The Destruction of Young Lawyers: Beyond One L

1. Unhappy Young Lawyers

chapter one: Unhappy Young Lawyers L awyers are pathologically unhappy. The problem reached public consciousness about fifteen years ago with initial warnings that lawyers were experiencing mental health problems and “running from the law.”1 In 1991, the American Bar Association acknowledged that the legal profession was at the “breaking point” due to an “emerging crisis in the quality of lawyers’ health and lives.”2 By 1995, the chair of the ABA’s Committee on Professionalism admitted that lawyers were leaving the profession because it had become “a nasty business” and was “no longer fun.”3 By the mid-1990s, the Wall Street Journal was consulting psychoanalysts to figure out why lawyers had become “depressed, anxious, bored insomniacs,”4 and newspapers on both coasts were reporting that lawyers were “miserable with the legal life.”5 Books with ominous titles such as The Betrayed Profession, Law versus Life, and The Lost Lawyer started to appear.6 Even Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the United States Supreme Court proclaimed that lawyers were becoming “a profoundly unhappy lot,” and that they were “dissatisfied with their professional lives.”7 When she attended the thirtieth anniversary of her Stanford law school class, she was shocked that the vast majority of alumni responded to a questionnaire by saying that they would not enter the profession if given another chance.8 And fellow Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer noted that “lawyers increasingly describe their profession in negative terms” and have a “negative contemporary image” as hostile, narrow, and detached.9 These gloomy assessments come from the mainstream of the legal profession , not from an underground band of disgruntled outcasts. And the bad news is buttressed by a mountain of empirical data. It is now well established that public perception of lawyers is at an all-time low;10 lawyers are reporting record levels of dissatisfaction, substance abuse, and mental illness;11 onethird of attorneys appear to be clinically depressed, alcoholic, or addicted to drugs;12 and attorneys are reporting anxiety levels at least double (and perhaps up to five times greater than) those of the general population.13 For the first time in recent memory, a cottage industry has sprung up to help lawyers find ways to leave the profession,14 and indeed a recent survey by the New York Law Journal found that 40 percent of young associates at large firms plan to leave the profession.15 All of the available evidence—anecdotal and statistical—points to the inescapable conclusion that the legal profession makes young people unhappy, anxious, depressed, and desperate. The problem is particularly acute for young lawyers, who shoulder most of the misery within the profession. Unlike their older counterparts, young lawyers cannot reminisce about the good old days when lawyers were “civil” and “professional.” In fact, young lawyers are morosely unhappy and pessimistic , often buried under a mountain of debt, and scraping to get jobs that offer very little long-term security yet require immense personal sacrifice. No matter how much complaining we hear from older lawyers, there is no question that younger lawyers have it worse. Law is no longer a safe profession, either economically or psychologically , and the trouble starts very early, in the first days of law school. As we will see, most lawyers hate law school with a passion, for good reason, but they pay dearly for the experience. Law student debt now averages $80,000 per student, the bulk of which consists of law school tuition, which has quadrupled in the last two decades.16 It is true that starting salaries for graduates of elite law schools can go up to $150,000, but the sad truth is that the median income of a law school graduate is presently below $60,000 and the path upward is slow and winding.17 That salary does not go very far in Chicago or Los Angeles (let alone in cities where housing costs are exorbitant , like New York or San Francisco), especially when carrying a massive debt load.18 When a recent graduate of Stanford Law School turned to prostitution to repay some of her $300,000 debt, the dominant feeling among fellow students was not outrage but empathy.19 Although prior generations of young lawyers carried some debt, the amount is insignificant compared to the debt carried by recent law school graduates. And unlike recent graduates, prior generations could often bank on a decent-paying job...