“Get A Life!”: Searching For Fulfillment in the Practice of Law
by Carl Horn, III

Editor’s Note: Carl Horn III has served as a U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Western District of North Carolina since 1993. A former Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney (1987 - 1993), Judge Horn spent the first eleven years after law school graduation in private practice and as counsel to two national non-profit organizations. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including the Fourth Circuit Criminal Handbook, now in its 10th edition, and is a frequent speaker at CLE and other bar-related functions. His latest book is LawyerLife: Balancing Life and a Career in Law.

Thanks to Dan Lukasik for the invitation to write this guest article for his website, and for his pioneer efforts in behalf of lawyers, judges, and law students suffering with depression. It is a privilege to make a small contribution to this very important work.

As many visiting this website know, the study and public discussion of lawyers suffering from depression is a relatively recent phenomenon. I do not recall hearing a word about it – or, for that matter, about related topics such as work/life balance or alcohol and substance abuse – during my law school years (1973-76). In fact, it was well into the 1980s before troubling trends in the legal profession generally, or the decline in quality of the professional lives of individual practitioners, began to be addressed in any significant way. Thankfully, we have come a long way in the interim – as evidenced by this very website – a thought that struck me when I was recently invited to speak at a law school on what the ABA has in the last year or two designated “Law Student Mental Health Day.”

I. Troubling Trends

A. A Profession In Crisis?

Older lawyers will remember a time when the legal profession was generally considered a “high calling”– when individual practitioners were not only regarded as skilled problem solvers engaged in respectable public service, but also had time to serve on a variety of non-profit boards or even in local public office. Those were the times, of course, before six figure starting salaries, ever increasing student debt, and billable hour expectations that either make liars or lifeless drones out of many practitioners. Now that’s depressing!

Beginning with the1993 publication of Yale Law School Dean Anthony Kronman’s book (The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of The Legal Profession) there has been a steady stream of scholarly and professional commentary chronicling these troubling trends and making recommendations for reform. Dean Kronman surprised many by diagnosing “a spiritual crisis” in which “the profession stands in danger of losing its soul.” Harvard Law Professor Mary Ann Glendon was no less direct in her 1994 book (A Nation Under Lawyers), describing our profession as then “on the edge of chaos.” And you can almost hear Sol M. Linowitz “weeping between the lines” in The Betrayed Profession: Lawyering of the End of the Twentieth Century, also published in 1994. Linowtiz – a successful Wall Street lawyer, former U.S. Ambassador, and then Chairman of Xerox Corporation – laments the transformation of the profession he so loved into an increasingly unprincipled, dollar-driven business.

Around the same time these scholarly critiques of the profession were published, polls and surveys found decreasing professional satisfaction and increasing personal dysfunction – including major depression – on the part of individual practitioners. I happened to be in California in 1995 when the Los Angeles Times ran a front page article entitled “Miserable With The Legal Life” in which it reported, inter alia, that 25% of the lawyers in that state were then on inactive status. The next year, 3000 miles away in Boston, the Women’s Bar Association of Massachusetts chose “The Misery Factor” as the theme for its annual meeting. Professor Glendon, having heard the collective voices of unhappy lawyers before many others, plaintively asks in her book, “Why are so many lawyers so sad?” And lawyer-turned-psychotherapist Benjamin Sells gives part of the answer in his fine book (The Soul of the Law: Understanding Lawyers And The Law, published in 1994): “Lawyers today are lonely, painfully lonely.”

B. Surveys and Studies

The results of the 1990 Johns Hopkins study of the incidence of major depressive disorder (MDD) in 104 different occupations – including the professions – is often referenced in the literature addressing lawyer dissatisfaction and dysfunction. As many readers will know, the Johns Hopkins research found that law was one of only five occupations in which the occurrence of MDD exceeded ten percent – and that lawyers topped even this list, suffering from major depression “at a rate 3.6 times higher than non-lawyers who shared their same socio-economic traits.”

The most comprehensive national data regarding lawyer satisfaction/dissatisfaction was gathered by the American Bar Association in surveys conducted in 1984 and 1990. What these surveys found, in a nutshell, was a 20-percent drop – during these six years alone – in the number of lawyers describing themselves as “very satisfied.” During the same period the percentage of lawyers describing themselves as “dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” rose sharply. Those conducting the surveys recognized the startling implications of this negative trend, convening a national conference in 1991 which it called “At The Breaking Point: The Emerging Crisis in the Quality of Lawyers’ Health and Lives, and Its Impact on Law Firms and Client Services.”

Even before the ABA’s second survey and its 1991 national conference, surveys by state bar organizations had reached similar conclusions. For example, in 1988, the Maryland State Bar Association’s “Committee on Law Practice Quality” conducted more than 1,000 telephone interviews with lawyers from various locations and law firm sizes, asking each interviewee 142 questions. The conclusion: “almost a third of the respondents were not sure they wanted to keep on practicing law,” and “[s]ixty-nine percent of the lawyers fell into the range of [only] somewhat satisfied to completely dissatisfied with the way their work lives mesh with their personal, family, social and civic lives....” Surveys of New Jersey, California and North Carolina lawyers around the same time were in accord.

It is noteworthy that the North Carolina survey was the result of the most extreme indicator of depression – eight lawyer suicides in Charlotte (my hometown) during a seven-year period. In response the North Carolina Bar Association created a “Quality of Life Task Force,” which in 1989 conducted what was then the most comprehensive survey of any state bar. In addition to generally noting “a severe level of dissatisfaction with law practice among some attorneys and lost dreams and idealism among many others,” the survey found:
• Twenty-four percent of North Carolina’s lawyers would not become lawyers if they could make the decision again;
• Only 54 percent wished to remain in law practice for the remainder of their careers;
• More than 24 percent reported symptoms of depression “at least three times per month during the past year,” with 11 percent reporting they had considered suicide at least once a month during the same year; and
• Forty-three percent agreed the demands of work did not allow them “to have enough time for life outside of work.”

II. Professional Satisfaction and Personal Peace: Are They Possible?

A. Defining The Issues

There is little question at this point that the practice of law has significantly changed in the past several decades, or that an increasing number of lawyers are dissatisfied with their professional lives. A smaller percentage of the dissatisfied are downright miserable – and no doubt many if not most of these are “clinically depressed.”

Because frustration is indeed a function of expectation, it is important that we have realistic expectations, and that we ask the right questions. The expectation, for example, that we can take a firm that demands 2,000 plus billable hours each year and make it feel like the practice of law in a small or medium size town in the fifties or sixties is not remotely realistic. On the other hand, asking whether there are choices we can make, or changes we and/or our law firms can adopt, which will restore a significant measure of professional fulfillment, work/life balance, and personal peace is both realistic and utterly necessary.
Before we briefly consider what I have called in LawyerLife (partly tongue in cheek) “the world’s first twelve step program exclusively for lawyers,” can we agree that it is realistic to strive for what Donna M. Killoughey describes in Breaking Traditions: Work Alternatives for Lawyers as a lawyer’s likely experience of “yesteryear”? Acknowledging that “it has never been easy to practice law,” Ms. Killoughey wrote in 1993 that “20 or even thirty years ago it was at least predictable that a lawyer would:
• be fairly content practicing law;
• have a supportive network of family, professional colleagues, clients, and friends;
• be acquainted with adversaries and friends of adversaries;
• remain at the same place of employment for many years;
• make a good salary; and
• be respected in the community.”

In other words, as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, most lawyers had respectable work/life balance and were more or less satisfied with their professional lives. Assuming it is realistic to strive for a comparable professional and personal experience today, let us now turn our attention to choices and principles which will facilitate our getting there.

B. Positive Steps Toward Fulfillment in Law and in Life

Step One: Face the facts. Every 12 – step program begins with an exhortation to the targeted group to acknowledge they have a problem which needs to be addressed. We have already touched on the scholarship, polls, and surveys that show troubling trends, dissatisfaction, and personal dysfunction in the legal profession. Are you on the unhappy side of these statistics? Even if you are not currently depressed, are there aspects of your professional experience that trouble you? How are you doing in light of your own values, standards, and priorities? Are you pleased with your work/life balance? Are you satisfied with what you are doing to nurture relationships that are most important to you, including relationships with family and close friends? If you were to give yourself a “happiness check,” where would you be on a one-to-ten scale? Do you feel good about where you are professionally and personally, and where your life appears to be going?

We must each face these facts, and not just once but on a regular basis. Lawyers who refuse to introspect from time to time are far more likely to experience what Dr. Benjamin Sells has described as “the lingering feeling of emptiness despite material success.” Instead, take step one: ask these hard questions of yourself and acknowledge the challenges your candid answers present.

Step Two: Establish clear priorities. Continuing in a realistic and honest vein, practicing law has always been a challenging, time-consuming, and emotionally taxing undertaking. The old saw that “the law is a jealous mistress” predates many of the less agreeable features of contemporary practice, hearkening back to a time when a majority of lawyers were solo practitioners or had one or two partners. And yet it is undeniable that the economics of contemporary practice, the demands of clients, and technology that makes it ever more difficult to place reasonable limits on when we “work” have resulted in increased stress and a sense that there is never enough time. Indeed, many contemporary lawyers identify with Jonathan Foreman’s description of his experience as an associate in a large New York firm as being “a six figure wage slave.”

So what do we do? How do we realistically draw appropriate lines in the proverbial sand, telling those with whom we work, “Sorry, that part of me is not for sale.” Or “I’ll get to that as soon as I can, but right now I promised my daughter I’d be at her soccer game.” You get the picture.

In LawyerLife I tell the stories of a number of lawyers who have managed to establish clear priorities – often after realizing the disastrous life consequences of failing to do so. One story I don’t tell is Keith Tart’s life-changing experience (because he related it to me after the book was published). Keith was with a large firm and had a national practice which had led to his admission in over 20 state and federal courts – so you can imagine how much time he spent at home. His wake up call came after one particularly long trip when he saw a picture his young daughter had drawn of her family – and noticed right away that he was not in the picture. The family dog was, but he wasn’t! Suffice it to say that this poignant reminder of what is most important resulted in major changes in that lawyer/father’s life.

Step Three: Develop and practice good time management. This is important, although it certainly isn’t rocket science. The resources are out there – including books, commentary, and consulting services – to insure that whatever time we devote to our work is arranged for maximum productivity. One book I have found particularly helpful is Alec MacKenzie’s The Time Trap, first published in 1990 by the American Management Association – especially MacKenzie’s insightful discussion of “the top 20 time wasters.” Margaret S. Spencer’s work in this area is well known and is expressly tailored to the demands of a busy law practice. You can read her commentary (see, for example, her contribution to the ABA’s 1997 publication, Living with the Law: Strategies to Avoid Burnout and Create Balance), or you can retain her consulting services. And see Chapter 4 of LawyerLife for my own practical time management recommendations.

Step Four: Implement healthy lifestyle practices. I believe it was the North Carolina Bar Association’s 1989 survey and 1991 report that first explored and commended “healthy lifestyle practices” to lawyers in particular. Readers will probably not be surprised that “regular exercise” was the healthy practice with the highest correlation to lawyers who reported a sense of “subjective well-being.” According to the report, the other regular practices that were predictors of a sense of professional and personal “well-being” (in order of importance) were: religious practice, having hobbies, engaging in outdoor recreation, pleasure reading, and taking weeks of vacation. In a word, the lawyers with other interests – these who successfully resisted the “all work and no play” syndrome – also considered themselves the happiest. (Of course, healthy eating and drinking habits and getting enough sleep are also crucial “healthy lifestyle practices.”)

For those interested in exploring these issues in greater depth I heartily recommend Steven Keeva’s excellent book, Transforming Practices: Finding Joy and Satisfaction in the Legal Life. Keeva, the former Assistant Managing Editor of the ABA Journal, also has a website (http://www.transformingpractices.com) where a number of his engaging articles are posted.

Step Five: Live beneath your means. Much like “work expands to fill the time,” leaving us with a sense that there is never enough time, our needs and wants tend to consume all available resources and – when we charge or borrow to make purchases – even anticipated future resources. If we do not recognize and curb this natural tendency to live beyond our means, we not only bring a great deal of unhealthy stress and pressure into our lives; we severely limit our personal and professional choices. (“How can I possibly change career directions – if it means for a time I will make less money – when I’m barely paying the bills now?”)

Breaking entrenched spending habits requires discipline and to some extent swimming against a powerful stream, but it will in the end yield more freedom and a heightened sense of well-being. Get out of debt. Save. Adopt the attitude that “I can afford it when I can pay for it.” Try to avoid borrowing money to purchase depreciating assets. Resist the relentless allure of consumerism or otherwise buying into a lifestyle which you cannot yet afford (and, if that is the case, which is unlikely to make you as happy as you think it will in any event). Choose freedom by living beneath your means.

Step Six: Don’t let technology control your life. In 2000, the ABA published a study entitled “The Pulse of the Profession” (hereafter “Pulse Study”) in which it identified “pressure points” in the contemporary practice. One of the highlighted pressure points was technology that makes it increasingly difficult to ever really get away from the demands of the office. Calling our growing dependence on technology “a blessing and a curse,” the Pulse Study explained the resulting pressures thus:
• Lawyers feel compelled to stay up on technology, yet they don’t know where to turn.
• Lawyers are . . . finding it increasingly difficult to mentally disengage or escape from work when at home or on vacation.
• Less-personalized communication both diminishes lawyers’ ability to develop relationships with clients and can lead to miscommunication.
• Work itself has become more rushed and less considered.
• Instantaneous access to information pushes performance standards higher:

• Clients expect fast turnaround on research and the remittance of documents
• Courts and clients expect legal work to reflect the most up-to-date decisions posted on the Internet.
Or as one lawyer who was interviewed for the Pulse Study put it, today the problem has become “too much information” requiring hours each week, for example, just going through emails.

At some point before we drown in the never ending flow of information and demands on our time, we have to say enough is enough. Turn off the computer during your “down time.” Let the answering machine take messages. Resist the efforts of partners or clients who would have you available 24/7. Again, as with the time we devote to work generally, we each must learn to draw appropriate lines, clearly communicating what part of us is and is not “for sale.” Our mental and emotional health absolutely requires it!

Step Seven: Care about character and conduct yourself accordingly. Writing in the Vanderbilt Law Review in 1999, Notre Dame Law Professor Patrick J. Schiltz warned law students that they were likely to “start acting unethically” by fudging on their time sheets. Then, Professor Schiltz cautioned, the inaccuracies in billing would become easier and easier to rationalize until “before long...you will be stealing from your clients almost every day, and you won’t even notice it.” A frightening insight, but sadly true for many who live by the billable hour.

If our aim is fulfillment in the practice of law, or in life in general, we should stay off this “slippery slope” altogether. If we steal from our clients, a little or a lot, it will become increasingly difficult to feel good about what we do for a living, to “look ourselves in the mirror,” or to sleep well at night. The same goes for lying or intentionally misleading our adversaries or the court. Unless we commit ourselves to scrupulous honesty and unassailable ethics we are likely to become cynical about the whole idea of right and wrong, condemning at least in our minds “moral absolutists” who would dare take issue with our real-world “pragmatism.” And an overall sense of professional fulfillment, difficult to achieve at best, will become more elusive still.

Do not let that happen to you. Be a person of your word. Develop a reputation as one who keeps promises. Practice civility. Treat others like you want to be treated. Be considerate of others, including those who work in your own office. Return phone calls as promptly as possible. Avoid unnecessary abrasion and hostility in your professional communications. Counter what the ABA Pulse Study called the “erosion of ...common courtesy,” which has led to a “less pleasant and more stressed work environment” for many lawyers. In short, care about character – and conduct yourself accordingly.

Step Eight: “Just say no” to some clients. Ambassador Linowtiz has it right when he exhorts lawyers “not [to] undertake the representation of someone [they] do[ ] not trust and whose story [they] do [ ] not believe.” For a more colorful way of making this point, see my summary in LawyerLife of Walt Bachman’s explanation of “The APC Factor” (in his book, Law v. Life: What Lawyers Are Afraid To Say About The Legal Profession, unfortunately now out-of-print).
It is noteworthy the ABA Pulse Study identified “increasingly demanding clients” as “Pressure Point #2” in contemporary practice. According to Steven Keeva, many lawyers have realized this and are now choosing their clients more carefully. You will increase your chances of professional fulfillment if you follow their example.

Step Nine: Stay emotionally healthy. How we spend the days and hours of our lives is not the only balance we must strike. Finding balance between the rational/cognitive left-brain elements of human experience – where many lawyers are at their best – and the “softer” right-brain aspects of human experience, including feelings, emotion, “heart,” and imagination, is just as important. Lawyers who achieve professional success, but who are not emotionally balanced and healthy will at some point realize “something is missing.” Some, like Dan Lukasik, see professional help which is more likely where there is clinical depression, a failed marriage, or some other personal crisis. Others muddle along in what Benjamin Sells calls “a state of mild torpor” for years. As Dr. Sells analyzes the problem, by prolonged overemphasis on the rational and the argumentative, many lawyers:  "have become abstracted from the world of actual experience . . . .
Whether in terms of feeling like a fungible component in a big law
firm machine, or a sideline spectator of one’s own family life, or like an amoral technician servicing the bottom line . . . lawyers feel dissociated from daily life – including themselves."

The antidote to this kind of detached and lonely experience, also according to Dr. Sells, is for "lawyers... to educate their passions and invigorate their imaginations with the same dedication they
apply to sharpening their analytical skills.”

An excellent resource to help with this emotional tune up is George W. Kaufman’s book, The Lawyer’s Guide To Balancing Life and Work: Taking the Stress Out of Success. Noting the importance of “intimacy” to happiness, Kaufman notes, “When I began my career [following graduation from Yale Law School in 1962], I assumed that success would yield happiness. It doesn’t. If happiness is to be a career goal, it must be separately addressed.” In his writing and in the seminars he conducted Kaufman effectively promotes emotional health through a series of simple exercises. Steven Keeva’s book and articles, which I have already recommended, also address the importance of what he calls “inner work” in a thoughtful and effective way.

Step Ten: Embrace law as a “high calling.” In The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession, Yale Law School Dean Anthony Kronman contends that “[t]he [spiritual] crisis [in the legal profession] has been brought about by the demise of an older set of values that until quite recently played a vital role in defining the aspirations of American lawyers.” According to Dean Kronman, at the heart of this “older set of values” was an assumption that the best lawyer was “not simply an accomplished technician but a person of prudence or practical wisdom as well . . . a wisdom about human beings and their tangled affairs that anyone who wishes to provide real deliberative counsel must possess.” Dean Kronman’s perception is my own. “To those who shared this view,” he urges, “it seemed obvious that a lawyer’s life could be deeply fulfilling. For the character-virtue of practical wisdom is a central human excellence that has an intrinsic value of its own. So long as the cultivation of this virtue remained an important professional ideal, lawyers could therefore be confident that their work had intrinsic value, too.”

Lovely old words: wisdom, ideal, virtue, human excellence, character. And although they are probably not words that come immediately to mind when the contemporary lawyer is considered, they are certainly the higher truths to which much else in the practice of law was once intimately connected. Nor is the connection to these ideals – this “high calling” – entirely lost. Indeed, those who think otherwise should take time to read the inspiring “oral histories” of contemporary lawyers and judges reported by Professor Walter Bennett in his excellent and insightful book, The Lawyer’s Myth: Reviving Ideals in the Legal Profession.

Dean Kronman is correct in connecting the collapse of historical ideals to the loss of “the professional self-confidence they once sustained.” It follows, if we are to have realistic hopes for regaining “professional self-confidence,” that we must reaffirm ideals and principles that transcend narrow self-interest – including our individual and professional commitment to the “common good.” We must not allow the legal profession to become an amoral, dollar-driven business; indeed, we should not be afraid to make value-based decisions or give advice grounded in moral conviction. In short, if we are to find fulfillment in our professional lives, we must embrace law as a high calling.

Step Eleven: Be generous with your time and money. As Steven Keeva observes in Transforming Practices: Finding Joy and Satisfaction in the Legal Life, “[i]n every tradition that emphasizes the importance of the inner life, compassion and service are held up as preeminent virtues.” In contrast, be correctly cautious, “[t]oday’s lawyers, being overwhelmingly inclined to minimize the importance of their inner experiences, are more apt to see personal enrichment as their purpose, at least in their professional lives,” failing to develop what he calls a “helping heart.” Step Eleven calls on us to reverse this trend and, like our professional forbears, to put public service, compassionate empathy, and enlightened generosity at the heart of our professional and personal lives.

Someone has said that we make a living in what we receive, but a life by what we give. Thus, as I note in LawyerLife, it is no coincidence that the words “miser” and “miserable” come from the same Latin root. The essential point: lawyers who eschew the narrow view of law as primarily a way to accumulate wealth (or power or influence), choosing instead to be generous givers of their time and resources, are far more likely to experience what Steven Keeva calls: “joy and satisfaction in the legal life.”
Step Twelve: Pace yourself for a marathon. If you embrace and strive to take Steps One through Eleven, you will soon realize that this is not a quick fix, but a life-long undertaking. Or, to use an athletic metaphor, this is not a dash or even a 10K race; taking these steps is more a kin to training for a marathon.

In a sense, applying the earlier points and principles will often result in the steady pace to which we aspire. Establishing clear priorities that balance our professional and personal lives, practicing effective time management, implementing healthy lifestyle practices, resisting the most intrusive technology, recognizing and dealing with excessive stress, and being more selective about clients are each important steps toward our last objective: a measured and sustainable pace.

Conversely, if you are working so many hours that you consistently come home exhausted (or are so distracted you cannot enjoy family or friends outside of work); if you have not established clear priorities – or your time allocations do not reflect those priorities; if you are a poor manager of your time; if you do not get regular exercise; if your consumer spending is out of control; if you can never get away from the cellphone and computer for necessary “down time”; or if stress is eating you up, you must dealt with these foundational issues first. Any of these, left unattended for too long, is inconsistent with our ultimate goal, which is a healthy and well-balanced life.

Finally, keep in mind as you take these important steps toward health and balance a point that Professor Alan Dershowtiz makes in Letters To A Young Lawyer and Dr. Amiram Elwork makes in Stress Management For Lawyers: How To Increase Personal And Professional Satisfaction

In The Law, namely, that we are striving for “balanced excellence,” not for perfection. Perfection is an unrealistic – indeed an impossible – goal; and therefore, as Dr. Elwork puts it, “[s]ince perfection does not exist, perfectionists are doomed to be perpetually frustrated.” And with that final point I will close by extending heartfelt best wishes to each reader for many years of personal and professional success – “properly defined,” of course. Carpe diem!

Carl Horn, III is a U.S. Magistrate Judge in Charlotte, NC. He can be contacted by e-mail at chorn@ncwd.net or by telephone at (704) 350-7470. The themes in this article are developed in greater detail in LawyerLife: Finding a Life and a Higher Calling in the Practice of Law (ABA Publishing 2003), which can be ordered by clicking on the link or by calling 1-800-285-2221 (ask for Product Code 1610024); from the ABA’s website (www.ababooks.org); or by writing Publications Orders, P.O. Box 10892, Chicago, IL 60610-0892.