News Roundup: Technology and Burnout; Lawyers' Lack of Self-Awareness

This morning I have two sobering stories for your weekend.

The first is from the ABA Journal about a recent report that cited technology and the changing BigLaw model as sources of significant stress and burnout in the legal profession. Kids, if any of you still think the Perry Mason model of legal services is what is common, you need to read this:

“Electronic communication has fueled a culture in which clients want more legal information, answers on the spot, and lawyers who can interpret, rather than simply provide, information,” the report says.The result is more specialization and an emphasis on ability to deliver higher quality services at a lower cost and in less time.
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“Work settings which do not address stressors of the modern practice of law will continue to produce a significant number of lawyers who are depressed, dissatisfied with the quality of their lives, spend too little time with their families and communities, continue to be isolated and show increased levels of depression and addictive behaviors,” the report says.

While the reaction of many who read this may be "no shit, Sherlock," the real question is whether the professional organizations who are supposed to regulate the attorney profession actually do anything about their industry slipping dangerously close to being the white-collar equivalent of a 19th-century textile mill.

Our second article today may point out why so many lawyers may be "depressed, dissatisfied with the quality of their lives, spend too little time with their families and communities, continue to be isolated and show increased levels of depression and addictive behaviors" and not wish to do a damn thing about it.

In his Sunday Reflection (published on a Friday), attorney Glenn Harlan Reynolds delves into the argument of whether America's problems are in having too many lawyers, or in just plain having too many laws. Although I find that a fascinating question (can you say "yes" to both?), what I found most interesting was his discussion of a new book, which I need to find, called "The Lawyer-Judge Bias in the American Legal System" by Ben Barton at Tennessee. This is interesting:

[Barton] notes that in America, pretty much all judges (except for a few justices of the Peace and such) are lawyers. And, after examining the work of judges in a number of different areas, he concludes that judges systematically rule in ways that favor lawyers, and that make the legal system more complex. (And legislators, mostly lawyers themselves, aren't much better).

Barton tells me that his thesis gets two very different reactions depending on the audience: Non-lawyers find it painfully obvious, while most lawyers and legal academics find it shocking and offensive.

"Shocking and offensive?"

Are lawyers - at least the type Barton interviewed - really that incapable of self-criticism? As a lawyer, you have to realize that your entire job is dependent on problem-solving being a byzantine endeavor out-of-reach for normal people who have better things to do than learn the intricacies of American law.

It is "painfully obvious" that one of our government's chief accomplishments over the last sixty years is to make law more needlessly complex; even though there's been minor movements to streamline and make uniform certain areas of the law (like the UCC), often the arrogance of each generation wanting to have its own voice has made multiple conflicting editions (why did we need a 3rd restatement of basic Tort law?) and the federal government's ability to (and stupidity in) drafting 2,000-page laws has created entire armies who do nothing but interpret ERISA or the tax code. And our Supreme Court, supposed to be the exemplars of the legal system, has cast aside brevity as a goal and turned the once-pragmatic exercise of jurisprudence into a labyrinthine exhaustion of bombast.

Lawyers find this "shocking and offensive?" What do you think you get paid for, except to untangle the massive knots? Could there be any less self-awareness than by grown professionals who have no idea why their field has more work than their French or Spanish peers? That don't understand why their profession has expanded exponentially over the last fifty years?

This doesn't make lawyer work any less "valuable," unless you take the absurd position that work has to have some innate value.

But self-awareness is the first step in correcting a problem, in being a contented human being at peace with himself and the world. If lawyers can't even recognize the most basic conditions and causes of their profession, how can they be expected to realize when their work lives resemble that of sweatshop workers? Will they continue to convince themselves that their 75-hour workweeks are more of a normative benefit to society than work that only exists because their predecessors made it for them?

Lawyers, like everyone else, are self-interested. They make more work for themselves and others; fundamentally, they're no different than auto mechanics who find new things wrong with every car that comes in. The only difference is that they do it on a much larger, more damaging scale. Until lawyers realize that fundamental truth about themselves and their peers, I don't see how it can ever be entrusted to self-regulate.