the most flexible practice group area and M&A (my first practice group area) appeared to be the least flexible. Granted, I never practiced tax law, but as an M&A attorney you solicit comments from many areas within the firm and you get a sense of their schedules.

The advantages of the tax group were a high billing rate (some of the very highest in the firm) and a lot of piecemeal, often not urgent, work. Sure, we “urgently” needed tax comments on most of our deals, and when clients are paying BigLaw rates, they almost always want a prompt response. But in my limited experience, the tax lawyers controlled their timelines more so than any of the other attorneys I worked with. There were few enough excellent tax attorneys that if they said – I will get to that tomorrow or next week – you often did not have much recourse. Perhaps this was just my own perception or simply unique to my firms. That said, I have also seen tax lawyers pull off the “part-time” or "flexible schedule" role better and more often than other areas. Areas like Patent and ERISA may have similar attributes.

In M&A, however, flexible, part-time work was almost impossible to obtain. I’ve witnessed some M&A attorneys try to go part-time, and I have never seen it go very well or last very long. M&A attorneys are the quarterbacks of the deal, so even if you are only assigned to one deal – you have to be involved in all aspects of the deal and have to be on call 24/7 when that deal is moving quickly. And a deal often lasts for months. And there isn’t much piecemeal work that you can just pop in and do without staying intimately involved. After practicing in an M&A/Corporate group for a few years, I moved to a business litigation/corporate governance group. While the litigation/corporate governance group was not necessarily flexible, and you do have to be "all-in" if a case is heading to trial, there seemed to be a lot more room for flexible, part-time research and writing. In M&A there were some opportunities for these sorts of things, but many fewer of them and often they were simply nonbillable client alerts.

Again, maybe this is just my own perception, I’d love to hear thoughts in the comments or via e-mail from readers, as those thoughts could be helpful in advising students. Which practice group area or areas in a large firm offer the most flexibility?