ABOUT OUR FOUNDER

Patrick Cliett, Photographer

Deborah Epstein Henry is the Founder and President of Flex-Time Lawyers LLC, a national consulting firm advising law firms, corporations and lawyers on work/life balance and the retention and promotion of women attorneys.

With a mailing list of thousands of lawyers and legal employer representatives, Debbie has facilitated over 100 Flex-Time Lawyers LLC chapter meetings in New York and Philadelphia, providing attendees with career guidance, support, education, networking opportunities and information to effect change.

Debbie is trained as a commercial litigator but the principal focus of her time today is as a consultant. She focuses on the issues of work/life balance and attorney retention, with a particular emphasis on retaining and promoting women lawyers. She has extensive experience in the following areas:

• Consulting to law firms, corporations and thousands of individual lawyers on flexible and reduced schedules, work/life balance, business development, women's initiatives, re-entry and women's issues generally.
• Speaking in public forums around the country, including law firms, law schools, conferences and events.
• Running a chapter organization and facilitating over 100 chapter meetings on work/life balance and women's issues in New York and Philadelphia since 1999.
• Providing recruiting services to employers who are seeking lawyers working flexible and reduced schedules and lawyers seeking such placements.
• Serving as an ongoing resource, writing articles and fielding inquiries from the press, lawyers and legal employers about how to live a more balanced life and thrive as a professional.

Debbie and Flex-Time Lawyers LLC have garnered press coverage from NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The National Law Journal, The American Lawyer, New York Law Journal, The Washington Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, Philadelphia Business Journal, National Public Radio, XM Satellite Radio, The Legal Intelligencer, Working Mother, Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, Los Angeles Daily Journal, The National Jurist, Diversity & the Bar, The Philadelphia Lawyer, The San Francisco Recorder, The Pennsylvania Lawyer, Daily Report, Connecticut Law Tribune, New York Law Journal Magazine, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, The Bencher, The Scarsdale Inquirer, New York City Bar Forty-Fourth Street Notes, Workforce Management, The Southampton Press, The Woman Advocate, Big Apple Parent, Philadelphia Bar Reporter, Business First of Columbus, Lawyers USA, San Diego Lawyers Club Newsletter, MBA Lawyers Journal, Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, Worcester Business Journal, The Plain Dealer, One-on-One with Steve Adubato, WPRO Providence radio, WBZ's Laurie Kirby Boston radio, The Wall Street Journal Juggle, ABA Journal e-Report, ABAJournal.com, Above the Law, AmericanLawyer.com, Law360, The Legal Intelligencer Blog, Law.com, and, Massachusetts Bar Association Lawyers E-Journal.

In September 2006, Flex-Time Lawyers LLC and the New York City Bar Committee on Women in the Profession released "The Cheat Sheet," the ultimate guide to selecting, creating and ensuring a woman-friendly employer. Debbie was the principal author of "The Cheat Sheet" and developed the concept to empower women law students and enable them to become another competitive pressure point to effect change and improve the status of women in the legal profession. “The Cheat Sheet” is also a resource for lawyers, law schools, law firms and other legal employers seeking to assure women’s retention and advancement.

Flex-Time Lawyers LLC has also teamed up with Working Mother magazine to conduct an annual national survey to list the Best Law Firms for Women and release statistics and trends on work/life and women's issues in law firms. All firms that participate in the annual survey receive a scorecard that provides a snapshot of how they stand on work/life and women's issues. Firms can also purchase a more extensive benchmarking report, providing them with an invaluable tool to improve the status of women in the future. For more information about the Best Law Firms for Women initiative, click here .

Additionally, Debbie released in late 2007 a new work/life methodology she developed called FACTS that has received national recognition through The New York Times. FACTS stands for Fixed, Annualized, Core, Targeted and Shared Hours and it enables lawyers to meet firms' economic demands and the ever-changing demands of the market while also satisfying lawyers' work/life balance needs within the billable hour.

In January 2009, Debbie released with three other partners an initiative called Balanomics™ whose mission is to improve work/life balance, profitability, and productivity in the profession by enhancing the retention, promotion, and professional satisfaction of talented attorneys. The goal is to achieve this by encouraging a work/life culture that emphasizes work quality, flexibility, responsiveness, and accessibility rather than face time. The objective of Balanomics™ is to highlight the historic silence that has existed about work/life balance in the context of diversity and demonstrate that the two need to be part of the same conversation to further gender and racial diversity. Balanomics™ will also focus on the economic and marketplace influences. The Balanomics™ premise is that loss of talent is closely tied to work/life conflict and whether loss of talent is due to attrition in good times or layoffs in bad times, the lack of continuity in client service has a negative economic impact on both providers and consumers of legal services. This negative economic impact results from disruption of client relationships, increase in training and replacement costs, erosion of institutional knowledge, loss of investment, delayed resolution of legal matters, decline in productivity, low morale, and alienation of future legal talent. For more information, please visit www.balanomics.net.

Debbie is a Senior Fellow and Legal Industry Advisor to the "Hidden Brain Drain" Task Force for the Center for Work-Life Policy. She is a Liaison to the American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession. Debbie is also a consultant to the New York State Bar Association Committee for Lawyers in Transition. She sits on the Honorary Advisory Board of Pace University School of Law’s New Directions program for attorneys seeking to re-enter the legal profession and the Editorial Advisory Board for Law360. She is the former work/life columnist for Diversity & the Bar (the publication of the Minority Corporate Counsel Association) and a former Consultant to the New York State Bar Association Special Committee on Balanced Lives in the Law and the National Association of Women Lawyers Ready to On-Ramp Committee. She was named a 2007 "40 Under 40" by the Philadelphia Business Journal and a 2004 "Pennsylvania Lawyer on the Fast Track" by American Lawyer Media. Debbie received her B.A. in Psychology from Yale University and her J.D. cum laude from Brooklyn Law School. Following law school, she clerked for the Honorable Jacob Mishler in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Debbie is married and the mother of three boys, ages 13, 11 and 8.