legal sanity

In a post called Lawyer unhappiness: Chicken Little at law, Stephanie West Allen highlights Robert Ambrogi’s recent reference to a chain of commentary about scholarly work on the subject of lawyer happiness. The chain backtracks from West Allen to Ambrogi to Jeff Lipshaw at the Legal Profession Blog to John Steele from the Legal Ethics Forum.

I enjoyed reading about the studies (and the bloggers’ perspectives on them) and wasn’t surprised to learn that they’ve yielded some inconsistent conclusions.

Over the years, I've discussed the topic of lawyer happiness and unhappiness from many different angles at legal sanity. If you want to conduct a study on satisfied lawyers, you'll find enough of them to gather data on. If you want to study lawyer discontent, you'll find plenty of empirical fodder for your consideration.

To add a different perspective, practitioners (especially newly-minted ones), law firm leaders, law students and their educators would benefit from a new study delineating the specific factors and forces (such as meaning, money, employee engagement initiatives, leadership, client interaction, and flex-time work options) that make or break lawyer happiness today.