Now The Lawyers are Upset

The Brits are just waking up to the idea that lawyers are miserable.  Apparently 25 percent of them want to leave the profession, according to Sathnam Sanghera.  But of course this is nothing compared to lawyer misery in the United States.  Here, 40 percent of lawyers want to leave the profession.  In fact, lawyer misery has become an industry. 

[T]here are now almost more books, articles and websites dedicated to the subject of legal despair than there are American lawyers. Which is saying something, given that the USA has more lawyers than people.

Ho, ho.  Those Brits must have their little joke.  But why are the lawyers so miserable?  Sanghera lists the reasons.

1. The long hours.
2. The misery of someone so intelligent doing such mind-numbing work.
3. The “yawning gap” between the ideal of law and the reality.
4. The toll of being “competitive, aggressive, judgmental, analytical, adversarial, emotionally detached, paranoid of being sued and, worst of all, pessimistic.”
5. “The vortex of hatred.”  Apparently lawyers hate each other, hate their clients and the clients hate them right back.
6. The self-inflicted misery.  After all, you don’t have to destroy yourself, but in the competitive world of high-stakes lawyering, people do it all the time.

Hold on a minute.  What is so different about lawyers?  Doesn’t everyone suffer in a high-stakes career where you are dealing with ruthless competitors all the time and confronted by the fact that all work, even the most creative, is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration?

Maybe it’s just that lawyers are pushy enough to demand attention.  They demand that we witness their misery.  Other people manage to live their lives of quiet desperation without calling attention to themselves.

But lawyers are different.