I found this line of Kimber Russel's commentary on the matter especially jarring:
[R]ecognizing that lawyers and law students are depressed is not the solution--we need the legal profession to change, period.Since I'm of the belief that one should actually cure a disease and not just put cosmetics on the collateral symptoms, I'm in full agreement. Post-hoc support groups are not the answer.
I won't pretend to know all of the causes of attorney depression, at least not in this entry, suffice to say that my strong suspicion is that it's the amount of hours "required." It's not just in the law that people who work insanely high amounts of hours - at a desk staring at a screen or dull text, mind you - but the legal field is certainly a recognized forerunner:
What we have in the legal profession is both a collective action problem and an unequal bargaining problem. On the individual level, no non-partner attorney has an incentive to limit his own working hours. And on the firm level, firms have no incentive to limit the billing hours of their associates. But in the big picture, the entire legal system would be better in the aggregate if working hours were curtailed (i.e. lower suicides, more happiness, better health, etc.). The bargaining problem is that young associates seem startlingly similar to industrial revolution workers, regardless of the fact that they wear suits instead of blue collars."When you have an undefinable product, there is a temptation to measure output in terms of hours," she said...
For partners at big law firms, the simplest way to track the performance of junior lawyers is to see who bills the most hours above and beyond what is officially required...
Given these problems, we need a centralized body to say something. We need a maximum hours limitation in the legal profession, either from the government or from some association of attorneys (like a labor union, as they've been effective in protecting working conditions...perhaps some sort of association of bar members could do something about it?)
To be up front, I'm normally more of a libertarian economic mindset than most. I think minimum wage laws and rent/housing assistance are poor policy based on misguided economic premises, for example. But maximum working hours limitations are not economic regulations. They're health regulations, plain and simple. One of the (many) things that made Lochner v. New York such a bad decision is that the Supreme Court couldn't grasp this distinction, and even today people misconstrue health regulations (like FDA food testing) as economic restrictions, especially the wackjob libertarians who lump them all together and cry foul because they'd rather have consistent, absolute beliefs than realistic ones. But I digress.
The point is that working long hours causes demonstrable harm. It did to the bakers forced to inhale dust in Lochner and it does to the lawyers today forced by the systems in place to work 70 hours a week and forgo traditional outlets of stress relief.
We need to collectively realize that a lawyer working 8 good hours on a night of good sleep is probably just as effective as a lawyer working 10-11 hours. We need to realize that from a health and welfare standpoint, a lawyer working 12 hours is no better than a lawyer working 8 hours and getting blasted on meth or crack. We need to realize that a normal human being cannot provide genuinely "competent representation" when writing briefs on arcane federal statutes at 4 a.m. just to keep the hope alive to make partner.
After all, how can a modern profession really have dignity when so many of its members are burnt out, depressed wrecks eerily reminiscent of the pawns in Asian sweatshops, at least mentally? Not even a nice Italian suit and a BMW can cover up being a dreary, suicidal human being.
billable hours stress is 90% self-imposed.
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