Burnout among U.S. Attorneys and the Implications for Life Satisfaction

To the public, law is portrayed as a career where people experience an intense workload that eventually leads them to burnout. As a person interested in becoming a lawyer, I took it upon myself to research how burned out lawyers are in the empirical literature and study if that burnout can be linked with job dissatisfaction and, further, life dissatisfaction. As predicted, lawyers have been and continue to be burnt out and that burnout has implications on their job and life satisfaction. In turn, a lawyer’s job satisfaction and life satisfaction can also have an effect on whether or not they experience more or less symptoms of burnout. After establishing that there is a problem, I researched potential solutions to increasing life satisfaction for lawyers within the existing flawed system. I discussed five solutions proposed in the book The Happy Lawyer by Nancy Levit and Douglas Linder, which included (1) gaining more control, (2) establishing more connections, (3) increasing flow experiences, (4) identifying pleasures and strengths, and (5) making downward comparisons. Finally, as a cumulation of all my research, I offer a final suggestion to increase life satisfaction, which is to create and stick to a schedule that works for the individual lawyer.