Deaths, Health / Wellness

In A Punishing Profession, Too Many Lawyers Are Paying The Ultimate Price

The difference between heeding the warnings and missing the signals can be life and death.

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“Best friends with the thing that’s killing me / Enemies with my best friend, there’s no healing me.”  — Macklemore

Yesterday, Robin Young, host of National Public Radio’s (NPR) Here and Now radio show, interviewed Eilene Zimmerman, who recently penned an article on drug use in the legal profession and the death of her ex-husband, a well-known patent lawyer. Last weekend, Zimmerman’s New York Times article, “The Lawyer, the Addict — A high-power Silicon Valley attorney dies. His ex-wife investigates, and finds a web of drug abuse in his profession,” was the top trending story on the Times website.

Zimmerman did a superb job of talking to various lawyers about the stress and toll of the legal profession, as well as detailing the disturbing statistics in our industry. Our own ATL columnist Brian Cuban — who writes and speaks on recovery topics, and who has a new book out, The Addicted Lawyer (affiliate link) — was featured in the NPR interview as well as the NYT article. Zimmerman’s story was reminiscent of a worrisome CNN column I read awhile back, “Why are lawyers killing themselves?”

The NPR feature on Zimmerman really brought her poignant NYT article to life. After listening to her interview, I had to read the article again. Zimmerman wrote this feature as a map of her ex-husband’s descent and a commentary on the stresses and abuses of the legal profession. I could not help but also think of her writing as a warning for those who are about to enroll in law school, sit for the bar exam, or begin their careers as attorneys.

Her story about her ex-husband and the data she shares on the various types of drug use in our profession also serve as a reflection of how brutal being a lawyer can be. Here are the most harrowing excerpts from Zimmerman’s NPR interview and NYT article:

  1. I think what was the most shocking is that there were all these glaring red flags. I think that because he was wealthy, white, well-educated, and lived in this posh neighborhood, IV-drug abuse never even entered the mind. We had every other explanation for it. Maybe he had an eating disorder. Maybe he was hiding AIDS. Maybe he was bipolar. We just couldn’t think of it. [NPR Interview]
  1. Lawyers are using lots of substances to prop themselves up in an incredible punishing profession, especially at Biglaw firms. [NPR Interview]

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  1. Lawyers and judges have twice the addiction rate when it comes to opioid abuse than the general population does…. I did talk to other attorneys and I talked to a judge, who had been a heroin addict, and several had been opioid addicts. They all said they would have never admitted it if they hadn’t been caught. One guy said to me: “If you admit you have a problem, there’s ten guys standing behind you ready to take your place.” [NPR Interview]
  1. People enter law school with a certain set of values and a certain level of passion and humanity. They come out the other side without it. It gets stripped out. [NPR Interview]
  1. It is a shame that Peter had to die for someone to be able to say what he was saying for so long, “I can’t keep doing this, I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life, it is going to kill me working like this.” He sort of missed the whole point of working hard in any profession is for “the life” — to have a life. He kind of missed “the life,” he missed so much of stuff with his kids because he didn’t make it or he was working or he was on a business trip. It is hard to imagine anybody who worked more than he did except other attorneys. [NPR Interview]
  1. Peter was really dedicated to his clients. Almost to the point where it was a pathology. If they called, he left whatever we were doing. He would miss any meeting for a client, you know he would work on a vacation. I think that single-minded dedication really served his firm and his clients well. He was really good at what he did, but at what price? [NPR Interview]
  1. Of all the heartbreaking details of his story, the one that continues to haunt me is this: The history on his cellphone shows the last call he ever made was for work. Peter, vomiting, unable to sit up, slipping in and out of consciousness, had managed, somehow, to dial into a conference call. [NYT Article]

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  1. The further I probed, the more apparent it became that drug abuse among America’s lawyers is on the rise and deeply hidden. [NYT Article]
  1. According to some reports, lawyers also have the highest rate of depression of any occupational group in the country. [NYT Article]
  1. “Being a surgeon is stressful, for instance — but not in the same way. It would be like having another surgeon across the table from you trying to undo your operation. In law, you are financially rewarded for being hostile,” according to Wil Miller, an attorney in Bellevue, Washington. [NYT Article]
  1. Peter was intelligent, ambitious and most of all hard-working, perhaps because his decision to go to law school was such an enormous commitment — financially, logistically and emotionally — that he could justify it only by being the very best. And he was. In law school he was editor of the law review and number 1 in his class. He gave the speech at graduation. [NYT Article]

With the bar exam quickly approaching for many future attorneys, I thought it was appropriate to talk about the importance of mental health in our profession and how critical it is to keep your sanity.

If you find this article insightful, be sure to check out the posts from my fellow columnists Brian Cuban and Jeena Cho, both of whom have written extensively about mental health for ATL.

I hope law school candidates, law students, and lawyers take Zimmerman’s message to heart. As our columnists have written many times before, the difference between heeding the warnings and missing the signals can be life and death.

Earlier: Drug-Addicted Biglaw Partner Dies During Conference Call

Renwei Chung is the Diversity Columnist at Above the Law. You can contact Renwei by email at projectrenwei@gmail.com, follow him on Twitter (@renweichung), or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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