Go to the Soccer Game

You’re going to be tempted to skip your kid’s soccer game to finish a brief.

You’re going to be tempted to work late instead of getting home for dinner.

You might even be tempted to cancel a family trip and send everyone without you, because there’s a matter that feels like it can’t survive without you.

I’ve done all three. I wish I could tell you I figured out early in my career to prioritize my family first. I didn’t.

Here’s what I wish someone had told me when I was a young lawyer.

Don’t skip the soccer game!

Go to the soccer games. Get home for dinner. On the weekends, give your attention to your spouse and your kids.

Even if you have to finish something for work, it will be there at nine o’clock when everyone else is in bed. It is remarkably patient. My work has never once gotten tired of waiting on me.

The trade isn’t the one you think you’re making

In the moment it feels like a simple exchange. An hour of family time for an hour of progress on the brief.

That’s not the trade.

Sure, you can spend that hour working on the brief now. But you can also do it tonight, at five tomorrow morning, on a flight, or even tomorrow morning. The point is that absent a real deadline, the brief can wait. Nobody will ever ask you which hour of the day you wrote it.

Time with your family doesn’t work that way. A specific Saturday, at a specific kid’s event only happens once. If you don’t go when it happens, you can’t go later.

We’re all pretty good at valuing the things deadlines attached. We’re terrible at valuing the moments that slowly and quietly slip away day after day.

Five years from now

Every year the NALP Foundation for Law Career Research and Education publishes an update on associate attrition. In 2025, roughly one in five law firm associates left their firm. And of the associates who left, 83 percent were gone within five years of being hired — a record, and a number that has been climbing.

Sit with that for a second, because this is the place you’re missing that game for.

Firms change. Practices change. People leave and people get pushed. There is a good chance the firm you’re working so hard to impress isn’t the same firm you’ll be working at by the time your kids are in high school.

But your children will still be your children.

Your spouse — hopefully, if you have prioritized him or her — will still be your spouse.

I’m not saying the work doesn’t matter. I’ve built a career on caring a great deal about it, and the people we represent deserve our best effort every day. I’m saying at the end of the day - and at the end of a long career that seems too far off to even contemplate - your firm will forget that you missed your kid’s soccer game to work on a brief. Your wife and kids, though? They will remember whether you missed those games, or you showed up.

Given that reality, the decision about whether to work late or go to your kid’s soccer game should be an easy one, but it’s often not.

There are real exceptions

I’m not saying that you should never miss anything for work.

There are moments when a case genuinely demands it. A trial. A deadline that can’t move. A client in a crisis that won’t keep until Monday. Those exist, and when they come you’ll know, because you won’t have to talk yourself into it.

In reality, that should be the test.

If you’re considering whether you should miss the game — if you’re weighing it, justifying it, deciding — then it’s not one of those moments. The real times you have to miss a family event for work don’t require a rationalization; they are obvious.

What I’m talking about is the other kind. Missing the small things because you wanted to bill a bit more. Because you wanted the satisfaction of finishing before you went home. Because the brief felt urgent at four in the afternoon in a way it will not feel at all by Tuesday. Because you just wanted to “knock it out” before leaving the office today.

We work in a portable world

This is the part that should make it easier, and somehow doesn’t.

The brief follows you. The email follows you. The document is on your laptop, your iPad, and even your iPhone! You can do the work from the kitchen table after bedtime, from a hotel room, from the passenger seat, from the subway.

If you have to, go to the game, come home, have dinner, tuck your kids in — and then open the laptop.

The work travels. The game doesn’t.

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The work will always be waiting.

When your seven-year-old’s soccer game is over, it’s gone for good.