One Lost Life and What That Tells Us About the Practice of Law in the early 21st Century.

I don't often lift an entire article, but I'm going to do so here as this one is so remarkable.  My commentary comes mostly at the end.

I've done the unusual thing of footnoting some things in this and commented on them, although I think that this stands to be rude an offensive, I don't mean for it to be.

Joanna Litt’s husband, Gabe MacConaill, a 42-year-old partner at Sidley Austin, committed suicide in the parking garage of the firm’s downtown Los Angeles office last month.  

My husband took his life—our life—on Sunday, Oct. 14, one month to the day before our 10-year wedding anniversary.* We had been planning a trip for over a year in anticipation of celebrating. 

I’m beyond lost and I don’t know how I’m going to get through the rest of my life. Gabe was my best friend, my partner, my lover, and my constant. I turned to him for everything, and he was always there with the most perfect advice and words. He was my world, and after losing him, I can absolutely say, my better half. Gabe and I did not have children (except for our dog Ivy) and we made that deliberate choice so we could focus solely on our life together, because we were happy.** And now he’s gone. He saw no other choice or path. 

I never thought in a million years that he could or would do that. And I keep going back to one thought: “Big Law” killed my husband. ***

We met on our first day of law school (he graduated third in our class). We had every class together and sat next to each other for two bars because of our last names. He was the smartest person I had ever met. He was also the kindest, most selfless person I’ve ever met. 

I know in my heart that overall, more than anything, we were happy. I would find myself during the day thinking how lucky I was to have him and our life. No one made me feel more special and loved— everything he did, he did for us. And that’s why I have this overwhelming need to tell our story, his story. I don’t want anyone else to experience the utter shock and pain I am in. 

Gabe and I worked hard at our marriage. Marriage isn’t easy and I would never pretend it was.**** Our most serious problem revolved around Gabe’s struggle with binge drinking. It wasn’t on a daily basis, but maybe three or four times a year there would be some event or function where he drank too much. I was hard on him for it—it made me so uncomfortable and mad and sad when he would cross that line. I didn’t have much compassion or realize his drinking was masking a deeper pain and I made him feel very guilty. As a result, he would stop drinking for a month or two and be OK for a while, but then there’d be a lapse. 

He saw someone professionally a few times, but that was it. In his way, he was working on it— and that meant a lot to me, so we stayed together. 

Then there were a series of ill-fated events at work. First, his mentor and confidant suddenly announced he was leaving the firm. This had a huge impact on Gabe personally. It also caused a big shake up at the firm, and another of his treasured partners left to take early retirement. 

Gabe, thrust suddenly into an important leadership role, was told in no uncertain terms that the firm was not going to hire any lateral support. Shortly thereafter, the last partner who was senior to Gabe decided to leave, and an associate whom Gabe spent a lot of time mentoring also left. The Los Angeles bankruptcy group Gabe had so deeply cherished and relied on for support had fallen apart. 

It was also during this time that Gabe was asked to chair the summer associate program. Sidley’s position in some rankings had fallen and Gabe poured his heart and soul into that program. I know there were many others that helped him, but he passionately assumed responsibility for all 13 candidates, wanting to make sure they had the professional summer experience of a lifetime and wouldn’t hesitate to accept an offer from the firm. The success of the program was overwhelming and he didn’t even tell me. I found out from someone after he died that the associate reviews were glowing. 

Finally, Gabe started working on the Mattress Firm case—a huge bankruptcy. It was a little over a month away from filing a Chapter 11 petition, and I had never seen him so stressed out and anxious. He was trying not to burden me with what was going on, but he wasn’t sleeping, I hadn’t seen him smile in weeks, and most everything he said was negative. 

He told me he had experienced stress during cases before, but it had never been this bad. I didn’t know what to do. I tried to be positive and encouraging and just make our home as pleasant a place to come home to as possible. 

The Sunday before leaving to file in Delaware, he spent all day at the office. When I finally called him that evening, it was clear he was in distress and had been working himself to exhaustion. He told me his body was failing him. I picked him up and we decided he should go to the emergency room. He actually said to me on the way there, “You know, if we go, this is the end of my career.” 

I’ve never felt so helpless in my life. I didn’t know whom to reach out to or to tell my husband was in crisis. I called his closest colleague and asked if she had noticed anything unusual with his behavior at work. She said he was working more with his door closed, and then she said something I’ll never forget: She said his sense of humor had been gone for a while. I asked her to keep an eye on him at work and then I just brought him home. I tried to make sure he slept and was rehydrating and eating so he could make the trip to Delaware. 

About a week later Mattress Firm publicly filed. I sent an article announcing the bankruptcy to my mom and a couple of close friends with the exact words, “This is the case that is killing my husband.” 

Gabe came home from Delaware late Tuesday evening. I was hoping the worst was over, but he wasn’t any better. I convinced him to skip a conference in Los Angeles that he was supposed to attend that Wednesday and Thursday and we stayed home together. I thought this would do him some good, but what I found out later was that he had stopped responding to work emails. And when he told me he was going into work that Friday, he instead spent the day at his biological father’s grave—a man he never met—a couple of hours away from our home. 

During this terrible spiral, I told him to quit. I told him we could sell our beautiful house and move to Mammoth, our happy place, and snowboard all winter and then figure it out. *****He said he couldn’t quit in the middle of a case. The irony is not lost on me that he found it easier to kill himself. I thought after this case was over, we’d find a path back to being happy. 

Suicide has now become my new world and I am desperately searching for answers. Because to those that knew him best, his family, friends and colleagues, this came without warning. Though it’s only the beginning stages of trying to figure out why this happened, I came across a concept, maladaptive perfectionism, that combines unrealistic standards of achievement with hypercriticism of failing to meet them. 

Gabe displayed most if not all of the characteristics. Simply put, he would rather die than live with the consequences of people thinking he was a failure. 

Looking back on the things Gabe confided in me, I now know I missed a lot of signs. He told me he felt like he was doing the work of three people—and I think that’s being generous. He told me the deal to resolve the bankruptcy kept changing. He also felt that while a senior partner in Chicago was heading the case, a lot of pressure fell directly on him. 

We spoke a handful of times about how he should just try to care less about the work, but knowing the kind of person my husband was, that was never going to happen. He said he felt like a phony who had everyone fooled about his abilities as a lawyer, and thought after this case was over, he was going to be fired—despite having won honors for his work. 

On the morning he killed himself, he said he got an email and had to go into work to put something together. I wanted to ask if I could go with him and just sit there, but instead, I simply offered to make him a sandwich for lunch. And without any hesitation, he said, “No baby, I’ll be fine—I won’t be long.” I’ll be haunted by those words forever. He gave me a few kisses, and tried to get Ivy to come cuddle me. 

And then he left, taking his gun with him, and shot himself in the head in the sterile, concrete parking structure of his high-rise office building. 

I feel like I lost my husband so quickly—within the course of a month—but I’m now starting to realize how hard he must have been on himself all the time. The constant striving to be perfect at work, to be the perfect husband, son, uncle, brother and friend. And then living with this deep unbearable shame that he wasn’t performing to the impossibly high standards he set for himself. He said a few times how he couldn’t turn off his head, but again, I didn’t understand the severity of that statement. 

Maladaptive perfectionists lack self-compassion. I should have held him just a little longer, loved him a little harder, and told him way more often how proud I was of him and how much I loved him—exactly as he was. I’ll make penance for this for the rest of my life and for just not seeing the depth of the sorrow and pain he was going through. 

Then came Sidley’s handling of Gabe’s suicide—“damage control” that included a last-minute invitation for me and my mom to attend a service at the firm. We went because I needed to see what kind of narrative they were creating. There were a handful of attorneys there, but in the immense receiving line of people who patiently waited to tell us about their unique story of Gabe, most were support staff. One told me that after working at the firm for years, Gabe was the only attorney to take the time to know her name. 

I heard story after story about Gabe’s encouraging nature and how he made people feel like they could succeed at anything they put their mind to. One close colleague said she wished “Gabe had his own Gabe.” 

Finally, packing up his office, I was handed a gift left by someone who just missed saying goodbye to him. He had decided to go to law school after numerous discussions with Gabe. The gift was a leather plaque; on it was inscribed, “It Can Be Done.” 

Gabe lived his life with integrity and treated those around him with sincerity, kindness, and a genuine sense of presence. Unfortunately, I know my husband died not knowing the impact he had on so many people. I believe he died feeling overworked, inferior and undervalued. And I know he died with a lot of shame. 

So as I write our story and think about it more and more, I know “Big Law” didn’t directly kill my husband—because he had a deep, hereditary mental health disorder and lacked essential coping mechanisms. But these influences, coupled with a high-pressure job and a culture where it’s shameful to ask for help, shameful to be vulnerable, and shameful not to be perfect, created a perfect storm. 

I don’t have any immediate solutions, but for the sake of retaining people like Gabe in these important professions, something needs to change. 

We need people like him walking this earth; they make it a better place. My husband was impeccable with his word, and actually cared so immensely about the job he did and how people viewed him. He wasn’t focused on the bottom line or lining his pockets with more money. He cared about his clients and the hundreds and thousands of people impacted by a corporation filing bankruptcy. Not to mention, he was really good at what he did. 

I was having a hard time getting older. I’m 41 and would think about how time was flying by. We weren’t as young or vibrant. I feel like I’ve answered the age-old question how do you make time slow down. You lose the love of your life. Now, there’s just so much time left, and infinite sadness. I’ll live the rest of my life trying to fill his shoes and help anyone from having to go through this horrendous, needless experience.

There's a lot to unpack in this very interesting post and I've put it up as it is interesting in part, both for what it assumes and what it doesn’t.  Keep in mind, additionally, that I don't know these folks and therefore anything I may be saying in connection with this story may not actually apply to them.

Now, let me also note, I have a long draft post on the topic of suicide in our modern era that’s been stewing for some time in a nearly completed, but still incomplete, form.  So this post will be rapidly supplemented by that one, but the other one came first.

Anyhow, the suicide rate for lawyers is high (but not as high as that for dentists, at least as of the last time I looked).  As  this is usually looked at specifically by the legal profession, there’s a common concept in the legal profession that this means there’s something specific to the practice of law about this, and there is, but I suspect it’s part of a larger societal problem.

Getting to this item, however, the first thing I’d note that I think is in error is blaming this on “Big Law”.  I'm not sure there really is a "Big Law" in the way that "Big Law" believes that there is, although there is something that is indeed called Big Law.

The Big Law organizations, i.e., outfits that track what’s going on in Big Law assumes that there is a Big Law.  There is, but frankly Big Law bleeds into regular law and varies little from it in most ways.  The biggest single distinction about Big Law form regular law is that Big Law is mighty impressed with itself and thinks that its unique in every fashion, when the only thing really unique about it is that it’s big and reflects the common ills associated with large entities entities.  Big Law is getting bigger and hurting the overall legal profession in my view, but many of the ills attributed to it are widespread indeed.

Anyhow, when the ills associated with the Big Law practice are addressed, in the contexts of what it is like to practice in front of Big Law, most lawyers would just recognize that stuff as the law.  Big Law doesn’t, because its impressed with itself.  People who work for Big Law don't realize that as they are self isolated as a rule.  Big Law tends not to impress people who aren't in Big Law unless they are just impressed by Big, and therefore those in it don't realize that those outside of it face much the same daily factors that they do, and frankly that lawyers outside of Big Law are every bit as good as those within it.

Which goes to this, if something about the profession killed this lawyer, it wasn’t Big Law, it was just the Law.

Or more accurately, perhaps, the way the law has become and the way it is continuing to develop.

Which goes to the next thing.

There’s lots of hand-wringing in the profession about conditions which cause its members to become depressed, drink, take drugs, chase skirts and in some cases, commit suicide. And nothing is being done about it.  Nothing that really matters, however.

Indeed, the profession is actually seeking to make things worse, at least in terms of its big organizations.  The conditions that cause the law to become unbearable for some are encouraged by the developments that organizations like the ABA are taking and which state bar associations have been taking which serve principally, Big Law, intentionally or not.  That is, in spite of all of their declarations of sympathy and angst, the profession is actually working towards the consolidation of bars in a fashion which serves bigness.  And where Ms. Litt may well be correct, although not in the way that she may have intentionally meant, is that this consolidation makes the conditions she observed worse.

Now, each state, probably, has some state bar program for distressed lawyers.  But that treats the lawyer and not the cause.  I.e., these are basically emergency rooms that take in the badly wounded the same way that a big city ER does.  ERs in Chicago treat a lot of gunshot wounds.  That’s great, but it doesn’t do anything whatsoever to stop people from getting shot.

Put another way, my bar card just came for 2019 and attached to it was a sheet going out to every lawyer in the state with their new bar cards that says something like "Feeling stressed" and then makes reference to the bar's service for lawyers who are having a  hard time.  There's no real effort to find out why lawyers are having a hard time and if something should be done about that.  None.

And that’s what this topic is like in the law.

Something about the practice is getting after people.  What is it? 

Well, it has to be something in the conditions of practice and nothing is being done about that whatsoever.

The law has never been a perfect profession, if there ever was such a thing, but the conditions of practice have undeniably gotten worse over the past half century and the trends towards that are accelerating.  Prior to the revolution in communications most practice was highly local. As communications have gotten bigger and bigger, the law has reacted in a direction that’s the opposite of efficient and logical.  It’s concentrated and become more and more inhuman.  Lawyers used to work with and against those they know.  Now they do that less and less.  And as that’s become the case, and things have scaled towards the big, pressure has been put on lawyers in big firms to be, as one lawyer I know has put it, “rented mules”, with all the dignity accorded them that a rented mule will have.  In litigation a premium has been put on results at any cost, with the collateral effect that lawyers in larger venues are  highly aggressive.

The problem with being that way is that its difficult to turn off.  A lawyers who has perfected the role of being the designated aggressive  person in a case probably tends to be that way everywhere else.  And to the people who work with him, particularly those who are just rented mules to start with, the conditions are worse  and worse.

And human behavior towards the aggressive is age old.  People come to hate people who act that way and resent them permanently.  Ultimately they'll resent the conditions that bring these people to them, whether that condition is the work, or the firms that act that way.

One legal blogger has made the extreme claim that being a lawyer in the trenches is worse, psychologically, than being a soldier in the trenches, as wars end and careers basically don't.  That is extreme, but there's something to it.  If a person's work has become unrelenting day in and day out combat, they'll begin to have problems with it.

The author here claims that she learned her husband had a "maladaptive personality".  I don't doubt that there's something to that, but there's been in the past few months an argument developed by a figure who spent most of their lives on antidepressants that in fact what is going on is that doctors are medicating modern life.  If he's correct (and I'm not in the profession, but I suspect more than a little that there's something to that), the "maladaption" may mean as little as "just not suited for".

That concept used to be more popular before modern society became so daft as to actually believe "you can do anything you want to". Some people are just not suitable for some things.  I recall in Basic Training meeting a soldier awaiting discharge. He was a nice kid, but the service had found him simply unsuited for military life, so it was letting him go.  There's no reason to believe that there aren't people who are unsuited for a life in the law.

If that's the case, however, that would have to be determined at some point early in their careers.  That's not going to happen.

Nothing is done by law schools, which are desperate to find students, to sort out those who will thrive in an environment of constant human contact form those who will not.  Many who are drawn to the law on introspective introverts with a flare for analysis.  Those people may say that they want to “help people” or “argue”, but what they really want to do is analyze and read.  Law schools don't bother with trying to discern anything about a person's talents to practice law.  If a person has passed the LSAT, even if they took a few times to do it, and they have the cash, they're in.

And certainly nothing is done by state bars either.  Indeed, less is done for admittance now than at any time in recent history.

As recently (granted it isn't that recent) as when I took the bar exam, you had to take a state exam combined with the national exam and be interviewed by the bar examiners themselves.  Now, most of this is a thing of the past.  The state exam is gone as is the interview.

Indeed, at that time you also needed a sponsor who was a practicing member of the bar.  You still need that, but basically you just take the national exam, the Uniform Bar Exam, and you're in.  This only shows you know how to take a test of that type and I'd wager that anyone who takes test well should be able to study on the UBE and take it, irrespective of whether or not they've gone to law school (which is of course a requirement) and irrespective of your actual qualifications to practice law.

Could something be done?  You bet.  But we're not going to do it.

First of all, the entire LSAT should simply go.  The LSAT was created to test your ability to think logically. That's great, but people study for it and take it more than once.  If it was to work, it would have to at least a one and done type of deal

But combined with that probably should be some sort of psychological test, and nobody is going to want that.  And maybe there should be references required to simply be admitted to any law school that are submitted to somebody other than a cash hungry law school.  And those references should probably have to include people who will vouch for you not becoming a jerk later on (which I'm not saying that this guy was) or collapsing under the stress.  I.e., if you are on of those bookish shy people who are attracted to the law because you are a polymath maybe somebody who is your friend might confidentially note that.  Or not.

And perhaps state bars ought to start acting like gatekeepers again by demonstrating that they know that there is a gate.  Relying on the UBE instead of doing state tests is a bad idea. The opposite would be a better approach. And with that, they could reinstate interviews.  If somebody seems too wired to get through the interview, maybe that says something

Beyond that, however, perhaps they could enforce the requirement that lawyers actually have an office in the state in which they practice, rather than simply a mail drop.  Or make that a requirement if they don't have one.  If a lawyer is going to practice in State X, he should probably be in State X at least 50% of the time (and yes, I have done out of state work).  What's that have to do with this, you ask?

Well, that operates towards making firms smaller and actually your work more local, and that matters.  I.e., that operates against Big Law and its bigness.  The smaller the law horizon is the more likely it is that somebody is going to catch you before you fall.

And taking that one step further, maybe it would be a good idea to take a page from the English and require lawyers to be admitted to a single practice area, rather than the fiction that all lawyers are admitted to do everything.  English lawyers have traditionally been barristers, who do courtroom work, or solicitors, who do not (in Quebec the latter are "notaries").  Making lawyers make that choice forces them very early on to make a choice on what they want to do, rather than simply making them scramble for a job anywhere and then end up where they shouldn't be.  Just because a lawyer has courtroom skills doesn't mean that he's able to psychologically carry that weight for the long haul, and chances are a lot of the lawyers who are in that spot know it before they ever fill out a job application.  Making them choose early on might keep a guy who is ill suited for the pressures of trial work opt for it.

And taking that one step further yet, the English traditionally did not allow barristers to form firms.  With practice being what it is in the United States, that couldn't be strictly applied here, but something like it probably could be.  Firms of barristers could be modified in some fashion to keep them small.  There's a lot of courtroom talent out there and this would be good for the practice and clients in general, but it would also operate to keep that class of lawyer from becoming grossly overburdened and also from being converted from courtroom lawyers into "trial warriors" or some such thing as their economics became more concentrated and local.

Finally, emphasis should be placed on the concept that if the law is a vocation, any good lawyer has a decent avocation.

No matter what state bars like to pretend, the way things are developing emphasizes creating a situation in which bright young polymaths are put in a situation where  they do nothing other than work.  Most young lawyers have varied interests.  Anyone who has been around older lawyers knows those who have had every single non law interest burned out of them.  The best lawyers I know and have known all had very strong interests in something else.  Some were pronounced outdoorsmen, some where agriculturalist, some were painters, some were writers, some were deeply religious and active in their faiths, and so on.  I think, frankly, that a person can't be a decent lawyer unless they have some other strong interest.  But the profession operates night and day to keep that from occurring.  Indeed, I recently had it suggested to me that being a rancher in addition to a lawyer was a disqualifying factor for being a judge as it "took too much time", which by extension suggests that all of a lawyer's time as a lawyer should be devoted to the law.  That's wrong.

Perhaps that should be a topic of inquiry by state bar committees for new applicants.  "What else do you do?", with some proof you do that.  If the answer is "I love the law so much I only study it", you aren't qualified to be a lawyer.

And that's because at the end of the day a meaningful life has some deeper connection to something.  A profession that things the profession itself gives that meaning has lost sight of that.  Lawyers shouldn't.

And individual lawyers will have to carry that ball. The profession isn't going to do anything about it.

________________________________________________________________________________

*My first comment.  Ms. Litt has that right, it was "our life". 

I'm back to the point that I made here recently on a post on abortion, but our lives aren't really our own.  We have a collective nature and the entire individualist concept that modern society, and Americans in general, espouse, is frankly shallow and wrong.  And this is particularly the case with married couples, whose lives, by law and by nature, belong to each other and their children. Two do truly join together as one flesh.

**I hear this a lot, but I think that what people do by choosing deliberately to eschew children is to close part of their lives entirely to something deeper.  I realize that this is a popular modern choice, but it gets back to that strong sense of individualism that runs so strong through modern life.  When Ms. Litt finds somebody else, and she will, I hope that this isn't part of her second calculation.

***And this is what my post is really about, and what the text I've put in is about.  

****Here's another modern comment I hear all the time.  "Marriage isn't easy".

An old clear thinking friend of mine who married earlier than I did once told me, after he'd been a married a few years, "marriage is easy".  And frankly, having been married now for over two decades, it is.

It is at least if you viewed it as a life time commitment and never considered that it had any out, and you didn't expect everything life to be perfect.  Life isn't perfect no matter what.  Marriage won't make it perfect.  

But marriage itself frankly isn't hard, at least in  my experience.  Based on my observation, people who live single lives live ones that are much harder.  Much.  And beyond that, people who insist on complicating their marriage with drama by never really being committed to it. . .well they make their lives difficult and their marriages difficult by extension.

But marriage itself?  If a person, like most people, was meant to live with another of the opposite sex. . it isn't hard.

*****Litt deserves a lot of praise for this offer.