August 19, 2003
Lawyers Questioning , Abandoning Their Profession
Thanks to Howard Bashman for spotting this one before I did:
"Generally speaking, being a lawyer today has become much more demanding, much more stressful, and there is less satisfaction from the work," said Boston lawyer and former Massachusetts Bar Association president Thomas F. Maffei. In Boston, most lawyers know of someone who has recently left the profession or abandoned a big-firm partnership. Bar association officials who track industry trends say former local lawyers have started new careers ranging from rabbi to venture capitalist, English teacher, and romance novelist.The problem, complex and wide ranging, has been building for some time. A Boston Bar Association survey released nearly six years ago concluded that a "significant cross-section of lawyers are dissatisfied with the quality of their professional lives."
The British lawyers at Allen & Overy might want to read this article carefully (see three posts down for British Firm Ups Hours, Angering Associates).
What was traditionally a noble and rewarding profession has been largely converted to a public joke and a personal nightmare by a relatively few lawyers' greed and blind ambition. The Boston Globe reports the story here.
Posted by John 2 at August 19, 2003 12:26 AMJohn, I just added this update to my posting from 8/18 on the Globe article: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ethicalesq/2003/08/18#195
Update (8/19/03): Commenting on the Boston Globe article, LegalReader says "What was traditionally a noble and rewarding profession has been largely converted to a public joke and a personal nightmare by a relatively few lawyers' greed and blind ambition." This Editor believes that it is insufficient loyalty to the client's interests (over the lawyer's financial interests), along with inadequate diligence and competence, on the part of a large percentage of the profession that has made it mistrusted and maligned by the public. This situation is not new, but has existed for centuries. Here in the 3rd Millennium, a more assertive populace and more insistent media coverage have made it more difficult for lawyers to live in denial about the profession's hollow middle, while congratulating themselves on their dignity and social status. We've lost the respect of the public one client at a time and can only regain it one client at a time. The few notorious bad apples need to be rooted out, but they are not the cause of the overall malaise among the legal profession.
Shamelessly Self-Promoting P.S. to LegalReader: If you took our RSS feed, you would have known about the Globe article yesterday morning.
