Does it strike you that there’s a lot of talk in the air lately about “happiness” in our profession? Just a few pointers recently:
- The American Lawyer writing last month about law schools “trying to close the gap between their students’ idealized vision of what a lawyer’s life is like and the reality,” citing a new course at Duke Law School called Well-Being and the Practice of Law.
- Vivia Chen, a/k/a “The Careerist” on the law.com site, writing two closely related columns:
- The first deeply skeptical of the case for work/life balance, which opens “Why do I feel that the discourse about work/life balance is taking on the tempo of pep rallies and religious revivals?”
- And the second responding to the inevitable torrent of criticism from the Political Correctness police criticizing the first.
- And the peripatetic Above the Law had a piece a few weeks ago that opened: “There’s one thing every lawyer, no matter how miserable, seems to agree on: law school wasn’t that bad. In fact, it was kind of fun. Things take a nosedive when you get to a firm. That’s when you start hating life. “
Let’s talk about the Duke course first. What are its aims?
“We don’t come in here and do jumping jacks and yoga for three hours,” says Daniel Bowling, a senior lecturing fellow at the law school who developed and teaches the course. “This is a serious class. We’re trying to describe more than prescribe.” He says the approach and substance of the course is rooted in science — primarily the growing body of research on positive psychology. While it may not be contracts law, Bowling insists that a comprehensive consideration of the role that well-being plays in the legal profession is a legitimate subject of academic inquiry. “This is not a form of self-help . . . or an experiment.”
As regular readers will know, I’m a big fan of data, and while the studies of “happiness” in our profession are limited, dated, and tangential, here’s what we have:
While some studies have shown that most lawyers are satisfied with their jobs, other data — produced over the years by the American Bar Association, local bar groups, law schools, medical schools, even the National Institutes of Health — suggests that lawyers are more prone to depression, substance abuse, and suicide. A 1991 Johns Hopkins University study, for example, interviewed 12,000 workers about depression. Lawyers topped the list of the most depressed professionals, with a rate of depression 3.6 times higher than workers generally. A 1995 study of alcohol-related and other disorders among lawyers found that 70 percent of practicing attorneys were likely to develop alcohol-related problems over the course of their lifetime. Studies have also shown that, as a group, lawyers are a pessimistic lot. Exactly what that means is unclear. Though pessimism generally has been found to hold people back in both professional and personal pursuits, a study by Seligman of the University of Virginia Law School class of 1990 suggested that pessimistic students fared better in school than optimists did.
So the research on lawyers and happiness, beyond being dated, offers a mixed message. It’s fair to say, though, that there is anxiety within the profession — and the recent state of the economy hasn’t helped.
A more current and hard-headed perspective comes from Steven Harper, a relatively new voice on the scene and a retired Kirkland & Ellis litigator, who has begun writing at The Belly of the Beast, and whose columns are fairly regularly picked up on law.com. (I don’t know Steven, but I wish I did; his stuff is good.)
Harper believes there is a high degree of dissatisfaction in the law. The findings of a study published in 2007 by the ABA suggests that he may be right. More than half of lawyers working in large firms aren’t satisfied with their careers, the study found, and 44 percent of the 800 respondents — lawyers in private practices of all sizes, as well as in-house counsel and public sector attorneys — would not recommend a career in the law to young people.
“The law has always been the last bastion of the dissatisfied liberal intellectual,” he says. “And the problem with that is twofold. First, you form these expectations after reading To Kill A Mockingbird and watching Law & Order and saying, ‘Gee this looks like a lot of fun.’ And then you realize it’s not quite that way.” Students, he says, need more information than they’re currently getting about what the practice of law entails — and the different paths they can follow within the profession — in order to make the best possible decisions. “Information is power,” Harper says, adding that the best time for a person to get that information is while he or she is still a student. “Anyone who sits around waiting for big law firms to adopt different models will be waiting for a long time,” he says.
Above the Law articulates another psychological insight into how we experience law school quite differently from law firm life (emphasis mine):
First – in law school when you work hard, you get a reward. There is an “incentive” for “doing your best.”
I remember a guy in my class at NYU who used to grow an exam beard every semester. He’d stop shaving a couple of weeks before exams. The beard would start to get scraggly – then, after the last bluebook was filled with scribble, he’d shave it off and everyone would hit a bar to celebrate.
It was silly, light-hearted fun, designed to focus attention on completing a goal.
Contrast that to a law firm, where nothing is silly, light-hearted or fun – and there is no such thing as completing a goal.
At a firm, you don’t “complete goals.” […] You work until midnight, then go in on the weekend. Rinse. Repeat. There is no end of semester. There is no end of the week. There is no end of anything. There is no vacation. There is no end.
David Van Zandt, dean of Northwestern’s School of Law (leaving at the end of the year to become president of the New School here in New York, and someone I count a friend), attributes part of the problem to students who go to law school on this premise: “People who are very smart, who did well in high school and then in college, believe that they will do well at a good law school. That’s an unthinking way to go through school and your career.” I agree.
Meanwhile, Vivia Chen writes that the “business case” for work/life balance hasn’t been made, and that “there’s a subtle pressure not to ask too many thorny questions or challenge the sacred cows that drive the work/life balance discussion.”
This brought down on her head the predictable opprobrium from the PC precincts–but, to be fair, from many other commenters as well–the more productive and thoughtful of which focused on the pressure to avoid criticism of the work/life balance cause for fear of its being seen as “cat-fighting,” which would be a huge distraction to “our common cause.”
But I think the most poignant, and trenchant, insight (reflecting a view I’ve subscribed to for years) was achingly described by this anonymous contributor:
“My work is deadly and dead-end,” says a part-time lawyer at a big firm that’s made the coveted “best” place list [Working Mother magazine’s best places for women] several times. “I have flexibility, which is good for my quality of life, but I have no career.” The work is so “dreadful,” she adds, that she’s thinking of quitting big law altogether to work full-time with a nonprofit.
“As long as we have part-time positions that some sucker will take, there’s no need to look at the discrimination women really face,” says a senior lawyer …. “It’s a camouflage.” Highly competent women, she adds, regularly get passed over for promotions: “Flex-time doesn’t do much for those of us who are trying to get ahead.”
Now we’re getting somewhere.
In one of the most commented-upon articles of a year ago last summer, the WSJ reported:
Former General Electric Co. Chief Executive Jack Welch has some blunt words for women climbing the corporate ladder: you may have to choose between taking time off to raise children and reaching the corner office.
“There’s no such thing as work-life balance,” Mr. Welch told the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference in New Orleans on June 28. “There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.”
Mr. Welch said those who take time off for family could be passed over for promotions if “you’re not there in the clutch.”
I don’t think Mr. Welch was saying women (or well-rounded men) cannot move up; he was saying those who commit themselves wholeheartedly to their careers will experience different and greater opportunities, and ultimately advance to higher levels, than those who don’t. What is in the least surprising or unfair about this?
“We’d love to have more women moving up faster,” Mr. Welch said. “But they’ve got to make the tough choices and know the consequences of each one.”
Taking time off for family “can offer a nice life,” Mr. Welch said, “but the chances of going to the top on that path” are smaller. “That doesn’t mean you can’t have a nice career,” he added.
The entire debate, I submit, about “happiness” and work/life balance, is misplaced. I say this from hard-won personal experience.
Happiness in one’s career has nothing to do with hours, which is a pitiably uni-dimensional way to characterize or think about it.
“Happiness” for a human being, like “profitability” for a firm, is not something you can control directly. (We could repeal Chapter 11 if it were.) Rather, it’s the result of so many other things that the person or the firm does. Happiness (profitability), in my book, are outcomes of what the individual or the firm are doing in all other aspects of their lives and business.
I have found it fairly simple to state, if terribly difficult to achieve for many of us:
If you’re passionate about what you do, happiness will result (at least, that is, vis-a-vis work). If you’re not passionate, not.
If the firm collaborates, has no internecine warfare, and knows what it’s all about, and is dedicated to client service above all, profitability will result. And if not,…
In other words, it’s not that you’re a lawyer that makes you unhappy and it’s not that you’re a law firm that makes you unprofitable. You are in the wrong line of work or the wrong business. That’s what needs to be fixed: Not dialing up the “happiness” or “profitability” volume on the control panel. No such knobs.
So what is all the sturm und drang over lawyers’ happiness about?
I’m sorry to say I think it’s just the PC police indulging the fantasy that wishing for a world would make it so, all the while exercising their inalienable right to be tone-deaf to human nature.
Update 13 Nov:
A regular reader writes:
In the mid-80s when I was in law school and trying to decide
whether to practice, I asked many lawyers “Do you like what you
do?” I was struck my how many did not answer the question;
instead, they treated it as “have you worked on interesting matters”
or “do you like your colleagues” or “do have nice perks at this
firm”.
That, to me, was very telling. I realized what was
happening in real time but it’s not very nice or polite to call someone on a
closely held but potentially false belief (that they are happy in their job).
As a summer associate, my office mate actually had to pull
some consecutive near all-nighters. After it was over and he had slept, I
asked “Did you like what you did on that matter?” He excitedly
told me how this was the first deal of its kind… yada yada yada. I
looked him in the eye and said “that’s not the question I asked” and
his face just fell with the recognition that it had, in fact, not been fun for
him.
I take this as a comment not so much on whether what we do is “fun” but whether we have the self-awareness to understand how we really relate to our jobs. Different views, dear readers?
Update 17 Nov:
Another loyal reader writes:
I understand your regular reader’s point
above. However, we should not mistake fun tasks for fun work or fun
jobs.
Satisfaction in my work (the “fun”)
comes from knowing that it was high quality and of significance to my clients
(and maybe precedential in some way). There are many tasks that go into
completing a transaction that would not, if disaggregated, be fun.
Changing a diaper isn’t a fun task,
either. I don’t think, as I throw a dirty one in the trash, “I had
fun doing that for its own sake.” I have fun changing diapers
because I have fun being a parent and raising cute little babies (if not
teenagers).
Washing dishes isn’t a fun task. I
don’t seek dirty ones to clean when I visit friends’ kitchens. Cooking
and eating and sharing good food is great fun, though, and part of the
experience is maintaining my cooking and serving equipment.
Legal careers, by necessity, frontload some
of the less glamorous tasks, but if you stick around long enough not only is
the job satisfying, it is fun.
This brought to me one of those rare “aha” moments.
Why? I hate to sound a spoilsport, but “fun” is vastly overrated in our culture. Indeed, I’d venture to say the primacy of “fun” as a desideratum is the primary culprit in the deploring descent into inanity of what passes for news in much of the MainStream Media (television being the most prominent offender, but with plenty of online company).
What do I mean?
I mean that things that are worth doing in life tend to be hard: Even more, they tend to be things that we’re not at all sure we can accomplish. By contrast, one presumes one can “accomplish” a theme-park ride, a rock concert, a trip to Italy, or a great bottle of wine. “Accomplishment” just doesn’t figure in the equation.
In March 1942, with the US newly embroiled in World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a (radio) fireside chat which has come to be known as the “Map Talk.” He asked US citizens to get out their atlases of the world beforehand, in order to be prepared to follow along with him as he described and specified the territories at risk, key strategic supply routes, where the Axis had leverage and where the Allies sought it, etc.
Can you imagine such a speech from an American President today? Asking the public to pull up their socks, get out their reference materials (or even go to maps.google.com), and follow along in an intellectual tutorial involving genuine thought and analysis? No, the entire idea is laughable.
No fun, that Map Talk, no, no fun at all. Thank God we are no longer at risk of being subject to such un-fun activities.
