Why Lawyers Are A Bunch Of Unhappy Jerks

I have quoted from mediation attorney Victoria Pynchon in the past.  She has some interesting ideas on the profession with which we all grapple.  Recently, an article by her was published by The Complete Lawyer as to why lawyers are unhappy and make others unhappy.  The 5 reasons concern prestige, greed, competitiveness, unhappiness, and continuousness.  My father in law, who is a lawyer in Victoria, Texas, says that all litigation is brought over one of the three Ps -- pride, principal or pocketbook.  This is an expanded explanation of the same thing.  I have edited it, but Victoria explains:

1.  Most successful lawyers are more interested in prestige than in either power or property. The pleasure of it depends upon other people’s fickle estimations of you.  Prestige is the corrupt base of the legal profession. It begins in college and continues through law school.  Lawyers are constant students of the legal “score”—what firm we practice in, how much we’re paying our first year associates, which architect designed our new offices, how many of our partners were Supreme Court clerks or Editors of their respective law reviews. We are obsessed by status, a bigger nothing than even our presumed power and possessed property.

2. Greed.  The words that sunk a thousand law partnerships? “Portable book of business.” He who could "walk out" with half the firm’s clientele was the guy in charge. He called the shots and received the highest salary.  So those who could not do the client acquisition tap dance became more and more dispirited as they realized and experienced the negative effects of the power of the “book.”

3. We’re competitive. While the adversarial system may be a good way to achieve justice, it’s a very bad way to find happiness. As both brain scientists and clergy will tell you, competition is not good for the “soul.” For neuroscientists, soul satisfaction is expressed by the biochemicals and neural networks that control our emotional and cognitive functioning.  When studying people playing the type of zero-sum or “ultimatum” game that is the foundation of litigation, scientists invariably find that the players are unhappy. When those players begin to collaborate, however, a curious thing happens:  The brain’s feel-good centers light up like pinball machines, releasing the feel-good neurochemical dopamine in sufficient quantities to make us a lot more happy collaborating than we feel when we’re competing.
 
 4. We are unhappy with the world the way it is. We not only self-select for contentiousness, we also self-select for restlessness, irritability and discontent. Most lawyers go to law school because they’ve never really liked the way the world works. For whatever combination of life experience, education and belief, we were convinced that if we learned to use the gears and levers of the legal system, we could set things right.  Unfortunately, we were wrong.  We are rarely able to set anything right; 90% of the time, we compromise our cases and worry about short-changing our principles.

5. Litigation is a contentious tactic initiated for the purpose of manipulating our opponents into doing what we want them to do. We litigators chose litigation and trial work because we like to win. We enjoy living by our wits and we chose to deploy them in the great American win/lose black/white right/wrong forum—the trial court. If we’re naturally combative, we’ve found the perfect socially acceptable use for our character defects. We are fighters, “hired guns,” “trained assassins.”  

Comments

[Vickie Pynchon]

Thanks for the link and the excerpt. I do want to make clear that I do not believe that "all lawyers are unhappy jerks."

My "story" is part confessional (i.e., particular to me) and part explanation for why my own intermitently bad behavior may be shared by others.

I know many happy lawyers who are incredibly even-tempered and gracious professionals.

Mediation was/is my half-way house, a place where I learned to de-escalate rather than to escalate conflict.

I'll explore the ways in which many litigators manage to happily engage in the practice of law in the coming year.

Best and happy new year!

Vickie