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Reinventing The Law Business: Are Lawyers Only Happy When They're Miserable?

According to managing partner Bruce Stachenfeld, if you're unhappy with your work/life balance, maybe you just need to change your perspective.

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I am famous for a saying. Actually I am not really famous, but I have a saying that I have been, well, saying for years, as follows:

“Lawyers are only happy when they’re miserable.”

What I mean is this: You are working round-the-clock so much you haven’t even been home for a full day and hardly at all for a month on a doozie of a deal. You are completely sick of it. All you can think of is when the deal will be “over.” You are clearly “miserable.” If only you could have your personal life back! Then, finally, the deal closes — at last. Your client is wiring out the funds. As the transfer of funds is happening, a (terrible) thought races through your mind. You hate yourself for the thought — you try not to have the thought — but you simply can’t help it… and the thought is that you are kind of worried because you have nothing to do now and that is disquieting… gee, what if work has really slowed… at some point this will be a real problem. You’ve had your personal life back for maybe a second — you haven’t even taken a shower — and you are worrying where your next deal will come from.

Or the other way around. Work has been slow — very slow — for a couple of months. You have enjoyed some rounds of golf and gone out to a bunch of dinners and lunches, but you really would like a nice tricky and challenging deal to sink your teeth into. And of course you are mindful of the fact that like it or not lawyers just have to bill hours. That is how we make a living, and you just aren’t billing hours. Not a good thing. You are edgy — if only you could have a big deal to work on….

The final lament is that work is so damned inconsistent. One day you have nothing to do, and the next day you are swamped. There is no consistency, and therefore it is hard to make plans — it is hard to commit to pilates or pottery class or even going to the gym regularly or anything that requires regular attendance. If only you could have a regular life; however, you know full well that the cutting-edge stuff, the cool stuff, doesn’t fit into regular scheduling. We must always respond to someone’s emergency as that is what a service business is. How often has a client uttered the following three words: “take your time”?

So what should we do about this? Can anything be done about it, or are we lawyers going to have the ultimately pathetic lives, only “happy” when we are “miserably” overworked?

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Dang it — I am not going through life that way — no way. And I urge the rest of the lawyers at my firm — and anyone else reading this — to avoid this terrible fate.

But avoiding this negative energy spiral is no easy feat. The fact remains that we are in a service business and we either do an awesome job for our clients — on their unpredictable time frames — or we lose our clients to other law firms that will make the necessary sacrifices. Just saying “no” to the clients or colleagues who make the time demands won’t work. And neither will being miserable and stressed out. Here is another plan.

Let’s say you re-engineer your own brain. Start by looking inside to find what you really “want” out of life.

Do you want a nine-to-five kind of boring job with unchallenging work? Most of us don’t want that. This is one of the reasons we became lawyers in the first place — because the work is incredibly interesting and challenging.

Conversely, do you want a life where you work round the clock, albeit on interesting and challenging matters, so hard that even your health starts to go? I would think you don’t want that either. At some point the work just isn’t fun any more and your job just stinks.

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So how about you just flip your brain around. Instead of looking at the negatives, start looking at the positives of each work phase? This is the trick.

I think of it like a (kind of dorky) metaphor that you are floating down a river. Sometimes you are just floating along and sometimes there are rapids. If you just floated along you would get bored, and if there were rapids all the time you would eventually burn out from the excitement and stress. But if you have a mix, it is kind of perfect, isn’t it? When you go on a raft down a river, isn’t that what you want — a combination of floating and rapids? And isn’t that what you really want out of life in the first place — relaxation and excitement?

So — ummmmm — you have exactly that as a lawyer! You get some down time and you get some crazy overwork time. How about if:

The crazy times are thrilling — like you were shooting the rapids — or going into battle like Navy Seals with your “best buds” — or going to climb a mountain you always wanted to climb with your closest friends. You can pick your metaphor, but the idea is that this is the spice of life — doing cool stuff. Think of how proud you will be in closing the mega-deal you are working on — and think of how incredibly interesting it is — and think about how you are working with your best friends in pulling it off.

And the non-crazy times are like going on vacation. You get to relax and not kill yourself for a while. You can enjoy hanging around with your best friends in the office — going out to nice lunches — going to pilates and pottery and the gym — and maybe just enjoy the feeling of satisfaction you get from the incredible work you just did.

If you can train your mind to think this way, then you have transformed a miserable job that you hate into the coolest and best job in the world — just like that. With just a reboot of how you look at things.

Is this doable, or am I just living in fantasyland? I think this is eminently doable. It works for me, if that means anything. Of course not perfectly — I get a bit stressed in both directions — but I also enjoy both the up-time and the down-time. And I am very pleased to have had such an exciting career. Lastly, I will be damned if I am going to go through life miserable in my job if there is anything I can do about it.

But before we toast victory here, there is a critical ingredient that needs to be added before this actually can work. If you look at what I wrote above, there is a little tiny phrase in there that is necessary. Can you see what it is if you go back before reading the next paragraph?

It is that you are with your “best friends.” I think this is necessary. If you are floating down the river or shooting the rapids with people you either don’t like or are kind of strangers to you or people you don’t connect with, I don’t think it is that much fun at all. You have to be with your friends, and then it all comes alive.

What this means is that the place you work has to have some energy and excitement to it in a way that connects people together so that they can come to respect and like each other. The firm has to have a common goal and a feeling that we are all in this together. If not, I think that even the river metaphor becomes kind of an empty existence. The overall point is:

Work at a law firm in which the firm and the people are connected with a common goal that brings everyone together.

Instead of making yourself miserable by looking at the negatives of “overwork” and “not enough work,” look for and enjoy the positive aspects of each work mode of your job.

You can have an awful lot of fun in your job even if your job is being a lawyer at a top legal practice in New York City.

Finally, to end, I will mention what we do at our firm. Sometimes we are working round the clock — it happens, often at year-end but at other times too. When this happens, our Hedgehog Committee kicks into action. They serve gourmet dinners every night and sometimes ice cream and similar stuff like that shows up in the afternoons. Our Hedgehog Committee has even arranged for chair massages to be available on particularly grueling days! We all try to have as much fun and excitement as possible. Instead of getting mean and nasty, we try to think of ourselves as being on a mission with our “best buds,” and in the middle of it all, we try to take at least a few minutes each day to enjoy each other and to remind ourselves that we are here helping each other to accomplish something great. Does this happen perfectly? Of course not — there are really rough and stressful days — who is kidding whom — but we do our best to try to have a good time even when we are overworked and highly stressed.

So I admit I made up the saying that lawyers are only happy when they are miserable, but I don’t believe it has to be that way.

Bruce Stachenfeld is the managing partner of Duval & Stachenfeld LLP, which is an approximately 70-lawyer law firm based in midtown Manhattan. The firm is known as “The Pure Play in Real Estate Law” because all of its practice areas are focused around real estate. With over 50 full-time real estate lawyers, the firm is one of the largest real estate law practices in New York City. You can contact Bruce by email at thehedgehoglawyer@gmail.com.

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