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Myth 1: Lawyers are miserable. Not so—lawyers are generally satisfied with their lives. The Bell Curve is alive and well. Well-being seems distributed among lawyers in a fairly normal statistical pattern, with most reporting life satisfaction around the middle.
What's more, law students entering law school actually show higher than average well-being. (This spring, we will be surveying 3Ls to measure what law school—and job hunting–has done to their happiness. Stay tuned.)
Myth 2: If you're depressed, that's your problem. For those lawyers and law students not doing so well, there's growing institutional awareness of this problem. There is no question that law practice and law school induce or exacerbate depressive symptoms in a percentage of the population, but law schools are taking this more seriously. Almost every law school makes some level of counseling resources available to students, and some go a step further, like Yale Law's “therapy” dogs during exams. Still, few if any legal institutions are providing the sort of formalized resilience training that is needed to better insulate this at-risk population.
Myth 3: Negative, cautious types get better grades. Personality traits don’t predict first-year grades. This is based on character strengths studies I conducted at two top 50 law schools with Peggy Kern of the University of Pennsylvania. This was surprising to us. It has long been believed that traits like pessimism and prudence translate into better law school grades (as opposed to grades in other professional schools).
Myth 4: Lawyers are cynical. They are skeptical, but no more so than most highly educated people. In other character strengths surveys, every group of lawyers sampled—from North Carolina country lawyers to their big city counterparts—rank themselves high in critical thinking. Guess what? So do most Americans with postgraduate degrees who took the same surveys.
Myth 5: Successful female lawyers are cold and emotionless. Instead, they attribute their success to humanistic traits. In a 2012 study of high-achieving women lawyers, we found that strong emotional awareness was a robust element of their success. (The study was led by attorney/psychological researcher Pat Snyder.) Which leads to the final myth:
Myth 6: Emotional intelligence is overrated. Actually, it becomes more important with career advancement. Lawyers tend to have a higher I.Q. than the general population, but score lower in emotional or social intelligence, meaning the ability to read and respond appropriately to other people.
Recently, I have noticed more firms talking about the value of emotional intelligence among its partners, arguing that it leads to better client attraction and retention. I agree.
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