Unsolicted career advice for the student No. 6: Stress and the law, know your mind.

Quite some time ago I wrote a couple of posts that are basically directed at people pondering the law as a career; one being a Caveat Auctor thread and the other on getting a useful prelaw education.  I'm sure that absolutely nobody who is pondering law school reads this blog, as hardly anyone does, but I recalled those when I read the most recent issue of The Wyoming Lawyer.  Then I forgot about it until this week.

 

Enigmatic message on a marble bench on the Byron White Courthouse in Denver Colorado originally penned by Francis Quarles, who also stated "No Cross, No Crown". I've never been too sure what this message actually was intended to counsel, but Quarles did not seem to be an advocate of idleness.  I suppose its supposed to inspire a person to strive on, forsaking rest, but in a life that's not long anyhow, maybe it really should be read to counsel the opposite, as some entire cultures do.*

On Monday last, I had a telephonic hearing with a lawyer I've been working against in a case. A really nice guy, we'd gotten along well in the case, which certainly isn't always the situation with opposing counsel  Some lawyers can be real jerks, but this guy wasn't.  Just prior to the hearing he asked me for a continuance of the schedule.  He'd already asked the other defense counsel in the case the same thing, and he'd agreed to it.  I had my reservations, but I agreed to it too. They both wanted one, and while I didn't need one, there were things I could do with the extra time.  All went well, counsel were friendly, the court cooperative, and everyone parted, it seemed, in good spirits.

Then, that night, that lawyer went home and killed himself.  I didn't see it coming.  I wish I hadn't agreed to the extension. With trial right around the corner, I feel he would have hung on out of loyalty to the client.  Maybe the crisis would have passed.

Back to the magazine.  The Wyoming Lawyer is the monthly magazine that members of the Wyoming State Bar receive. It's nicely done and has pretty good production values, which is more than I can say for a lot of career journals. This month's is mostly about psychological well being.  Then the ABA Journal came out, and it had an article on the same thing, maybe more than one (I didn't keep the journal around long, as it didn't appear to be that interesting of an issue).

I'm not really going to comment on the psychological well being context, but it does raise an interesting point for those pondering entering the law, that being, are you up for it?

That may seem like a silly question, but apparently the statistics are alarming for lawyers.  The depression rate is really high, apparently twice that of the general public, and that manifests itself in all sort of terrible ways, from consuming gallons upon gallons of alcohol, to taking illegal drugs, to dicey behavior.  Indeed, I think I've known lawyers, over time, who fell into all of these vices.  Additionally, apparently, the suicide rate is high for lawyers, although the statistics vary on that.  Dentists may or may not have a high rate as well.  Lawyers come out something like second or third in that grim area.  I've known quite a few dentists, but I've never known one who harmed himself.  I can't say that about lawyers, however.  Definitely not now, sadly.  Indeed, after the tragic event mentioned above occurred, another lawyer told me about a fellow that we know of, who died quite awhile back, who also took his own life.  I didn't know him that well, and I don't think that this was widely known (or if it was, I didn't know it).  And it occurred to me that I know of at least one other instance, which in that case was apparently mixed with the resort to illegal drugs, which no doubt made the situation even worse.  And in further pondering I realized I know if yet another lawyer who fell into some sort of weird situation, in another state, and ended up in an armed standoff with the authorities.  Guess I hadn't really pondered any of this until now, but it occurs.

All of this, or at least most of it, seems to be due to people's inability to deal with stress, although in the recent example I mentioned, the lawyer had suffered a horrible psychological trauma as a young man, and my guess is that is what caused his grim frame of mind, not the law.  Various state bar organizations, including our state bar, have set up programs to deal with lawyers falling into the vices noted above, and attempt to help their members, but I wonder how much of this really can be proactively dealt with.

One reason that I doubt it is that lawyers like to repeat the propaganda that our adversarial system is the best in the world.  I think there's real reasons to doubt that, and the less adversarial systems of France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Switzerland, and so on, are at least as good as ours.  At any rate, a system which encourages adversarial conduct is going to be stressful in and of itself.  No doubt about it.  Beyond that, a legal education system that has flooded the market with young lawyers is also going to whack them upside the head with stress.  Most traditional legal education systems tended to weed a lot of people out, and the American system itself did at one time, but this is no longer so much the case. The schools produce the graduates and state bars are moving towards systems that let most of them in.

All that means you have a lot of people who may have entered for one reason or another but now find themselves fighting for work and fighting for a living. That sounds pretty stressful.  This would, however, seemingly be uniquely the case in litigation work, which is fighting.  I wouldn't think transactional work, for example, should be as stressful.

Having said that, one other added element of that, I suspect, is that at the end of the day, the law is about solving problems.  And that means people transfer their problems to the lawyer.  It's easy to think of lawyers as guys with expensive suits engaging in witty banter all day long, but in reality for almost every single lawyer the day is filled with attempting to solve other people's problems.  In litigation, of course, that means advancing a point that they desire, one way or another, which may be all the more stressful as the solution may not really be tailor made for their actual problem, whatever that is.

Recently I ran a series of letter snippets here between my grandmother and grandfather, on my mother's side, all of which related to either World War One or riding horses.  I didn't, by any means, put up all those letters.  But I know, from family stories and what not, how things were and went.  My grandmother, at the time she wrote those letters, was 26 years old and hoping to get married to my grandfather, who was struggling to get a start in business.  They did get married, but about five years later, when he'd returned home to Montreal.  I note that, as if you read the letters in their entirety, you can see that he was frequently ill in his 20s and obviously very stressed out. The family well knew that.  At the time those letters were written he'd already received a discharge from Canadian service due to ill health, which was mostly due to a very nervous disposition, and he'd struggle with that his entire life.  Indeed, he ultimately turned to drinking himself, until my grandmother told him to knock it off, and he did, simply quitting.

My point here is not to condemn him.  By all accounts, his children loved him greatly and the family was a very noted family.  But rather something that was noted at the time, and was noted later, is that he was an extremely intelligent man whose constitution just couldn't endure high stress.  He would probably have been better off as an academic or something. But, coming from a family of very high achievers, and being uniquely afflicted in this sense, nobody really understood that and he followed along the well trodden family path of business.  Ultimately, it did work out okay, but it was hard on him.

I wonder how many other people find themselves in situations like that.  From groups of high achievers, and uniquely oppressed by such a condition.  Now, there's all sorts of things that can be prescribed for such people, although I'm personally bothered by the degree to which Americans resort to pharmaceuticals for everything now days.  I wonder if a person should take something like this into account. 

Over the past year or so I've run across lawyers who were drinking too heavily, one who was engaged in an improper relationship with a female employee which resulted in the end of his marriage, one who seems to be on the constant edge of a nervous breakdown (assuming that's still regarded as a real condition), one who writes nasty letters but who won't answer his phone, one who quit law work, went into policing, and then had an improper relationship with another policeman while at work, and now one who killed himself.  I can't say that all of these are reactions to stress, but all but the last one are so common in this line of work, I wonder.

Some lines of work require psychological testing before entering them, I'm told.  Law enforcement now does, I guess.  I know that American submariners and missile crewmen do.  I kind of wonder if law schools ought to at least require some sort of testing to inform the student of if their makeup is suitable for the law, before they invest in their education.  But then law schools generally aren't very good about informing students about the practice of law in general, and have low interest in discouraging people from entering law school.

Be that as it may, a person whose prone to bad reactions to stress maybe ought to think twice about some aspects of the law, assuming that they know that they have that character trait, which I suspect few people do, until their really under stress.

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 Postscript

On this topic, because I think its significant, and because  I recently saw an example of how this is true that brings it to mind, I thought I'd amplify something that's mentioned above, but which wasn't expanded on much when I noted it.  That's the element of responsibility in the law.

I hear all the time, from people contemplating a legal career, that "they like to argue", as if that somehow qualified anyone to be anything.  Make no mistake, it isn't whether you like to argue or not that makes you qualified to be a lawyer, or makes the law an ideal career for you. If you truly like to argue, that may just make you a jerk.

The bigger question is whether you like to take on the responsibilities of others.

That's the key aspect of a legal career and legal personality.  Everything else is ancillary.

Most people don't, quite frankly, like to take on the hopes, dreams and burdens of others, and carry the full weight of them.  Some do, but most do not. But that's what an awful lot of lawyers do, and that's what all lawyers do to some extent.

That, for litigators, this is done in an adversarial setting doesn't change that.  A lawyer arguing in court his hoping to win something for somebody else, and that person is depending on them.

That's the key thing, I think, that causes stress in the law.  A lot of people who have entered the law because they were smart, analytical, etc., may not have realized that what they were signing up for was to be completely devoted to the causes and hopes of other people. And that can wear on a person.  It wears on some more than others.

And it's something that people don't understand at all.  For that reason, there's little relief from it at any stage.  Family, which should be the primary refuge from this, provides one of the main areas where it doesn't occur.  The lawyer, being a person who solves problems for others all day, is expected to keep on doing that at night.  Men and women who travel weary hours for others are asked to turn around and do it for those at home. All that is reasonable enough.

But that gets to some very much, and that's something that a person entering this field should be aware of.

The paradox of it is that if a person is motivated by a "desire to help others", in my view, this is also the wrong career. That suits a person for social work, or perhaps for the seminary, but not really for the law.  That's a greater type of calling, and this is a more narrow one. The work of the lawyer is more at the pick and shovel end of things, but none the less the work is often desperate and important, and a lot of weight if carried on that person's shoulders.  Just because a person liked to compete in high school or college debate doesn't mean that they want to take on the desperate causes of other people. That's something that at least all lawyers do a little, and some lawyers do a lot of, and that's something to consider.

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*On the other side of the building are the words "Alternate rest and labor long endure."