Are American Lawyers More Unhappy Than British?
Some interesting studies have shown that American lawyers are about as dissatisfied with their profession as any lawyers in any other part of the world. A whopping 40% of American lawyers would like to leave their profession. 25% of British lawyers want to end their legal careers.
What makes American lawyers so unhappy? I think the major factor is the hours. I know lawyers who are at work before 6am, and they might not come home until 7 or 8 at night, sometimes much later. Those hours are beyond long, they're downright vicious. After going through college, several years of law school, and the BAR exam, lawyers end up working hours just as long as their two-jobs-at-once, high school dropout counterpart.
Sure, lawyers tend to make a lot of money. The problem is that they have little time to spend it. Any basic economics class teaches us that there is a delicate balance between wage and free time. At some point, wages cannot be raised enough to cause someone to decrease free time and increase workload. Would you work for $1,000 an hour if you had to work 22 hours a day? Not if you had to do it every day.
Lawyers also face a lot of really boring work. They might spend 8 hours of their day pushing paper, working their way through our bureaucratic legal system. They are the small print writers, putting legalese to paper that no one will ever look at but needs to exist to "protect" their clients.
Perhaps something needs to be done to curb the dissatisfaction among those in the legal profession. Or maybe the world is better off with fewer lawyers. It would be nice if more young people pursued a medical profession, because I'm not getting any younger.
Law Blog - WSJ.com : British Lawyers are Unhappy, Too
What makes American lawyers so unhappy? I think the major factor is the hours. I know lawyers who are at work before 6am, and they might not come home until 7 or 8 at night, sometimes much later. Those hours are beyond long, they're downright vicious. After going through college, several years of law school, and the BAR exam, lawyers end up working hours just as long as their two-jobs-at-once, high school dropout counterpart.
Sure, lawyers tend to make a lot of money. The problem is that they have little time to spend it. Any basic economics class teaches us that there is a delicate balance between wage and free time. At some point, wages cannot be raised enough to cause someone to decrease free time and increase workload. Would you work for $1,000 an hour if you had to work 22 hours a day? Not if you had to do it every day.
Lawyers also face a lot of really boring work. They might spend 8 hours of their day pushing paper, working their way through our bureaucratic legal system. They are the small print writers, putting legalese to paper that no one will ever look at but needs to exist to "protect" their clients.
Perhaps something needs to be done to curb the dissatisfaction among those in the legal profession. Or maybe the world is better off with fewer lawyers. It would be nice if more young people pursued a medical profession, because I'm not getting any younger.
Law Blog - WSJ.com : British Lawyers are Unhappy, Too