Reviewed by: David Griffiths
Author: Nancy Levit and Douglas Linder
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 978 0 19 539232 6
Price: £12.99

There is a bit of something for everyone in Nancy Levit and Douglas Linder’s book The Happy Lawyer: Making a Good Life in the Law. Levit and Douglas are law professors at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and what they say for the US is relevant for the English legal profession.

There are separate chapters for the managing partner with 10 top tips to make lawyers happier; for law faculty professors on preparing their young charges for a satisfying career; and for the rest of us, well, just being happier at work.

There is more than a hint in the title of the book that, as a breed, lawyers are unhappy. While there is more than enough to devote an entire article to a book review, I take a wider focus and look at the extensive literature covering the question of happiness generally and its relevance to the legal profession. Most articles and books on lawyer unhappiness trot out the words of former US Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo: ‘As to being happy, I fear that happiness isn’t my line… I fear that all trouble is in the disposition that was given me at birth.’ In other words, nature and not nurture, nor indeed the practice of law, is to blame.

The reality of the legal profession appears to be otherwise – we are somewhere in the middle in terms of job satisfaction. Extensive research carried out in April 2007 by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago into 198 different occupations placed lawyers (albeit in the US) slightly above average in terms of ‘very satisfied’ at 52.4%, compared with doctors at 57.9% and accountants at 49.7%. The clergy report the highest level of job satisfaction with an impressive 87.2% as well as the highest level of overall personal happiness. Roofers, baristas and waiters rank at the bottom. Levit and Linder ascribe this to a lack of control and absence of creative challenges.

The idea of the unhappy lawyer appears to have either started or had a major relaunch about nine years ago with the publication by Martin Seligman and others of a paper entitled Why Lawyers are Unhappy in the Cardozo Law Review of November 2001.

So who is Seligman and what are his qualifications to describe lawyers as unhappy? He is the founder of the positive psychology movement, a sort of turbocharged cognitive behavioural therapy, and unsurprisingly a disciple of Aaron Beck (founding father of cognitive therapy). Seligman is a professor of psychology and former distinguished president of the American Psychological Association.

He advances three principal causes of demoralisation among lawyers:PessimismThis is defined as a pessimistic explanatory style and the tendency to interpret the causes of negative events in stable, global and internal ways. Seligman opines that such pessimism is maladaptive in most areas. Pessimistic life insurance salesmen make fewer sales attempts and pessimistic undergraduates get lower grades. The one exception is represented by lawyers where pessimism becomes prudence, that is the ability or virtue to see snares and pitfalls that might conceivably occur in a transaction. Problems arise, however, because lawyers cannot easily turn off their pessimism (prudence) when they leave the office.

Low decision latitudeThis refers to the number of choices one has, or believes one has. Workers in jobs that involve little or no control are at risk of depression and poor physical health. The classic category here is junior associates in large law firms. Another way of looking at it is the problem of having responsibility for a task without the authority.

Zero-sum gamesSeligman views the adversary process in civil litigation as a classic zero-sum game, so that for every gain by one side there is a counterbalancing loss by the other. According to Seligman, lawyers are trained to be aggressive and this leads to a dog-eat-dog mentality, making lawyers less sympathetic to other people’s troubles and hence less valuable to their clients.

Seligman enthusiastically advocates his own brand of positive psychology and encourages young associates to discover their ‘signature strengths’. So, if you are a stressed out associate in the corporate team of a large law firm and currently between deals, check out the VIA Signature Strengths Survey.

I remain unconvinced by Seligman’s three causes of demoralisation. For one thing, I cannot see how they should be specific to the legal profession. Law firms are not alone in employing workers executing tasks with high responsibility and low authority. Nor does ‘pessimistic prudence’ feature as an exclusive quality of lawyers. It is hopefully a quality of airline pilots and anyone else who has to be careful in what they do. Also, most litigation does not turn out to be a zero-sum game. Lawyers are perfectly capable of assessing litigation risk and reaching a settlement in the vast majority of cases; and for everything else there is mediation.

There are better examples of the causes of lawyer unhappiness. Take the quite common occurrence of the draining effect which results when the lawyer over identifies with his or her client. It is often a difficult balance to achieve – being committed to your client’s cause while not making the client’s problems your own.

I would hope that it is obvious why happiness matters, not just in a law firm but the workplace generally. Basically, if we are happy at work we are more effective and productive. It is also worth making the point that possessing happiness is a desirable objective value in its own right. In the UK this led to the launch in March of the ‘movement for happiness’ by Lord Layard, a founder director of the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE, inventor of ‘happiness economics’ and more commonly known as the (former) government’s ‘happiness tzar’. Lord Layard’s main thesis is that higher remuneration does not necessarily lead to greater contentment. Conversely, the good news in these straitened times is that becoming worse off in real earnings is not going to make us permanently more miserable.

Points of viewIf you have succeeded in reading so far, then your expectation no doubt is some bullet points to make you happy. Something along the lines of: eat your vegetables, go easy on the polyunsaturates, exercise regularly, meditate (double the time for this on difficult days) and get a business coach. (The latter suggestion, in fact, is not fanciful. In their exit interviews the principal reason for leaving given by associates was the lack of coaching or mentoring, according to Levit and Linder). However, you probably already know you should be doing these things.

I shall limit myself to two tips. First, measure your own happiness. The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire can be taken online. Second, finding happiness involves finding out more about yourself. A good jumping off point is the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and you can find out about this on the OPP website. The MBTI is the best-researched psychometric instrument in determining personality type, there are no negatives and, in my experience, lawyers like its structure and theory.

Further readingI propose concluding by some reading recommendations which will hopefully fit your preferred learning style.

At the heavyweight end of the scale must be Daniel Haybron’s The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (2008), published by Oxford University Press. Haybron is an academic philosopher and a lucid thinker when it comes to discussing happiness. Its appeal is to the theorist and it is very definitely not a self-help book. Central to Haybron’s arguments is drawing the distinction between two forms of happiness, namely:

1. What is it for my life to go well for me?

2. What is the state of mind that so many people seek that tends to accompany good fortune, success and so on?

The first proposition encapsulates the notion of flourishing and well-being, the eudemonic happiness advocated by Aristotle and the ancients. The second, refers to happiness in the long-term psychological sense and is the subject matter of all the self help books.

What should concern us as lawyers is that in terms of living the virtuous and flourishing life recommended by the ancients, we could be doing very well and yet be pretty miserable according to the second proposition. Haybron impressively collates all the research to show that contemporary Americans have to cope with high levels of stress in their lives resulting in alarming statistics for medical prescriptions for anxiety and depression disorders. And yet these people can still enjoy high levels of satisfaction with how their lives are going generally.

If your learning style is through the power of narrative, then towards the other end of the scale and good poolside reading is Robin Sharma’s bestseller The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari (2004), published by Element Books. It tells the story of superstar lawyer Julian Mantle who has achieved a stellar reputation with a seven-figure income, even if success comes at a personal cost (‘there were enormous expectations weighing on his Armani-clad shoulders’). Mantle regularly puts in 18-hour days and unwinds by eating late in expensive French restaurants, smoking thick Cuban cigars and drinking cognac after cognac.

Mantle eventually has a dramatic collapse. Fortunately, he recovers and embarks for India where he immerses himself in a psychic bubble bath of Buddhism and Kaizen. Three years later he returns to the law firm and his pleasantly astonished associate, who assesses the new Mantle: ‘He was no longer the anxious "type-A" senior partner of a leading law firm. Instead, the man before me was a youthful, vital – and smiling – model of change.’

And so there is hope for us all. Technically, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari is about living the Aristotelian virtuous life and has less to say about happiness as a psychological state of mind. If you are considering chucking it all in and doing something else then the book may give you something to think about before making a decision.

My personal favourite is The Money or your Life – Reuniting Work and Joy! by John Clark (2000), published by Random House. Clark is a former successful corporate lawyer in a large New Zealand law firm and so speaks from experience. He clearly writes and thinks like a lawyer. He asks whether these descriptions apply to your work:

  • a freely chosen, fluid, life-enhancing activity;
  • a fulfilment of personal growth and self-expression; or
  • a form of leisure, and inherently enjoyable.

If this is not the case then you should do something about it. The book explains how, and there are plenty of good cartoons to illustrate the points being made.

If there is a single big message to take away from all the books, it is to live a life in accordance with your own values.

David Griffiths is of counsel to Geldards and an ADR-accredited commercial mediator

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