High earnings post-law school don’t guarantee satisfaction, says lawyer happiness study
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Would-be lawyers who attend law school with the hopes of a high income might want to readjust their goals, a study on lawyer happiness has found.
Lawyers working in large firms and other prestigious positions aren’t as happy as public service attorneys, according to the study (PDF) published in the George Washington Law Review. And junior partners in law firms were no happier than senior associates, despite the partners’ better pay and enhanced status. Judges, however, had the highest happiness levels.
Given those findings, “encouraging new people to enter the profession for high earnings (even if expectations were accurate) could result in a pool of future attorneys predisposed to disappointment and lower well-being in their careers as well as in law school,” write the study authors, Florida State University law professor Lawrence Krieger and University of Missouri psychology professor Kennon Sheldon.
To test their hypothesis, Krieger and Sheldon asked surveyed lawyers how their actual earnings in their first few years working in law jobs compared to their expectations when they were applying to law school. Fifty-five percent said they earned less or much less than expected, 32 percent earned about what they expected, and about 13 percent earned more or much more than expected.
The study surveyed bar members in four states and had a response rate of 12.7 percent. The study focused on about 6,200 respondents who provided complete data and said they worked as lawyers, judges or in related positions. The ABA Journal covered an earlier version of the study here; the New York Times Well blog has a story on the latest version here.
The study found that the most powerful predictors of lawyer well-being were autonomy, relatedness to others, feelings of competence, and choosing work for internally motivated reasons. “These data consistently indicate that a happy life as a lawyer is much less about grades, affluence, and prestige than about finding work that is interesting, engaging, personally meaningful, and focused on providing needed help to others,” the study says.
The data suggests that would-be law students would be better off choosing a law school for a fit with their personal values and personal learning goals and styles, rather than for prestige or rankings, the authors say.
Wording in second paragraph corrected to read “highest happiness levels” rather than “happiest happiness levels” at 11:20 a.m. A commenter pointed out the error.
