Slaughter specifically highlights the legal industry, built on the foundation of the billable hour, and discusses the unique challenges that this model presents for a law firm associate seeking to establish a work/life balance with which he or she is satisfied.

Clearly, it's far easier for a senior executive (male or female) to simply announce that a meeting is being cancelled or rescheduled because he or she has chosen to attend to a personal obligation instead, especially because in many of the aforementioned instances, the executive rescheduling the meeting was the one who arranged it in the first place. However, the senior leadership team's frank, unapologetic approach to these work/life conflicts had symbolic significance for the rest of us who lacked similar control over the scheduling of professional obligations. Their openness on the issue was the key which opened the door for other, more junior, employees to be similarly direct (and feel less guilty, at least in my case) when they had to leave the office a little early, or work from home for a morning, in order to attend to a personal matter. The "face time" norm began to fade when it became apparent that the highest ranks of the company's leadership team rewarded and valued high-quality work-product, not the number of times per week their analysts worked late enough to order dinner to the office or take a town car home on the company's tab.