Plan for stained glass window depicting the Lamb of God surrounded by depiction of
modern professionals: architect, dentist, typist, housewife,
construction worker, doctor, businessman/husband, and psychiatrist. To what extent this culture places anything more central than money is questionable.
Some of these posts meander, and this one certainly is going to. But that's in part because I've been experiencing both some unsettling conversations in this arena and experiencing some
synchronicity regarding it as well. So here goes.
Let's start off with a comment I recently heard.
Lawyer, sitting, at a desk (probably in a law library). Sitting remains a lawyer constant, but trips to the law library have nearly completely vanished due to on line legal research.*`
Recently I was sitting in a deposition when the very bright young lawyer across the table, who no doubt has a bright career in the law ahead of him, commented on how he just couldn't stand to be sedentary indoors.
Eh?
And you're a lawyer?
Lawyers may try to fool themselves about it, but being a lawyer is, always has been, and always will be, a sedentary career. Indeed, it may be growing slightly more sedentary due to the computer, although it's always been fairly sedentary. No two ways about it. It so surprised me that I commented "well you picked a funny career then", to which the another lawyer sitting there laughed and the court reporter loudly exclaimed "yeah". The young lawyer seemed surprised, like maybe that had never occurred to him, and even looked unsettled.
Maybe he should be unsettled, as it wasn't all that long thereafter that I discovered that the Wyoming State Bar Association has a Facebook page. I checked that Facebook page out as, of course, I'm a member of that association, all lawyers in the state are. It was a bit of a shock for a peculiar reason.
Wyoming lawyers have long used a phrase coined by one of our late bar presidents, Gerald Mason, that we're "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer". Mason was seriously distressed by all the animosity directed at lawyers and thought if we had pride in ourselves it would combat and even reverse this, or at least he said that. He seemed to be a pretty sincere fellow, based upon what very little I knew of him, so I think he genuinely believed it. If so, he was highly naive on that score.
Indeed, I'm probably a rarity in that I've always been skeptical of the phrase, although I'll concede that there was and is some merit to it. If we're proud to be a "Wyoming" lawyer, that means that there's something unique about being a Wyoming lawyer, as opposed to merely being a lawyer. I think sometimes people using this phrase really mean that they're boosting the concept that lawyers should be proud of being lawyers, and indeed a recent article in our bar association magazine struck me that way. There may be some merit to that as well, and I've listed an impressive
list of lawyers on this website with some famous, and let's be frank, some infamous characters listed on it. Anyhow, people who says we're "proud to be [Wyoming] lawyers" usually point to all the positive things lawyers do in society. And there are quite a few. If we say we're "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer", that ought to point to the unique things about that status, and there are quite a few, including that our state bar has been small enough that it has encouraged collegial behavior among lawyers. Of course, that fact that the Wyoming Supreme Court forced the
Uniform Bar Exam upon the state means that we're now to the lawyer population megalith of Colorado and there's been a flood of Colorado lawyers getting admitted into Wyoming while living in Colorado. That's changing the practice here, and for those of us who still keep using the "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer" tagline I'll suggest it's now obsolete, and probably ought to be "proud to be a UBE lawyer with a connection to Wyoming", something that is becoming increasingly accurate and which is difficult to get enthused about.*
Anyhow, that isn't really my hope, even though I retain some hope that maybe the committee that overseas the bar exam will act on behalf of the state's citizens and go back to an actual state exam, a diminishing hope, and probably a pipe dream, in which case I have no hope that the UBE won't do a vast amount of damage to the state. My actual point is this. Mason's comments about being "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer" cutting into the negative views about lawyers were naive, and that's something that those proud folks should probably be aware of. People hate lawyers.
Chances are, however, that Mason knew that, and his comments really meant that we shouldn't add to the perception by being part of the commentary. Indeed, if I recall correctly, he didn't approve of lawyers circulating lawyer jokes for that reason, although it's been a long time since I've read that article.
Apparently the Wyoming State Bar is actually aware of that. That is, that people don't like lawyers so much. The last issue of the Wyoming Lawyer (do Colorado UBE lawyers guffaw when they get that?) has an article about the perception of lawyers from outside the law, and one of those commenting flat out states that, save for when a person needs to hire a lawyer, in which case they generally like that lawyer. There's been more and more comments in our bar journal noting that, and also more and more noting that a lot of lawyers are apparently slipping into emotional trouble in the practice.
Which brings me back to the comment about the Wyoming Bar Association's Facebook page. It's full of articles about lawyers in trouble with their lives and beyond that, even ones that are really harsh on the practice in general. It's almost like a Caution sign for those pondering a legal career, although anyone reading it surely (or mostly) must already be a member of the bar, I'd guess. It wasn't what I was expecting.
One article that I saw listed on that site was actually called "25 Reasons Most Attorneys Hate the Practice of Law and Go Crazy (and What to Do About it)" by one Harrison Barnes (whom one other blawg refers to as a "windbag").** Wow, that's a pretty surprising thing I think for a bar association to list on their Facebook page. And it's a pretty surprising title in and of itself. "Most"? Hmmm. . . . I know at least a couple who love their jobs and are pretty open about that, and they don't have odd malignant personalities or anything. Most has to be an extreme overstatement. Maybe he was trying to shock.
Still the article made me recall the conversation above, as it listed this as one of the twenty five reasons***:
They are miserable being behind a desk all day. Most
attorneys spend the majority of their days trapped behind a desk. There
is very little one-on-one interaction and socializing when you are under
pressure to bill as many hours as possible. While television shows and
movies glamorize the practice of law, most attorneys spend their time in
an office, sitting at a desk, staring at a computer monitor.
That's a pretty accurate statement.
Middle aged lawyer at his desk in 1919. . . something that middle aged, old aged and young lawyers in 2015 are doing just as much, if not more, than the subject of this photograph did.
Of course, a lot of modern professions do that, and I've commented on that on this blog before. People truly not meant to do that, but we're building a world in which that's what everyone is going to have to do, it seems. That's a very curious fact, as it isn't really good for us. And I suppose that a person, in pondering careers, should consider, as my young friend mentioned above, their ability o handle that. If they really "can't stand" to be in a chair all day, the law, and a lot of other professions, probably should be considered in that context.
Another comment that struck me
One that struck me was this comment:
They are exhausted from the constant conflict (conflict with peers, conflict with clients, and conflict with opposing counsel).
The constant conflict attorneys face can take a massive toll on them.
This conflict is never ending and something that drains attorneys
emotionally and physically.
The same author stated, concerning the rising (or perhaps now simply appreciated for the first time a a real problem) of substance abuse:
If I were to pick you up and drop you in the middle of a war zone in the
Middle East, give you a machine gun, and tell you that you had to fight
there for the next 30 years, that would screw you up pretty badly.
You'd want some liquor and antidepressants, and you'd be pretty sweaty
and pissed off. Practicing law often feels the same way. At least in the
war zone, you would know who your enemy was, and there would not be so
many rules!
That's actually not a bad summary of what litigators do, and of course we should keep in mind that not all lawyers are litigators by any means. I do think that's a factor in lawyer discontent and substance abuse, however. Indeed, I was pretty surprised a few years ago when I completed defending a pretty hard deposition of a tough deponent, and jokingly asked the opposing lawyer if that lawyer "would like a beer" only to have that lawyer accept. We actually did have some in the office and that lawyer gladly took it, saying to me "I don't think it would be possible to practice law without beer."
It ought to be possible to practice law without beer, and of course I know a few lawyers who don't drink at all, including a few litigators who don't.**** Frankly, I haven't known all that many lawyers who really had a substance abuse problem either, although it's apparently a rising problem.
I've written on stress and the law before, and I guess this is part of that scene.
Slipping away from the law, however, but noting that I heard the following at a party of all legal professionals, I've been a bit bothered by the western concept of career once again for a peculiar reason. I've also written on that before.
This one comes up on a personal level, I'll note.
At this party, a friend of mine made an inquiry as to what my son's career plans are. Oddly enough (synchronicity?) the same topic was simultaneously being explored by somebody else with my wife, which I know as I could hear her discussing it.
We don't really know what his plans are and perhaps he doesn't as well. I have to say, at age 18 a lack of a plan worries parents but at the same time can a person rationally be expected to have one? I'm not so sure that everyone should, and a person ought not to rush to one just because everyone thinks you should have one.
And people do think you should have one, and it turns out that they have ones for you, which is quite surprising.
Now, he tested very well on the ACT. Very well. And without bothering to do any studying for it. So, when his ACT scores were mentioned by my wife (not me) to the above referenced friend, and it was noted that
he may start off at the local community college, he was taken aback. He was frank that a person with such high ACT scores should not do that, very much not do that, and rather should go to a major university from the onset. Indeed, he thought about it and determined that my son should go to Georgia Tech to major in engineering.
Maybe he should major in engineering, and maybe he should go to Georgia Tech (about which I know nothing at all), but that raises an interesting aspect of Weltanschauung that hard for almost anyone in this society not to have, including myself. That is, in the western world (and my friend here is a European immigrant from one of the highly ordered European societies) there is a very strong concept that a person should exploit academics and then career to the maximum possible extent, even if that means leaving the place of their birth and all they know.
Why is that?
As far as I can tell, the only thing that's based on is a concept of money. The general idea seems to be that a person should make as much money as they can. It's a really primitive instinct and it probably derives from the idea that we need to keep the wolf from the door. But it's a particularly pronounced cultural concept, in my view, in Protestant societies. By that I do not mean that only Protestants have it, that would be completely and utterly false, but it's a cultural aspect of those societies and generally held by nearly everyone in them, without any question of its correctness whatsoever.*^
And it's not as if its devoid of any rationality. There is some. It's well proven that money won't make a person happy, but poverty sure doesn't help that situation much either. At least a little monetary surplus helps keep some anxiety at bay, unless a person is irresponsible with money.
But the acquisition of it can lead a person into areas that they would otherwise not naturally go. Its stated by some that a person can't be a monetary success unless he loves what he's doing but the evidence of that is quite poor, and at least by my historical and personal observation the opposite is true in at least some cases. A lot of people do well, at least for a time (whether they can indefinitely is another matter) doing things that they would rather not.
Indeed, I'd argue that this is responsible for one of the things that is constantly noted in articles like the one linked in above. People start to compensate for their discontent, with some of that surplus money, with things that lead them into trouble. According to Mr. Barnes, whose article is cited above:
Here are some incredible statistics:
- The
American Bar Association estimates that 15-20 percent of all attorneys
are alcoholics or suffer from substance abuse problems. Jones, D.
(2001). Career killers. In B.P. Crowley, & M.L. Winick (Eds.). A guide to the basic law practice. Alliance Press, 180-197
- Lawyers have the highest rate of suicide of any profession. Greiner, M. (Sept, 1996). What about me? Texas Bar Journal.
- Lawyers have the highest rate of depression of any profession
according to a John Hopkins' study of 100 professions. Occupations and
the prevalence of major depressive disorder. Journal of Occupational Medicine, 32 (11), 1079-1087.
Pretty grim. I think, however, that the last two items are statistically incorrect, and actually dentist have a higher rate of depression and suicide than lawyers do.
All the dentist I've every met, and I've known a lot as my father and one of my uncles were dentists, seemed to be a happy lot but obviously not all are. Indeed, maybe only the upset in any profession draw attention. However, I will note that dentist do suffer from some of the same liabilities that lawyers do, namely that people are pretty vocal to express their discontent with the entire group of them and at the same time complaint about their fees, etc. Like lawyers, they make a lot less money than people believe that they do and they tend to have massive overhead. Oddly, at the same time, it's a profession that, like the law, people from the lower middle class have pushed their children towards for a long time. My father got into it in his own, like I did with the law, but college in general was something he was reluctant to do but for a big push from my grandmother. His father owned a meat packing company and died young. My uncle's father was, I believe, a construction worker. One of my father's good physician friends, I'd note, came from a farm in Nebraska and other dentist friends had fathers who were, respectively, a railroad worker and a miner.
Which brings me back to community colleges for a moment.
My father attended the local community college,
Casper College. He did so as his mother wanted him to. He was employed at the post office at the time, after the death of my grandfather, and his basic plan was to stay there. My grandmother recognized that he undoubtedly had the intelligence to advance in university and she urged him to do so. He was the single most intelligent man I've ever met and that was obviously apparent to my grandmother. He started off in engineering and then went right from Casper College to the University of Nebraska, after a brief stop at Creighton which he didn't care for. So, he did well, as we've been using the term, by Casper College. And he's not the only one of his generation around here who did. And who still does.
Indeed, recently I spoke to a lawyer about a decade younger than me who related to me that he'd started off at Casper College, in education. He related that it was his opinion that if he hadn't have started there, he ultimately would not have graduated from university, in his opinion. His father was a mechanic, I'll note.
Likewise, I've often suspected that if I hadn't have started off in Casper College I may have not made it far in post high school education. Indeed, my earlier college career strongly suggests that to me.
I had no plans at all of going to Casper College at the time that I graduated from high school. When I was in my senior year of high school, my vague thoughts were that I'd go to the
University of Wyoming and major in Wildlife Management. Like my son, I tested well on the ACT and my mother told me I could go anywhere I wanted, which frankly baffled me as I'd never thought of going outside the state. Indeed, she darned near scared me by suggesting that I could go anywhere, in part because she cited the example of an older cousin who was going to a very prestigious university and whom I thought of as a really good student. I didn't think of myself that way and probably regarded myself as an indifferent student. I don't know that I really was, but I didn't have any developed study habits and therefore must muscled through high school on what I liked or what I needed to learn, when I needed to learn it. I'd become a student, really, in college and university, a habit that became a personal character trait that's never left.***** Anyhow, I declared then that UW was where I was going, which seemed to disappoint my mother a bit.
Shortly after that, or perhaps before that, I had my ACT scores as noted and also had to take some sort of personality career test, one of the very few and fairly pathetic things the school district did here at that time to attempt to help students find a career. Wildlife Management was mentioned and my plan was loosely fixed, sort of. My idea was to go to UW and major in that while enrolling in ROTC, as I also wanted to see if a career in the Army, another outdoor profession (I believed) might be for me. If it was, I figured I could do that for twenty years and then retire, and enter the Game & Fish here. If it wasn't, I could do four years and come back and work for the Game & Fish. The concept that I wouldn't get hired by the Game & Fish didn't really occur to me, oddly enough.
I mentioned that to my father, who replied that there were a lot of people around here who had Wildlife Management degrees and no jobs. That was all the more he said about it, but he so rarely gave advice of that type that any time he did, I listened. Indeed, I don't ever recall ignoring his advice on such topics, which was always very rare. That was enough to deter me from majoring in Wildlife Management and I decided instead to major in geology, which was an outdoor science that I was good at in high school. It might be the case that avoiding a career with the Game & Fish saved me from disappointment as a game warden later told me that he didn't get out hunting much as he was always working during the season, something that would seem self evident I guess, but which didn't occur to me at the time. That same sentiment is contained in an interview by Brett McKay, of the Art of Manliness, of his father Tom McKay, who was a New Mexico and later Federal game warden. In that interview he relates:
9. What is the biggest misconception people have about the job?
The biggest misconception is that game wardens spend all their time
hunting and fishing. The good wardens and agents have no time for this
as they are in the field managing the other nimrods out there during
hunting season. I hunted and fished much more before I became a game
warden, not at all after I became one.
I would have had a hard time with that.
I did make it down to UW and I did obtain a degree in geology, but I didn't go down right away. I enrolled in UW and went down to orientation. Something about it turned me off right away. It might just have been the hugely unfamiliar environment. We were supposed to stay in the dorms and the crowd of people there, for an only child and solitary introspective personality was too much, and I backed off that very day.*~ I went home and announced I was going to Casper College.*~~ The very next day I went down and enlisted in the Army National Guard as I felt not starting off in ROTC would be disingenuine. Joining the National Guard was one of the very best post high school decisions I ever made.
Me, as a Sergeant in the Wyoming Army National Guard in South Korea. My parents weren't happy about me joining the Guard, but it was one of the absolute best post high school decisions I ever made and I have no regrets about doing it at all.
Going to Casper College may have saved my entire academic career. My mother was very ill at the time and I lived at home. In the afternoons when I didn't have class I went hunting or fishing. In retrospect it was the freest I have ever been. I got into the swing of studying at the post high school level and when I went to UW two years later I was ready for it. In the meantime I'd learned that I didn't think I wanted a career in the military and my desire to experience that had been satisfied by the National Guard, indeed it'd last beyond that as my enlistment period of six years took me all the way though my undergraduate career.
Would I have made it through university if I hadn't have gone to Casper College? I don't know. Maybe I would have, but even during that first two years there were times when I wanted to quit pretty badly and acknowledge my desire to do so, although even now I'm not quite sure why I occasionally harbored those feelings. On one occasion I recall even asking my father to ask a sheep rancher friend of his if they had any jobs, which would have been a turn in a much different direction, had it lasted, to say the least (that ranch long ago sold).*~~~ By the time I went down to UW however the urge to quit was behind me and it never occurred to me again.
Would my father have gone at all if it hadn't been there? I don't know that either, maybe he would have. It's hard to say. But I can't sneeze at community colleges. Indeed, as earlier mentioned in a post on this blog, at least actor Tom Hanks feels that he wouldn't have made it through university but for starting at a community college first.
Casper College geomorphology class, 1983. This was the last Casper College class I took in my path towards a Bachelors of Science, and I already had just obtained my Associates when I took it. Technically it was a University of Wyoming class. Of the individuals depicted, three of us I know went on to UW but only one other went on as a geology major, a good friend of mine who I am still in contact with today. The professor remains at Casper College to this day.
Circling back around, a crash in the oilfield, much like the one we're experiencing right now, left me unemployable without after I graduated with a geology degree and I ended up in law school a year later. I'd first contemplated the law, however, as far back as Casper College, when it became evident that I'd probably have to go on to grad school in order to find a career in geology. I did take the Graduate Records Exam as well as the LSAT, and did well in both, and took the law route.*~~~~
Which oddly enough brings me back to this topic. Recently a dental hygienist, asking my son's career plans, suggested that as his father was a "famous" lawyer, he could go on to law school and then capitalize on the last name.
Well, the thought that I'm famous is flattering, but quite inaccurate. Indeed, if I'm famous I should be getting on television and capitalizing on my fame by hanging out with the people who are famous for being famous. But that's not going to happen. And unless you have a really famous lawyer last name, that's just not going to work.
But the thought that this is good advice is interesting. Being a lawyer, in reality, is really hard, tough, work and anybody who is familiar with it probably ought to pause before recommending it to anyone. Some lawyers I know have claimed that they'd not recommend it to their own children, although the very few I know whose have a child who is a lawyer are proud of it. One person I know fits both of these criteria. Of course the recommendation is based on a misunderstanding, at least in part, as to what we actually do.
All of which brings me back to a few points.
First of all, I think the concept that a person must maximize their economic potential deserves some serious reconsideration as part of the culture. Not that it hasn't always been somewhat criticized. But the idea that a person must do something as that will generate the highest income for them assumes that a high income is the highest goal, and it's pretty clear that point of view is destructive in more ways than one. At the bottom line, just because a person can do it and make a high return doesn't mean that would make them happy. I'd wager that there are plenty of high income people who would have been much happier doing something else, and I've heard plenty of high income people who look back on some earlier low income position as their happiest one. Guys at their desks look back on working on family farms, or working in construction, or being a soldier in the Army, as their golden days, and not without reason. Indeed, to at least some extent, perhaps we ought to reassess our views on this topic on a societal basis.
Which isn't to glamorize low income, as you'll sometimes find people do. Or suggest that a person can suddenly just up and have no income at all. Not hardly.
Secondly, people should be cautious pushing a person towards a career if they aren't really familiar with it. I have a better idea than most about a lot of careers, so I could probably do that better than most, but I don't think that's universally the case by any means. Indeed, one of the really neat things about being a lawyer in litigation is that you get to know quite a bit about what a lot of other people do. Even then you sure don't know everything, however. I would never have thought, for example, about game wardens not getting to do much hunting and fishing. Some occupations we know a lot better than others, but usually because we have a close personal association with them in some fashion.
Finally, I think people should be pretty cautious about their concepts of ideal schools or institutions. We have a very pronounced societal tendency to view certain schools almost as if they're Hogwarts institution of magic. It's true that there are very good, and very poor, schools, but as higher education has spread in the US post war there are, quite frankly, a lot of really good schools that offer individual students an individual advantage. A lot of people who go on to other schools start off at a community college level and beyond that quite a few graduate from universities that are very good, if not very big names. In some occupations, in my view, such as law, some schools have acquired an inordinately revered reputation and society in general would benefit if their stars faded a bit. It may actually be the case, in spite of all the criticism of higher education, that it's gotten so good that there are not all that many Yugos amongst the Mercedes really, except in terms of reputation, which does admittedly mean a lot in terms of later employment.
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*`I'll make it the topic of another entry, more appropriate for the supposed focus of this blog, but a different comment I read elsewhere noted how the big firm expectation of a certain number of billable hours of young associates is irrelevant in the modern context, as electronic legal research has made the practice of that sort of law so much more efficient. That is, a single lawyer can do the work of an entire team of lawyers. Not only that, but one lawyer can research a topic in half a day that formerly would have taken days. That person's comment noted that his superiors, all of whom had started off well before electronic research and never really learned it, didn't grasp that in his big firm, and therefore they didn't understand that what was for him a four hour project wouldn't result in 24 hours of billable time. A very interesting point.
*Wyoming has seen a jump in applicants to its bar, but due to the UBE.
** Barnes seems to be employed as a lawyer recruiter, and the rest of his articles, to the very limited extent I've bothered to look at them, seem rather rah rah to me about the profession, so I don't know what to make of this one. He notes that he was a drop out from the profession in this one, so its perhaps unusually candid. If so, I don't know how to reconcile his rah rah posts and his occupation which would amount to recruiting people into something he claims drives people crazy. Of course, maybe if I read all of them I'd feel differently, but I doubt that I will.
***I was going to list the full 25, and then comment on them, but it was too much of a diversionary project. Suffice it to say, I don't think all of them were all that common.
In fairness, Barnes offers solutions to his perceived problems as well,
although there aren't many listed. One of them is just to quit working
and figure it out next, which strikes me as something that wouldn't be
realistic for a lot of folks.
****The beloved late Gerald Mason, who coined the phrase "Proud to be a Wyoming lawyer", didn't drink and held what was, as far as I know, the only dry State Bar Association Annual Meeting. I didn't go, but then I only rarely do. I recall hearing some complaints about it, however.
Which isn't to say that I've witnessed a lot of lawyer drinking abuse. I'm sure that lawyers drink more than airline pilots, but I really haven't seen a significant number of lawyers boozing it up. Maybe I'd have to hang out more where that sort of stuff occurs, but I doubt it. I suspect that this may be one of those areas where a lot of attention is being paid to a particular problem, but that means that attention is being paid, not that its increasing.
*^It may mean nothing at all, but amongst European societies, it is noticeable that the ones that have not had a significant Protestant influence tend to be much less economic driven and have cultures much less focused on an individuals relationship to work.. Pretty much all of Europe and south of the Rhine would fit this category, and their work behaviors and life focus does tend to be quite a bit different. The work ethic of France, Italy and Spain tends to drive Americans crazy to some extent.
Hillaire Belloc, I learned after writing this, was so convinced of something similar that he attributed Capitalism to the Protestant Reformation, with his analysis having some merit to it. Belloc wasn't stating that in a nice way, as he was a Distributist and lived in the era of fairly unrestrained Capitalism.
*****While I didn't know it at the time, my parents feared in my later undergraduate stage that I'd become one of the classic "career students", a fear that was very parental on their part but actually not very well founded. On the other hand, by becoming a lawyer, maybe that is what happened.
*~According to the same individual above who first is mentioned in this long winded essay, "introspection is my cure to bear". Maybe.
*~~These struggles must be more common than I suppose. I just watched the film American Graffiti for the first time in a long time and found, which I'd forgotten, that much of the film's central plot is based upon the central character struggling with whether to leave the next day for university or to attend the local community college. He goes, his close friend who is going with him stays.
*~~~Indeed, I was practicing law when it sold and it was one of the first experiences for me on how agriculture was now really beyond the means of the common man, something that shocked me at the time, and which was a sad experience to observe. Some out of state person bought it, something I can't help relive every time I drive through it, which I very frequently to.
*~~~~ I did well on both tests without studying for either. Indeed, while I understand why a person would study for the GRE, it still baffles me that people actually study for the LSAT. The LSAT is just a logic test. If a person can't do well on the LSAT without studying for it, they probably shouldn't enter law school.
