Escaping the Law

A couple of factors have put me in a contemplative mood this morning. The first is an outstanding article by Alec Scott, Exile on Bay Street, which details the life of lawyers in big North American law firms. Second, we arrived in Aberdeen two years ago today. In that time I've had a difficult time answering a common question. Why Aberdeen?

I wanted to escape, just like Scott did. His account focuses on Toronto, but surely echoes the experience of any lawyer in any large law firm in any large North American city.

Here’s what you won’t read in the glossy law school brochures, what many practising lawyers know, but deny: the practice of law has become a lousy way to make a living; it breaks all but the highest spirits. The profession can no longer lay claim to being a calling; it has become a soul-destroying business. The big downtown Toronto firms, which used to draw some of the country’s best and brightest, continue to draw its brightest, but no longer hold on to its best. The cynics flourish, while the ideal­ists lag, jump ship or, unable to beat the cynics, join their ranks.

Unfortunately I think that may be exactly right. The billable hour system has taken hold because it allows these large firms to make extraordinary sums of money.

Being a lawyer in 2007 means being a slave to the billable-hour system. Most downtown firms have actual or de facto billable targets for associates ranging from 1,800 to 2,000 hours per year. Not, seemingly, too high a bar, but usually you have to work three hours to produce two hours of billings. “Not long ago, billable at these levels would have been thought unbearable,” wrote Notre Dame law school associate professor Patrick Schlitz in a much discussed Vanderbilt Law Review article published in 1999. Before the billable-hour system became common, companies and individuals with ongoing legal issues would pay a retainer annually to firms for their counsel. Others without regular legal problems would be billed roughly on the thickness of their files—as good a measure as any of the quantity of work put in.

In most big firms now, partner salaries are linked to the number of hours they and associates assigned to their files log. And thus, partners have a financial incentive to drive their associates to bill long hours. A modest proportion of the profits earned is returned to the young lawyer. In blunt terms, what we’re talking about is a pyramid scheme.

Lawyers divorce, commit suicide (or think about it) and suffer from depression at unusually high rates. The legal profession “is one of the most unhappy and unhealthy on the face of the earth,” Schlitz wrote. Some 15 per cent of lawyers in a Washington-based survey were full-blown alcoholics. Over half the lawyers surveyed in a California poll said if they had to do it over again, they wouldn’t go into law. Forty per cent of North Carolina lawyers would never recommend that their children go into it.

Said one lawyer,

“If you want to be a success downtown,” New Father carps, “then go to U of T, take all the corporate law courses, work your ass off, go to Oslers, work your ass off again, and 20 years from now you can look around and say, ‘I have more money than God.’ But let me ask you something: what’s in your photo album?”

The indicators of success as a PhD student are much different than for those who took this path. Shifting gears was difficult for me. It took me a year to be comfortable doing my own thing, and learning to ignore bad advice and silly people. I decided to go in a different direction, but I couldn't do it without the support of Joni who saw how unhappy I would be working like many of my former classmates are now.

Without question all of this appears gloomy, and I do admit I could think of happier matters. In writing this I've been pulled this way and that by conflicting impulses. It's a personal post, which perhaps should not be inflicted on others.

I consider many folks here great colleagues, and I'm fortunate to count many of them as friends. There are others for whom I've had to reserve an empty smile and little else. But even on my worst day as a PhD student when the weather and Aberdonians are doing their worst, it makes for a much better life than the soul-crushing plight of many of my law school classmates. Law teaching is a loophole in life. I don't think many here realize how lucky they are to live in Europe, and in some cases to get paid to think and write about whatever they find interesting.