Running From the Law: Why Good Lawyers are Getting Out of the Legal Profession, by Deborah Arron. This review is a preliminary to a more comprehensive posting I am preparing that deals with the legal profession as a whole, as a lawyer who has argued constitutional law in federal court. Return later to read that entry.
Running From the Law is a book from 2003 which, despite the passage of years, remains a valuable critique of today’s legal profession by an experienced attorney who gave up the life of a corporate lawyer to help others caught in the same career dilemma. Organized by case-history and personality profiles, the result is highly engaging, and avoids the typing by legal sub-categories that the public usually applies to lawyers. Her complaints are many: boiler-room pressure; cutthroat competition; office politics; the boredom of endless paper-pushing; long-hours with no time for family life; professional pigeonholing; lack of contribution to social progress; lack of creativity; constant rudeness and incivility; stress; depression; and a daily diet of “dispute, confrontation, and hatred.” The cause of all this misery she attributes primarily to the adversarial nature of the profession, which, she asserts, has resulted in public disrespect for lawyers.
Her criticisms are largely accurate and Arron deserves credit for articulating them. However, her remedies, IMHO as a fellow lawyer, are superficial and hardly worth repeating. She proposes the usual bromides of less obsession with hourly billing; less combativeness and more mediation; less hierarchy and more “democracy” (whatever that may mean); and kinder, gentler law schools with required liberal arts and humanities courses for law students with required courses in professional civility. Ludicrous solutions, IMO!
The legal profession is adversarial for several important reasons. First, because the foundations of American law are based on individual rights, not social compromise or saving face. To change this would require not merely an act of Congress, but a new Constitution and a new government. (For my analysis of the problems with the Constitution, click here) Perhaps desirable, but highly unlikely. Second, the public disrespects lawyers primarily not because of what lawyers do, but because of the news lawyers bring, i.e., knowledge of the law. It is law itself that the public is most unhappy with, and having no way to resist what they see as unfair laws, or any law at all, they take out their frustrations on the messengers, i.e., lawyers, regarding them much as they do the IRS—a necessary evil whom they wish to always be pursuing someone else, never themselves.
The very people, in fact, who criticize lawyers the most, medical doctors for example, are often the first to hire the big guns when they themselves feel cheated, and demand nothing less than 100% of their “rights,” whatever the cost, ignoring the fact that most medical malpractice lawyers were medical doctors before they became lawyers. Mediation itself is seldom a solution. When they do opt for mediation, it typically only exposes them to more time and money down the drain, a mere tactic used by the party with the deeper pockets. But angry people are never satisfied with mediation, and no one gives money to a lawyer unless he or she is angry as hell, or scared stiff. I know from long experience in the legal profession that it is easier to bag an elephant on the moon than it is to get most people to ward off legal issues in advance. It never occurs to them to plan ahead so they won’t get into trouble, always it seems falling back on the false bromide, “But I never do anything wrong!”
Arron is correct when she states the overall profitability of the profession is declining–it still is! Just as there are still way too many lawyers. But this reflects another fact that she strangely fails to mention—that a law degree today has become the equivalent of a high school diploma many years ago, essential to the successful pursuit of many other professions, from real estate to medicine. Therefore, what she perceives as a failure of the profession is, in fact, a natural consequence of the growing necessity of a law degree in today’s increasingly complex world, whether one intends to practice law or not, and whether one’s personality is suitable to litigation or not. Most lawyers, of course, never have and never will litigate in a courtroom, just as most people with a college degree will never use that degree in their professional life. It’s more for education than practice.
The most obvious solution—which Arron again fails to suggest—would be for the U.S. to adopt the English system of dividing the profession into barristers and solicitors, the former licensed to litigate, the latter restricted to contract and desk-work, which is what most lawyers have always done. Arron herself admits that, far from “running from the law,” she herself is now a practicing contract lawyer. Since she admits to retaining her license, it seems she did not run very far.
As for making law schools kinder and gentler, they are already inundated with liberal arts majors who couldn’t find any other satisfying work. Since law schools see their role as largely remedial, turning “brains full of mush”, as Professor Kingsfield observed, into razor-sharp minds, it is highly unlikely that law schools will step backward and accommodate those students whose personalities make them more suitable to be therapists and communication specialists, as most of Arron’s case histories ended up—being mostly women who entered law school in the first rush of feminists into the profession in the 1970s with little notion of what they were about, and who eventually dropped out of the profession to raise children.
Another potential criticism Arron omits to mention is that the legal profession is the only profession that cannibalizes its own. No other profession routinely seeks to profit by attacking its own members, resulting in an assumption among lawyers that every other lawyer is an enemy until proven otherwise. This too could be easily fixed by prohibiting privately-prosecuted malpractice suits among attorneys, bringing some measure of elementary camaraderie, as is the norm in most professions.
Prohibiting lawyers from suing each other for profit would go far in restoring some respect and professionalism to the practice of law and enable more lawyers to actually serve the public instead of constantly looking for huge judgments to cover the costs of their large malpractice premiums, office overhead, and burgeoning school debts. Why this is not being proposed by the powers that be, this reviewer does not know. Neither does Ms. Arron.
For the most part, however, her litany of complaints—accurate though they may be, and this reviewer agrees with most of them—nevertheless apply to most other jobs that this reviewer can think of. The boredom of paper-pushing? Try pushing hamburgers instead. Rudeness and incivility? Try sales or retail or teaching high-school. Pressure and competition? Try being a stockbroker or real estate salesman. No family life? Try working as a professor with the pressure to publish. Stress, depression, and lack of creativity? Well, that applies to most of the rest of the jobs out there.
Plenty of careers reward years of hard work and boredom with nothing more than bankruptcy and a pink slip. And given her repeated complaints of ulcers—someone should have mentioned to her that ulcers have little to do with stress but are usually merely a bacterial infection. A few pills is all it takes to cure them.
