Public Interest

Public Interest Lawyers Are Happier

Money actually can buy happiness -- just not much happiness

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Lawyers have a reputation for being miserable. But I’ve never found that stereotype to be true of my coworkers, who have generally (but with notable exceptions) been sociable, smiling, quick-to-laugh types. And now I know that my coworkers probably have been more cheerful than lawyers writ large: a study published last week and profiled in the New York Times shows that public interest lawyers are happier on average than their private-practice contemporaries.

Law Professor Lawrence S. Krieger and Psychology Professor Kennon M. Sheldon took an empirical approach to researching what makes lawyers happy.  They sent out surveys to tens of thousands of lawyers in four geographically and demographically diverse states, received about 7800 responses, and narrowed that set of responses to about 6200 that were complete enough for them to work with. The 6200 respondents whose surveys constituted this “working sample” also turned out to be strongly representative of the universe of American lawyers, in terms of their demographics.

The study turned up some interesting results. For one thing, it turns out that money actually can buy happiness — just not much happiness. The study data showed that both higher income and lower law school debt bore “small-to-moderate correlations” with lawyer well-being. It also turns out that law school ranking has “an almost meaningless correlation” with lawyer happiness, “despite a modest correlation with greater income.”

So a lower debt load increases happiness while law school prestige doesn’t really. This would seem to support my position that it makes sense for prospective public interest lawyers to pass up prestige in favor of scholarship money and a decreased debt load. (One major caveat though, is that the study’s “working sample” included only practicing lawyers, so it’s possible that the data are skewed by the absence of people from lower-ranked schools who never actually found employment as lawyers. Those people may not be all that happy.)

And the study looked at much more than just finances and academic prestige — it also reported on lawyers’ happiness sorted by practice setting. The key finding? “Attorneys in large firms and other prestigious positions were not as happy as public service attorneys, despite the far better [law school] grades and pay of the former group.”

Let’s take a closer look, starting with definitions.

The researchers defined “prestige” positions as those in “law firm settings of 100 or more lawyers; plaintiff’s tort/malpractice law; corporate, commercial, or transactional law; international business and commercial transactions; securities or partnership law; and tax, estate planning, or patent and copyright.” In contrast, “service” positions are the sort that we probably all consider “public interest,” including: “public defender, criminal prosecutor, government agency, legal services to the indigent, and in-house counsel for nonprofit organizations.”

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The researchers then explained how exactly they arrived at the conclusion that “service” lawyers are happier than “prestige” lawyers. Using a social-science measure known as “subjective well-being” as a proxy for happiness, they looked at two main factors: life satisfaction and “affect” or aggregate mood. The “prestige” and “service” groups both reported equal life satisfaction, but, in the researchers’ words, “the ‘service’ lawyers reported significantly higher day-to-day mood, likely from their sense of service and greater enjoyment and perceived meaning in their work.” Factoring in both life satisfaction and mood, the researchers found that “the rather striking net result was greater aggregate well-being for the lawyers in “service” positions.”

This result was teased into some fairly nuanced conclusions. One of the most interesting to me: the stresses of litigation detract from the well-being of “prestige” lawyers, but they don’t affect “service” lawyers in a statistically significant way. Another, perhaps surprising, finding is that working more hours does not detract from happiness (or at least not much), though higher billable-hours requirements do negatively affect well-being.

The researchers also suggested in a footnote that “service” jobs “are typically less competitive and easier to secure (as evidenced by the lowest mean class rank of the three attorney groups)” than other types of legal jobs. Based on admittedly anecdotal evidence, I’m not sure that’s fair to say. I know the numbers are stacked against public-interest job applicants; I just don’t know how those numbers compare to private-practice legal hiring. But I suspect that public interest lawyers’ low “mean class rank” is the result of a different set of hiring criteria for public interest lawyers — one that places a demonstrated commitment to an organization’s cause over more esoteric forms of achievement like law school grades.

It’s also worth noting that the researchers looked at two other groups: judges, who are happier than everyone else, and “other” lawyers — people who aren’t judges, “prestige” lawyers, or “service” lawyers — who are the least happy.

The final takeaway? In the researchers’ words, “These data consistently indicate that a happy life as a lawyer is much less about grades, affluence, and prestige than about finding work that is interesting, engaging, personally meaningful, and focused on providing needed help to others.” And that’s what public interest law is all about.

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What Makes Lawyers Happy?: A Data- Driven Prescription to Redefine Professional Success [George Washington Law Review]

Earlier: How Important Is Prestige To Public Interest Lawyers?

Sam Wright is a dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding-heart public interest lawyer who has spent his career exclusively in nonprofits and government. If you have ideas, questions, kudos, or complaints about his column or public interest law in general, send him an email at PublicInterestATL@gmail.com.

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