From the President

• Jurisdiction: Wyoming,United States
• Citation: Vol. 40 No. 1 Pg. 10
• Publication year: 2017
• Pages: 10
• Year: 2017
• topic: Business of Law,Civil Procedure

From the President Vol. 40 No. 1 Pg. 10 Wyoming Bar Journal February, 2017

Why Practice Law?

John A. Masterson Welborn Sullivan Meck & Tooley P.C. Casper, Wyoming

If you take an old lawyer joke and apply the results of the Wyoming State Bar's last Quality of Life Survey, it would go like this:

What do you call 100 lawyers in a room?

• 57 people who, if they could maintain their financial situation, would leave the practice of law;

• 53 people who don't believe the financial benefit of being a lawyer justifies the personal impact of a legal practice;

• 61 people who believe that the amount of work-related stress in their lives is unhealthy for them.

This edition of your Bar magazine is dedicated to bringing you tales of people who graduated from law school but for various reasons, elected not to pursue a career practicing law. Everyone has a different tale of why he made the decisions he did—not only to go to law school in the first place but also to graduate and not practice.

But why would otherwise intelligent people^[1] put themselves through three brutal years of class, study and testing and then decide to skip doing what you worked so hard to...