Lawyers at the Peak of Their Careers: A 30‐Year Longitudinal Study of Job and Life Satisfaction

• Date: 01 March 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12207
• Published date: 01 March 2019
• Author: John Monahan,Jeffrey Swanson

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies

Volume 16, Issue 1, 4–25, March 2019

Lawyers at the Peak of Their Careers:

A 30-Year Longitudinal Study of Job

and Life Satisfaction

John Monahan*and Jeffrey Swanson

A decade ago, we conducted a 20-year longitudinal study of career and life sat isfaction among

the class matriculating at the University of Virginia School of Law in 1987. Here, we extend

our repeated measures follow-up from 20 to 30 years—from the time when respondents were

a mean of 43 to the time they were a mean of 53 years old. The 2017 survey emp loyed sub-

stantially the same instrument used in 2007, with the addition of a new section assessing

potential period effects occurring over the past decade that might have influenced respon-

dents’ working conditions, including a stronger stress on economic sustainability. The 2017

response rate was 81 percent of those who had responded to the 2007 survey (consti tuting

58 percent of the class matriculating in 1987). We found respondents to have taken diverse

career paths, with no single work setting accounting for more than one-quarter of the respon-

dents and with fully one-third of the respondents changing jobs in the past decade. Marked

gender differences in the professional lives of respondents persisted (e.g., women continued

to be much more likely than men to forego full-time employment “in ord er to care for chil-

dren” (30 percent vs. 4 percent)). Working conditions at large private law firms stayed prob-

lematic, with the portion of respondents negatively affected by a stro nger stress on economic

sustainability being twice as high among those working in large firms (77 percen t) than

among those working in other settings (38 percent). Finally, both career satisfaction and life

satisfaction again were found to be high, with 77 percent of respondents satisfied with the

decision to become a lawyer, and 91 percent satisfied with their lives more broadly.

I. Introduction

A decade ago, we published in this journal research that simultaneously measured the

predictors of lawyers’ satisfaction with their careers and the predictors of lawyers’ sat-

isfaction with their lives more broadly.

1

Our research was longitudinal—the same

*Address correspondence to John Monahan, University of Virginia School of Law,580 Massie Rd., Charlottesville, VA

22903; email: jmonahan@law.virginia.edu. Monahan is John S. Shannon Distinguished Professor of Law, University of

VirginiaSchool of Law;Swanson is Professorin Psychiatry andBehavioral Sciences, DukeUniversity Schoolof Medicine.

For conducting the survey, we thank the University of Virginia Center for Survey Research—Thomas Guter-

bock, and, especially, Matthew Starnowski. At the School of Law, we received much essent ial assistance from Kent

Olson in locating members of the Class of 1990. We are also grateful for the support for this research provided by

Law School Dean Risa Goluboff and by her predecessors Deans Richard Merrill, John Jeffries, and Paul Mahoney.

Alana Harris provided excellent research assistance.

1

John Monahan & Jeffrey Swanson, Lawyers at Mid-Career: A 20-Year Longitudinal Study of Job and Life satisfac-

tion, 6 J. Empirical Legal Stud. 451 (2009).

4

respondents were studied at matriculation to law school and during the three-year

course of their legal education,

2

and again 20 years after they matriculated—

permitting a number of factors relevant to career and life satisfaction to be examined

over time. In the current research, we extend this longitudinal project from 20 to

30 years.

Before describing the study and its findings, we briefly situate them within two dis-

parate research traditions, the body of work specifically addressed to career satisfaction

among lawyers and the empirical literature on life satisfaction. We focus in these sections

on work published in the decade since our last follow-up.

3

A. The Career Satisfaction of Lawyers

There are two literatures on lawyer satisfaction, and their findings differ so starkly that

one might wonder whether they are studying the same phenomenon. The first litera-

ture is vast and much better known both to lawyers and nonlawyers alike. In this body

of work, “lawyers [are] more prone than anyone else to the dangerous disease of

depression,”

4

“drug abuse among America’s lawyers is on the rise and deeply

hidden,”

5

America is experiencing “an epidemic of lawyerly anxiety,”

6

and suicide is

also “an epidemic among lawyers.”

7

Not only do lawyers experience “striking levels of

behavioral health problems,” they do so “while simultaneously refusing to acknowl-

edge or deal with them.”

8

The titles of popular books on the legal profession reflect

the dystopian landscape portrayed by their authors: Way Worse Than Being a Dentist:

2

John Satterfield, John Monahan & Martin Seligman, Explanatory Style Predicts Superior Law School Perfor-

mance, 15 Behav. Sci. & L. 1 (1997). Satterfield et al. studied the “explanatory style” of students in the Class of

1990. Explanatory style, or “the habitual way an individual explains the causes of events” to himself or herself, id at

95, had been found to be useful in predicting success in areas as diverse as undergraduate academic grades, politi-

cal elections, athletic contexts, and many types of jobs. A “pessimistic” explanatory style—a tendency to believe the

cause of negative events to be stable, far reaching, and internal—had been related to depression, passivity, and

poor performance. An “optimistic” explanatory style—a tendency to believe the cause of negative events to be

unstable, highly specific, and external—had been associated with motivation, resiliency, and good performance.

The goal of the Satterfield et al. study was to determine whether this finding could be replicated among law

students.

3

For a review of earlier work, see Monahan & Swanson, n.1.

4

C. Stuart Mauney, The Lawyers’ Epidemic, S.C. Law. January 2012.

5

Eilene Zimmerman, The Lawyer, The Addict, N.Y. Times, July 16, 2017.

6

Leslie Gordon, How Lawyers Can Avoid Burnout and Debilitating Anxiety, ABA J. July 1, 2015.

7

Virginia Bryan, Suicide and the Bar, 37 Mont. Law. 16 (2012).

8

Patrick Krill, The Impaired Professional, Part II: The Attorney as Client: Insights for Understanding an Especially

Challenged and Challenging Population, Counselor, May 2015. Available at http://www.counselormagazine.com/

detailpageoverride.aspx?pageid=1729&id=6442455507.

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