Is Being a Lawyer and Marriage Compatible?
| Author | Brentley Tanner |
| Pages | 16-18 |
16 FAMILY ADVOCATE www.shopaba.org
The alarm goes o early at 5:00 a.m., and you
struggle to nd the snooze button on your cell
phone as you dream of just fteen more minutes
only to be reminded six minutes later that the
snooze button cuts that dream short. You turn o
the alarm on your phone only to see a litany of email
messages that have come into your inbox overnight. Beside
you is your spouse, who like you, is also an attorney in a busy
law practice that neither time nor COVID-19 can stop.
When your spouse wakes up with you, they are bombarded
with the same barrage of demanding clients, never-ending
tasks lists, and court deadlines that make the nine circles of
Dante’s Inferno look like paradise.
And so begins another day, for another dollar, of a
married couple who happen to both be attorneys. e
embrace of a warm bed and the loving exchange between
spouses is substituted with the immediacy of stress, anxiety,
and the unending feeling of rotating around the circle of life
that is a hybrid mixture of a hamster on a wheel and Bill
Murray’s character Phil from the movie Groundhog Day. So
the question for any couple that has one or both lawyer
spouses is: “Is Marriage and Being a Lawyer Compatible?”
Much like the response that is often repeated to clients, the
answer is it depends.
Five Stressors That Destroy a Lawyer Ma rriage
1. Not Setting Boundaries with Clients
Lawyers have a multitude of clients, each with dierent facts,
circumstances, and intricacies that will dictate the path in
which each case will take from beginning to end. But to
some clients, their case is the only case that matters. A select
ensemble of clients expect that the lawyer give their undi-
vided attention to the needs, wishes, and expectations of the
client regardless of other clients, the lawyer’s personal life, or
their well-being so long as the ends justify the means. For
instance, the narcissist client for whom the celestial bodies
Is Being a Lawyer and
Marriage Compatible?
BY BRENTLEY TANNER
circle can never accept anything but a yes that conforms to
the narcissist’s belief on how the case should be conducted.
When a lawyer has one or more clients like this and often
nds themselves dropping everything to fulll client whims,
it can come at the detriment to self-care and other obliga-
tions, including one’s spouse. is is especially true if both
spouses are lawyers who might be representing a demanding
client together or if both spouses have a plethora of demand-
ing clients in their own law practices.
When only one spouse is a lawyer, the nonlaw yer spouse can
have very little understa nding of the time commitment and
emotional toll involved in having a demandi ng client. at very
important client call t hat occurs during the piano recital or the
“emergency” matter that must be heard duri ng the lawyer’s
vacation can quick ly cause even the most tender-hearted
nonlawyer spouse to go into a frenzy. at frenz y, in turn,
causes the law yer spouse to have lukewarm feelings towards
their nonattorney spouse, who clearly ca n never empathize with
how it must feel to fulll t he endless void of client demands in
order to make the living. In the se situations, the chasm caused
by clients can often create such a ga ping hole in the marriag e
that the divide ca n never be converged and repaired.
2. Financial Stress
For most attorneys, the practice of law involves the hustle
and constant business of getting—and keeping—clients who
will pay the fees incurred, which will in turn pay the over-
head, which includes the lawyer’s compensation, which
ultimately covers the lawyer’s household nancial expenses.
Much like reading that sentence was exhausting, so is the
constant “business part” of the practice of law. e hardships
of maintaining a nancially viable law practice can seep into
the marriage of a lawyer. For example, the lawyer’s practice
may be diminishing based on market forces, the downturn of
the economy, or just the inux of self-help groups sponsored
through salacious private enterprises and/or the government.
In those moments, the lawyer can begin to feel the pressure
of not fullling the monetary requisites that will enable the
living accommodations to which their family has become
accustomed. e pressure can be even greater when the
couple lives extravagantly due to one or both spouses’
spending habits. A bad spell in business for those couples can
cause a cataclysmic shift in the accord in the lawyer’s mar-
riage. We know that clients are not immune from marital
issues due to nancial stress; we need to remember that
attorneys are also not immune. If the lawyer and their spouse
have not utilized nancial literacy to control their household
budgeting, the slightest of nancial strains can serve as the
tide that washes away the marital foundation built on sand.
3. Children, Pets, and Activities
I always joke that you can tell how old my children are by
the number of swirls of grey hair that circle my head like the
rings in a tree trunk. Of course, the two children that I have
Published in Family Advocate, Volume 43, Number 3, Winter 2021. © 2021 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof
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