The Stress

It begins for those in our profession the moment you decide to attend law school. We stress about the LSAT, getting into the best school, beating 1L, getting onto law review, setting up a job, getting a clerkship, publishing our student notes and comments, passing the bar, and so on. Are lawyers just creatures of stress due to the overwhelming amount of type-A’s in our midst? Or, does the work in this field simply facilitate anxiety? Whatever the reason, excessive stress is problematic, and can lead to other mental and physical health issues, including depression. In fact, I recently observed a thread in an online forum where prospective bar exam takers were utilizing hypnosis to counter the extremely high level of anxiety they were experiencing in preparing for the bar exam--there has to be a better way.

To that end, Damien Carrick, of ABC Radio National (Australia), discussed this issue in depth on the April 6th edition of his radio program, the Law Report. In particular, he spoke with various attorneys and medical professionals who offer advice on various measures you might consider taking if you’re a lawyer suffering from high levels of stress.

This is an issue that I believe is not taken seriously enough by most legal professionals, so check out the transcript.

Meditation (Not Mediation) for Lawyers

Highly recommended from the California Bar Journal.

Informational Asymmetries, the Emperor's New Clothes and More Cries For Value

Early in 2009, we noted that the recession has exposed numerous deficiencies in the current legal education system. Accordingly, we argued for a systematic change in curriculum and focus. It appears that law students elsewhere are yearning for the same at their institutions. From The Daily Texan:

[C]riticisms [of the University of Texas Law School] are well-founded. In a survey of accredited law schools, Texas was the only school without a mandatory brief-writing course. In fact, only about half of first-year students surveyed reported being able to get into a brief-writing course. As a result, they will not be trained how to present arguments to a court — one of the most basic legal skills.

Instead of rectifying the problem by meeting national practical skills standards, UT Law instead chooses to steer law students away from taking practical courses by offering grossly grade-inflated first-year electives on such totally impractical topics as Race and Gender in the Constitution.

The first-year curve in all courses is set at 3.3; the average in these “electives” is a 3.8. A student in Race and Gender in the Constitution commented, “The class is a complete joke and a waste of time, but the professor gives almost everyone A’s.” Since law students’ employment is determined by their first-year GPA, creating such an exception to the curve is unfair to other students and misleading to employers relying on the veracity of student transcripts. . . .

So law students can game the system and come out Order of the Coif, while not knowing a single thing about the basic exceptions to the hearsay rule? I can vouch for the fact that this is an absolutely accurate characterization of the system as it is constituted both at my institution, and as the authors noted, at others.

But more pertinently, law school seems (oddly enough) to present a sort of transparent information asymmetry cogently illustrated by the student in this article: in many respects, law schools fail to meet the demands and expectations students have upon entering and that employers have when hiring. Yet, it seems like we all know a little bit of what we are getting at the outset; the sales pitch is just all too compelling. In this sense, law school is more like an experience good that shouldn't demand any sort of warranty. But the problems are still exceedingly pervasive. As the authors noted with respect to their institution:

[There is a] deeper problem at UT Law that has drawn criticism from all corners of the legal industry: Lax institutional standards have marginalized the law school’s role in society of preparing its students to be competent, ethical lawyers.

I hate to say it, but this problem is not confined to UT Law. We need major reforms soon, because permitting students to become engulfed in massive amounts of debt with little to no guidance on how to be competent lawyers will (inevitably, I think) continue to dilute the profession's quality, and worse yet, harm students' lives. Law students ought to be more vocal in their cries for change like the authors in the noted article.

Why Are Lawyers So Unhappy?

A friend of mine just referred me to a book titled "Authentic Happiness" by Martin E.P. Seligman, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. The author devotes a section to discussing the three main causes of the demoralization among lawyers, which he identifies as pessimism, low decision latitude in high stress situations, and the adversarial nature of the profession.

A Troubling Statistic

Law.com posted an article discussing a very disconcerting--yet perhaps, unsurprising--statistic released by Gallup: roughly 25% of Americans currently have a favorable or "positive" view of the legal profession. This finding is particularly troubling given that, as the article notes, "the banking industry--linked to the current foreclosure crisis and our widespread economic woes--ranked higher than lawyers with . . . 28 percent holding a positive image." Unfortunately, common misconceptions seem to drown out any good that lawyers add to the world.

I guess this begs the question of what good fixating on prestige is if the rest of the country does not fixate with you...