Unhappy Lawyers and Unmet Legal Needs

April 27th, 2014 / By

Lawrence Krieger and Kennon Sheldon recently posted an important paper about the factors associated with lawyer happiness. The paper includes a number of intriguing findings–I recommend it to all members of the legal profession. I focus here on a worrisome finding that Krieger and Sheldon discuss only briefly: The majority of lawyers, those who provide legal services to middle-income individuals, are the unhappiest.

These general practitioners, family lawyers, and others of their ilk are less satisfied than both those who work in prestige positions (serving primarily corporations) and those who work for the public interest (including government). Yet these “lawyers in the middle” make up the bulk of our profession–and are essential to address unmet legal needs. What are we going to about this?

Four Groups of Lawyers

To gather data for their study, Krieger and Sheldon surveyed bar members in four geographically diverse states. They divided the respondents into four groups:

Prestige lawyers are those who (a) work in law firms of 100 lawyers or more, or (b) practice tort/malpractice law; corporate, commercial, or transactional law; international business/commercial transactions; securities or partnership law; and tax, estate planning, or patent/copyright law. Krieger and Sheldon identified 1434 prestige lawyers in their sample.

Service lawyers work as public defenders, criminal prosecutors, other government lawyers, legal aid lawyers, or in-house counsel for a nonprofit organization. 1091 sample members fell in this category.

Judges include both judges and hearing officers. This group accounted for 141 sample members.

Other lawyers work in “general practice, family law, private criminal defense, and many [other areas] not typically associated with either very high earnings or primary public service.” This group constituted the largest slice of the sample, with 2852 members.

[Note that Krieger and Sheldon excluded “teachers, bar administrators, mediators/arbitrators, and clerks or support staff for judges or lawyers” from these groupings, so they could focus exclusively on more traditional practitioners. The “other” lawyers group, therefore, does not include attorneys in these positions.]

Who’s the Happiest?

Judges reported higher well-being than any other group studied by Krieger and Sheldon. Service lawyers were the next happiest, despite their low incomes. Prestige lawyers ranked third, and “other lawyers” brought up the rear.

Krieger and Sheldon focus on the difference between prestige and service lawyers: although the former earn more, the latter report greater well-being. To my mind, though, the more important result involves the “other” lawyers–those in general practice. These lawyers constitute the single greatest group of practicing lawyers; they also serve the needs for which Americans have the greatest unmet demand. Yet these are the unhappiest lawyers. This is a critical problem, one that legal education has ignored for too long.

The Invisible Majority

As I read Krieger and Sheldon’s very thoughtful study, I realized how much of our law school culture revolves around the prestige/service dichotomy. Both before and during law school, law students imagine that they will choose between high-paying prestige positions and modest-paying (but personally satisfying) service ones.

Our law school culture tacitly supports this dichotomy. Students quickly learn about the prestige positions and yearn for both their status and compensation. Prestige employers are well represented on campus, in the media, and in student gossip.

Schools counter the dominance of “prestige law” with talk of service careers. We sponsor public interest fellowships, job fairs, and other service programs. Faculty and career counselors encourage students to weigh the personal satisfactions of a service career against the monetary rewards of a “prestige” one.

At most law schools, however, a majority of graduates will work in neither of these fields: the dichotomy is a false one for them. Instead, they will become “other” lawyers serving the needs of small businesses and moderate-income individuals. The fact that service lawyers are happier, while prestige lawyers are wealthier, is irrelevant to them. They, according to Krieger and Sheldon’s study, will experience neither the high incomes of prestige lawyers nor the well-being of service ones.

Out of the Shadows

Is the plight of general-practice lawyers inevitable? I don’t know. Some of them manage very stressful work for clients of modest means. Family law tops that list; many lawyers shudder at the prospect of handling divorce or child custody cases, although courthouses teem with people seeking lawyers to represent them in those matters.

It may not be possible to give these “other” lawyers the high salaries of prestige lawyers or the civic satisfaction of service ones. But we might improve their well-being by recognizing the importance of their work. Rather than relegating them to the shadows of “other” lawyers, as law schools currently do, let’s celebrate the work of these every day lawyers.

Many of our graduates will handle divorce and child custody cases. They will represent criminal defendants for pay. They will handle small personal injury and commercial disputes. None of this is glamorous; much of it is stressful and modestly paid. But this is what lawyers do. This is what brings justice to most Americans.

Let’s embrace this legal work in our law school curricula. Let’s feature it in our placement programs. Let’s help our “other” graduates find satisfaction in their practices. I know some general practitioners who find substantial psychic rewards in their work. Although we don’t recognize them as “public service” lawyers, they are the professionals who help people through the traumatic days of a divorce, criminal charge, custody dispute, or probate contest.

We can do more to prepare these lawyers, celebrate their work, support their well-being, and offer their services to more of the clients who need them.

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The Value of a Degree

December 18th, 2013 / By

Are college graduates better off than non-graduates? If so, does value vary by the type of institution attended? How much value does a JD add to a BA? Does that value vary by institution?

Both critics and defenders of higher education have struggled with these questions. Most have recognized that we can’t measure a degree’s value solely by financial reward. We hope that higher education also improves health, autonomy, personal relationships, emotional well-being, community engagement, and other goods. But how can we measure all of those outcomes?

Now there’s an app for that.

The Gallup-Purdue Index

The Gallup Organization and Purdue University have just announced creation of the “Gallup-Purdue Index.” This index will attempt to measure both career and well-being outcomes for college graduates.

Gallup has decades of experience asking people about their financial status and well-being. The company plans to draw upon that knowledge to devise questions for the new index. Participants will answer questions about their jobs, income, educational debt, other debt, and financial management. They will also provide information on their workplace and community engagement, personal relationships, physical fitness, sense of purpose, happiness, and stress.

Gallup will start conducting its surveys in the new year, with the first results available in spring 2014. The polling company plans to survey 30,000 college graduates a year for at least five years, generating a database with responses from 150,000 individuals.

Benchmarks, Not Rankings

Notably, Gallup does not plan to release data about individual colleges or universities. Instead, it will aggregate data by category. The results, for example, could report how individuals of different races fare after graduation, how graduates of research universities compare to those of liberal arts colleges, or how outcomes vary by region of the country. These data, Gallup suggests, will create benchmarks that institutions can use to gauge their own graduates’ outcomes.

The results, however, undoubtedly will do their part to fuel competition among universities. Gallup, for example, has proposed releasing results by athletic conference. Do Big 10 graduates earn more than Pac-12 ones? Are they more happily married? If fans don’t like the BCS system, they can embrace Gallup-informed “well being” competitions among the conferences.

Although Gallup will not announce institution-specific results, colleges and universities can contract with the company for surveys of their own graduates. Each institution could then compare its results to the national benchmarks. Purdue has already asked Gallup to survey its graduates; other colleges may do the same.

What Will We Learn?

Like all social science research, the Gallup-Purdue Index will have significant limits. If Pac-12 graduates are happier than Big 10 ones, is that because of their college experiences or because they live in sunnier states? If Ivy League graduates earn more money than graduates of land-grant universities, is that because their college education was superior, their native talents were greater, their pre-college advantages were deeper, or their employers favored the Ivy League for outdated reputational reasons?

Even if we disentangle these strands and identify the colleges that produce the happiest, most successful graduates, how will we know which part of the educational experience paid off? Was it class size, particular majors, the campus environment, the football team’s success? In the social world, measurement often generates new questions rather than solid answers.

There’s also a dark side to surveys like the Gallup-Purdue Index. Users can interpret results to support their pre-existing notions: If my college fares well, I’ll tie the results to my pedagogy. If my graduates stumble, I’ll blame the weather.

There’s a danger, furthermore, that policymakers will seize upon data to construct superficial answers to complex questions. It’s unlikely that one, or even three, college attributes explain graduate well-being. Understanding the relationship between higher education and adult satisfaction will require considerable exploration. As the data generate new questions, we’ll have to commit to asking those questions–not simply settling for first-generation answers.

Indices, finally, seem to breed competition. Administrators, educators, students, and alumni will await the annual index as eagerly (and anxiously) as they anticipate the US News releases. In my worst nightmare, Gallup will update survey results weekly–just like the football rankings. We already spend far too much time on rankings and competition in higher education.

The Up Side

On the other hand, the Gallup-Purdue Index could teach us a lot about higher education. We spend a lot of time speculating about the benefits of higher education; more data could begin generating answers. Used responsibly, high-quality data could help us address essential issues: What type of education gives low-income students the best boost? How do liberal arts majors compare to STEM specialists? Are there educational innovations that will advance the progress of women and minorities in the professions?

Measurements also facilitate accountability. Now that a degree can cost more than a starter house, and now that we have the capacity to gather substantial data about outcomes, we should hold educational institutions accountable. If we can improve results for our graduates–in any facet of their lives–we should work towards that end.

What About Law Schools?

So far, the Gallup-Purdue Index will focus on college graduates. It seems, though, that law schools could get in on the act. Individual schools could commission surveys to determine whether their graduates obtain value from earning a JD. Are those law school graduates happier than college grads with no further education? Richer? More stressed? More or less involved in the community?

To make those comparisons, each law school could choose college benchmarks that match their feeder schools. Maybe a particular law school’s grads are happier and more successful than the graduates of research universities in the region, but not better off than the grads of local liberal arts colleges.

Equally intriguing, the ABA, NALP, or another national group could commission Gallup to conduct a survey of law school graduates nationally. How do those graduates compare to college grads without further education? Do the results depend on the type of law school, type of post-law job, or region of the country?

As legal educators, we pride ourselves on the fact that our degrees last a lifetime. Now that we have the tools to explore the extent of that impact, we should seek that knowledge.

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