Unhappy Lawyers : They’re Highly Trained and Highly Paid, So Why Do Many Feel So Low About Their Jobs?

For Ellen Whelan, it was a bitter disappointment. All through law school, she thought about how great it would be when she became a lawyer. Then, four years ago, she got her degree and found that as a young associate, all she did was work--six and seven days a week, to 11 every night, up at the crack of dawn.

“I didn’t even have time to see my parents,” she says, “much less anybody else.”

After two years, she found a new job and met a guy. “I said, ‘Oh, this is new. I might actually go out on a date for a change.’ ”

That was until she told her friend what she did for a living: “He said, ‘Oh great. You make tons of money, drive a BMW and (cheat) everybody.’ ”

Whelan was devastated and not just because she drove a Hyundai. “What kind of world is it,” she asks, “that you can’t tell people what you do because they come down on you?”

Welcome to the legal profession, 1988.

Working More, Enjoying It Less

More than ever before, many lawyers say they are working harder, getting richer and enjoying it less.

To most working people, their complaints may not evoke much sympathy.

But many lawyers wonder if perhaps their choice of career wasn’t a major mistake. The paperwork seems endless and meaningless. They labor to help big institutions, not needy individuals. Often, they say, their clients are ingrates. The legal system can be frustrating and unresponsive. The public views the legal profession with distaste. There is a widespread perception that criminals escape punishment. Lawsuits drag on interminably. And, as many people see it, it’s all the lawyers’ fault.

“I attended a conference last summer at USC with some high-level human relations people from some of the biggest companies in the country,” says Mike Driver, a professor of Management and Organization at USC’s business school. “And the one thing they were in agreement on was that . . . lawyers were the kind of people who caused more trouble than they were worth.”

Jack Weinberg, 55, a Los Angeles lawyer who gave up his practice after 22 years to publish a tourist guide to on-location movie sets, maintains that unhappiness among lawyers “is pervasive, endemic and out of control.”

Which is not to say that unhappiness is easy to document. For one thing, lawyers in surveys tend to give contradictory information: On the one hand, many of them report they have a great deal of satisfaction (which isn’t surprising when one considers that starting salaries of associates in big, elite firms has doubled over the last eight years); at the same time, however, a study reported in the February, 1984, American Bar Assn. journal showed that 41% of lawyers would enter another profession if they had it all to do over again.

There’s a reason for such contradictory attitudes, says David Chambers, a University of Michigan law school professor who has surveyed the profession for years: When lawyers get paid $60,000 a year to start, they are “embarrassed” to say they are “miserable, especially when you can look out the window and see people sleeping on gratings.”

There also are other less subtle indicators that lawyers are unhappy. The alcoholism rate among lawyers is an estimated 15%-20%, almost twice as high as the general population. In their first three years of practice, half of all lawyers change jobs, with some firms losing as many as a quarter of their members every year.

Career consultants and counselors report lawyers flocking to seminars and workshops on changing professions. Career dissatisfaction in the profession has become a regular topic of discussion at placement director meetings, says Lujuana Treadwell, placement director at Boalt Hall, the law school at UC Berkeley. At its recent Toronto convention, the ABA conducted a three-hour panel discussion for law firms on ways to cope with lawyer discontent.

It is clear that “many lawyers don’t seem to be getting much gratification from practice,” says Sheldon Krantz, dean of the University of San Diego School of Law who is on sabbatical interviewing unhappy lawyers for a book on problems with the profession.

For many lawyers, the problem is unrealistic expectations. After graduating from college with liberal arts degrees, many attended law school for lack of better ideas on what to do with their lives; on television, at least, the life of a lawyer seemed exciting to them.

Life Isn’t Television

“Unfortunately, my life is not television,” says Whelan, who left a large New York firm to join a less frenetic Los Angeles practice.

Clients often blame lawyers for taking too much time and running up their bills because they “don’t appreciate how complicated (the law is) and how difficult it is to get any results,” says Bob Schneider, who was a lawyer in Los Angeles for 10 years and now works in Phoenix. Even people who get free counsel frown on lawyers. Reuben Castillo, a Pomona legal services attorney, said it is not uncommon for clients to announce: “If I had the money, I’d get a real attorney.”

For graduates of prestigious law schools, it can also come as a shock to discover that much legal work is boring. New associates may spend their first six months in practice doing rote review of case documents, says John Siamas, a partner in the San Francisco firm of Jackson, Tufts, Cole & Black and general counsel to the National Assn. for Law Placement.

Young lawyers also learn quickly their work is often lonely. “It’s basically you and your desk and reams of paper,” says Schneider, the Phoenix lawyer. “You don’t even deal with people that much.”

The major complaint among associates, however, is overwork. In 1985, some major New York law firms found their young associates were bailing out in droves in their third year, just as they were starting to really earn their keep. In response--and in answer to increased competition from the financial community for major universities’ best and brightest--the firms offered enormous starting salaries (now reaching $76,000 annually at some New York firms) to people who, in some cases, never had held a job before.

(This, by the way, is not to suggest that all lawyers are getting rich. A 1986 survey by the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. showed that 64% of members made between $21,000 and $100,000; 5.5% made less than $21,000; 6% made more than $200,000 a year.)

60-80 Hour Weeks

While the big salaries at elite firms were gratifying to the young lawyers, they came with a catch: To earn the pay, they had to increase dramatically the number of hours they billed clients each year. As a result, it is now common for young associates at major firms to work 60-80 hours a week, Treadwell of Berkeley says.

That is an astonishing increase, says Martha Fay Africa, a legal headhunter in San Francisco. When she was placement director for the law school at UC Berkeley, firms typically required associates to bill 1,500 to 1,550 hours a year. After giving big salary increases, the firms now demand 1,850, 1,900 or 2,000 hours.

Further, this is often the bare minimum. A lawyer at a major firm who bills only 2,000 hours a year “has one foot out the door and the other on a banana peel,” says Carol Kanarek, chair of the ABA Career Issues Committee. For associates who hope to become a partner and share in the profits, the minimum billing time demanded now is closer to 2,200 hours. “And I see some people,” Kanarek says, “who are billing more than 3,000.”

Because billable hours generally are 15%-20% less than the total time lawyers work--they usually, for example, cannot charge clients for meetings and administrative tasks--their time on the job can stretch intolerably.

“My brother bills 60 to 70 hours a week,” Whelan says. “He goes home in order to sleep. He never leaves the office. I ask him what he does for pleasure. He says, ‘Nothing.’ You make money, but what is the point? You have no life.”

Hoping to avoid the most consuming firms, some prospective associates try to deduce their true situation from clues in job interviews: Do the attorneys wear their jackets at work? Do they keep their doors closed? Are the secretaries happy? Most frightening are firms with showers and dining facilities on the premises. When you see those, “you might as well not even rent an apartment” because you’ll never have time to use it, Whelan says.

Half-Pay, Decent Living

If firms wanted, she says, they could divide a lawyer’s work and give it to two people--even on half-pay, a person could make a decent living. But firms are so conservative, “they would rather kill one person than work two.”

Some lawyers, especially women with families who do not mind being out of a partner track, have opted to work part time, which is still 40-45 hours a week.

But for those associates who choose to spend the six or seven years to make partner, the pressure is intense. Partners are notorious for giving associates major projects late on Fridays or calling them up Sunday morning to come to work. Associates “realize that if they don’t comply with every sort of whim, that they won’t make partner,” Africa says.

As law firms are increasingly run like businesses, individual associates are increasingly viewed as profit centers--the more, the better. In big New York and Los Angeles firms, Africa says, it is common for the ratio of associates to partners to be 3-1 or even higher, in contrast to the 1-1 ratio of most other areas. Because of this, associates have less contact with partners, less training, less supervision and, most importantly, less chance to make partner. The result often is drug and alcohol abuse, divorce and health problems.

For lawyer Ed Rybka, it was overwork that affected his health; the strain of billing 2,100 hours a year gave him chest pains, insomnia and arthritis in his hands and joints. “I was grinding my teeth so bad at night, I was having toothaches,” he says. “I decided at the age of 30 that that was not the way I wanted to live the rest of my life.”

Long, Dehumanizing Hours

Most young lawyers know long before they get out of law school that they face long hours working in practice. What is less clear to them, however, “is how dehumanizing that can be,” says Siamas, the partner in a San Francisco firm.

Lawyers get so obsessed with their jobs that all they can talk about is their cases. Or they become so analytical, they start to examine casual conversation for hidden agendas. The result: Even lawyers sometimes don’t like lawyers anymore.

Soon after becoming an associate, Rybka says, he made an effort to avoid lawyers socially. They were too competitive, too cynical and too tired for anything but one-upsmanship. (“Oh what firm are you with? What law school did you go to?”)

It is unfair to call all lawyers “arrogant,” Rybka says, but a “pompous” streak does run through the profession.

Although Rybka got out--he now works at a small firm and is planning to set up his own company providing on-line data on law firms--many other young lawyers feel trapped.

Instead of moving to less-pressured environments with firms in smaller cities, Treadwell says, they get seduced by the big salaries and stay at a firm until it is too late. When, as often happens at larger firms, they get passed over for partner, they have no options.

Corporations, Not Individuals

Many lawyers get into the business thinking they can help people and benefit mankind. But they soon discover that much of what lawyers do benefits corporations, not individuals, says Dianne Sundby, a Los Angeles psychologist who sees many lawyers in her practice. In contrast to the ‘60s, lawyers also get far less time to help the needy by taking pro bono cases. Under the pressure to produce, Siamas says, “the easiest thing to go is the non-economic elements--public service and pro bono. “

If they try to move to the public service sector, lawyers soon find the jobs are often scarce and in many cases, poorly paid--as little as the low $20,000s or less, a third of what they would earn in big private firms. Besides, with the cost of three years of law school now approaching $60,000, many young lawyers may owe too much money on graduation to even consider public service. According to Jane Theiberger, director of career planning at New York University, the percentage of people who go into government service has dropped from 17.6% in 1975 to around 12% today.

It also is not clear that public service work is a great improvement over private practice. Reuben Castillo, 33, an attorney with the Legal Services Program in Pomona, works on debt and eviction cases. He gets little satisfaction because his client “usually does not have a good case. . . . We grovel and beg and hope judges will give us an extension. And that gets old pretty fast.”

In personal injury law, a difficult, frustrating process is made worse by the tactics of opposing counsel, says Joel Kleinberg, a Los Angeles lawyer who serves on the national board of the Trial Lawyers of America.

Lawyers disregard the plain meaning of English words with “nonsensical objections” to conjure up hypothetical problems. “You see less and less effort to solve anything,” Kleinberg says.

Lawyers also get distressed by dealing with greedy clients. In Los Angeles, the State Insurance Commission reports, the frequency at which people file auto-accident personal-injury claims is nearly twice that of the average of other major California cities. No matter how slight the impact, says Anne Koza, a Los Angeles personal injury lawyer, many people “jump out of their cars holding their necks.”

Although such clients are “morally repugnant” to many lawyers, says Stacey Betterman, 35, a lawyer with Jacoby & Meyers in Rosemead, “the bread and butter of a personal injury law practice are soft-body-tissue (no broken bones) claims by unemployed poor people.” Lawyers can’t afford to be choosy. Meantime, Betterman says, clients who are plaintiffs in personal injury cases one day are defendants in criminal cases the next: “It’s almost humorous at times.”

But it is hardly fun. The lawyer spends time filling out forms, arguing with insurance adjusters over the size of a settlement and fielding calls from clients asking, “Where’s my check?”

The result, Betterman says: Many lawyers get “disgusted with their own clients and perhaps on some level with themselves. . . .”

To escape what he saw as the cynicism of personal injury law, Betterman recently switched to family (divorce) law. That offered a small improvement but “the day to day experience of most (divorce) attorneys is one of grinding trivialities. There’s an incessant flow of petty client demands: ‘Who gets the toaster? She signed my name to the tax refund check.’

Adversarial Nature

“I think one would have to have a deranged sensibility to genuinely enjoy what the day-to-day practice of law is like,” because it “largely consists of arguing with other people about money,” Betterman says.

The adversarial nature of the profession also troubles many lawyers. In litigation, “you fight about everything,” says Schneider. “It’s like going to war. No matter what it is, you fight about it and it goes on forever.”

John Shean, a Los Angeles trial lawyer for eight years, observes that, “You can end up litigating for four years to go to trial for two weeks.”

While a trial usually is fun--it is an “ego trip” to tear up an opposition witness--”it’s not clear that it is useful to society,” Shean says.

Unlike engineers or craftsmen who get the satisfaction of producing something with their hands, lawyers spend 90% of their time filling out paper work that few people will read, let alone pay any attention to, Betterman says. In the process, they become what Driver, the USC business school professor, calls “paper warriors,” people whose lives are filled with a series of meaningless maneuvers. “And at some point, people stop and ask themselves why are they doing this? ‘What’s the point of it?,’ ” he says.

Betterman has considered leaving the law many times, he says, adding, “Then I ask myself, ‘What else can I do?’ I’ve been an attorney since the age of 25. I really don’t know any other occupation.”

Shean, formerly a trial lawyer with the downtown firm of Wise, Wiezorek, Timmons & Wise, decided to leave the law--no matter what: “I just became disenchanted with the way the people involved in the system were running it, from the Legislature to the judiciary to the attorneys. I lay a lot of blame on the attorneys.”

On June 30, Shean, who lost a son to liver disease three years ago, resigned his partnership to become president of the Children’s Organ Transplant Assn. in Bloomington, Ind.

“One of my law partners said, ‘I admire you for having the guts to do what the rest of us would like to do,’ ” he says. “But they can do it. A lot of people could do it.” All it takes is a willingness to accept a pay cut as his family did--from $130,000 a year to $30,000.

For him, Shean says, it became clear that there were things more important than personal wealth: “I saw that if I was going to be making money or saving money, I wanted to do it for children, not a big corporation or greedy insurance company or a greedy client.”

Besides, he says, it is not as if people wanting to sue someone will lack for attorneys to file the lawsuit: “There are plenty of people who will take my place.”