What Makes Lawyers Happy?: A Data- Driven Prescription to Redefine Professional Success

This is the first theory-guided empirical research seeking to identify the correlates and contributors to the well-being and life satisfaction of lawyers. Data from several thousand lawyers in four states provide insights about diverse factors from law school and one’s legal career and personal life. Striking patterns appear repeatedly in the data and raise serious questions about the common priorities on law school campuses and among lawyers. External factors, which are often given the most attention and concern among law students and lawyers (factors oriented towards money and status—such as earnings, partnership in a law firm, law school debt, class rank, law review membership, and U.S. News & World Report’s law school rankings), showed nil to small associations with lawyer well-being. Conversely, the kinds of internal and psychological factors shown in previous research to erode in law school appear in these data to be the most important contributors to lawyers’ happiness and satisfaction. These factors constitute the first two of five tiers of well-being factors identified in the data, followed by choices regarding family and personal life. The external money and status factors constitute the fourth tier, and demographic differences were least important. Data on lawyers in different practice types and settings demonstrate the applied importance of the contrasting internal and external factors. Attorneys in large firms and other prestigious positions were not as happy as public service attorneys, despite the far better grades and pay of the former group; and junior partners in law firms were no happier than senior associates, despite the greatly enhanced pay and status of the partners. Overall, the data also demonstrate that lawyers are very much like other people, notwithstanding their specialized cognitive training and the common perception that lawyers are different from others in fundamental ways. * Clinical Professor of Law, Florida State University College of Law. ** Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri (Columbia). We particularly appreciate the dedication and focused efforts of the Lawyer Assistance Program directors and bar administrators who made this study possible. Special appreciation also goes to David Shearon, who generously provided his thrivinglawyers.org website for management of continuing legal education records related to this study. We thank Sarah Spacht for research assistance, Hunter Whaley for research assistance and editing suggestions to complete the draft, Mike Prentice and Mark White for technical assistance with data compilation and expression, and Jerry Organ and Daisy Floyd for thoughtful comments on an earlier draft. Deficiencies remain the responsibility of the authors. February 2015 Vol. 83 No. 2