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Work-life integration is our key to practising law intensively and consistently over a further horizon. We want the lawyers you deal with today at fsLAW to continue to be on your team in 10 years’ time.

Why integrate work and life? We want to do excellent work for our clients. We want to be super-responsive. We also want a team that can do this together for the long haul – which means our team must never feel they are sacrificing their life for work.

For us, work-life integration is a hunch that activities generally associated with ‘work’ and those generally associated with ‘life’ can better be structured so we can practise law intensively and have a fulfilling and full life.

We can have more than just balancing work and life or trading one for the other. We can steal time from other activities and put it back into work or life. Starting with a blank canvas with client needs as the only constant, we are stripping out old ways of doing things to give ourselves more time to nurture long term success.

At this time, work-life integration for our firm means a number of things:

• living closer to work – steal back time you would have spent commuting and be close enough to your family to take short breaks with them;
• going paperless – steal back time you would have had with the printer, scanner or searching or filing papers;
• having low overheads – place less pressure on yourself and your clients to pay the landlord or for other services;
• maintaining organised systems – spend less time on reminders and repetition;
• delegating appropriately – spend more time on things on which you can add value, and allow someone else to spend time on things on which they can add value.

• not all costs are monetary ones – thinking holistically about your costs naturally and logically leads to accounting for the full costs of what you’re doing in the long term;
• lawyers become exceptional with experience and experience only comes with time – exceptional lawyers are a long-term proposition and we need to ensure our lawyers stay with us in the long term;
• exceptional lawyers consistently deliver excellent legal solutions because they nurture their relationships, health and curiosity in areas outside the law.