Tom Sharbaugh (Penn State), Being #1 Isn’t Always a Good Thing—Loneliness Among Lawyers:
Success as a lawyer can come at the expense of personal relationships. Is it worth the price?
Few of my former partners in the global firm where I worked would understand my transition from a profits-first managing partner to a speaker and commentator on lawyer well-being. How could this have happened? Have I gone soft? Quite the contrary—I remain on my mission to live a good life.
Before offering my views on law practice and lawyer careers, it’s useful for me to state my background upfront so that readers know my biases. For about three decades, I was a partner in a global law firm, practicing in a wide variety of business areas (frankly, wherever the clients led me). For the last 15 years of that run, I was the full-time managing partner with firm-wide responsibility for the day-to-day business of the firm. At the end of my third term as a managing partner (at age 62), I looked for another career and began teaching at a large university’s law school, where I started a legal clinic for startup and early-stage businesses.
My late-stage career change caused me to consider whether many of the hard-charging senior and retired law partners would be happier if they sought out some activity that gave them a purpose. This led me down the “rabbit hole” of lawyer loneliness as I listened to the many podcasts and interviews with Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General of the United States. See, e.g., Arthur Brooks, “How to Know You’re Lonely,” How to Build a Happy Life, Ep. 2 (Oct 12, 2021). Then I read Dr. Murthy’s book, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connect in a Sometimes Lonely World (2020).
As I explored the research on loneliness, this fact consistently jumped out at me: lawyers rank #1 in loneliness, not retired lawyers trying to keep busy, but lawyers generally. In a 2018 Harvard Business Review article, researchers from the consulting firm BetterUp shared the results of their survey of over 1,600 workers. “In a breakdown of loneliness and social support rates by profession,” the authors note, “legal practice was the loneliest kind of work.” Shawn Achor, et al., “America’s Loneliest Workers, According to Research,“ Harv Bus Rev, Mar 19, 2018. …
There are no doubt many reasons why some law students transform into hyper-competitive, self-focused, success-driven lawyers. This extrinsic success has come at a price—lawyers who become successful under the measures of income and status are less likely to have close personal relationships and, therefore, more likely to suffer from loneliness.
It is naïve to suggest that law firms should just require fewer billable hours, promote and retain more partners, and make less money. The current business model works too well for those who measure their lives by their published profits per partner. Also, ratcheting down would only work if all firms adopted the same philosophy because the high achievers would simply move to the firms that were still in the race to the top.
I suggest that law schools take a look at whether their annual reenactment of The Great Race strikes the right balance among those customs that are intended to promote effective education and those that are likely to detract from the long-term well-being of their graduates. It is ironic that law schools have been quick to adopt well-being programs during the COVID pandemic, yet the winner-take-all model in the academic realm continues to thrive. Perhaps law schools need to spend more time discussing with their students the many careers that are available apart from Big Law, and the possibilities for finding fulfilling careers in public service, with Small Law, and in small cities. Likewise, law schools with top-to-bottom rankings of their students should consider whether even percentage-based ranking below a certain level, say, the median, serves any worthwhile purpose (although I appear to be losing the battle to abandon numerical rankings in the law school where I teach). And wouldn’t it be better to train law students to work in groups, as most of them will do when they start practicing?
I admit that I do not have a systemic solution to propose for the legal industry, though I am confident that the so-called meritocracy based on rankings, whether it be the US News law school rankings or the American Lawyer profits-per-partner rankings, is a road to personal loneliness. …
On an individual level, I encourage lawyers to examine their personal situations to see whether they are devoting enough time to their personal relationships. I have a few friends who have called me almost every week just to “check-in,” as they say—none of them is a lawyer.
In my case, I was over age 60 when I jumped off the hedonic treadmill and started a new career. It is easy for me to say now that I wish that I had done so earlier, and I acknowledge that I was wearing the same income-and-prestige blinders that chain most Big Law partners to their careers. It was apparent to me as a managing partner of a law firm that most of my friends were (and would turn out to be) only what Arthur Brooks calls deal friends, but I was fortunate in my legal practice to grow some lasting client friendships. This was presumably because I was fortunate to represent small- and mid-market companies where the management teams did not turn over regularly (but which could still afford my Big-Law fees).
I will end with a tribute to a small-city lawyer in Iowa whom my daughters called Big Jim when they were young. By extrinsic standards of fame and fortune, Jim was not special. However, he was an important member of his community and his clients pleaded with him not to retire as he entered his 70s, then his 80s. Jim obviously enjoyed the many relationships that he had built over the years. Likewise, Jim was happier in his role as a lawyer than any better-known and better-compensated lawyer whom I have known. I cannot imagine that Jim suffered from loneliness.
