Wal-Mart to require outside law firms to have flextime policies – over-reaching?

The National Law Journal reports a new requirement from Wal-Mart’s legal group on its outside counsel. “Law firms must have flextime policies if they want to do legal work for Wal-Mart.” Associate general counsel Joseph West told an audience at the annual meeting of the Association of Corporate Counsel in Boston that his his company will add the flextime requirement to its current list of criteria used to evaluate [and I presume to select] outside law firms.

“We’ve found that even those firms that have flextime policies haven’t communicated to attorneys in the firm that it’s OK to use them without fear or shame,” West said.

Here, then, is yet another imposition by a well-meaning legal department on how its law firms should operate. I have written extensively here and in an article about the uses and abuses of interventions (See my post of Aug. 4, 2008: interventions with three posts and 40 references.). This one strikes me at the abusive end. What about nursing rooms, or carpool policies or recycle?