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At
the Hogwarts of J. K. Rowling’s imagination,
the
Sorting Hat magically assesses the character and talents
of first-year
students
and assigns them to the house—Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw,
Slytherin, or
Gryffindor—that best matches their individual strengths.
Every student
ends up
where he or she belongs and stands the best chance of
thriving. In the muggle
world—our world—there
is no Sorting Hat. Choosing a career path requires doing
our own
assessments of
our abilities, interests, and desires. Every year some
48,000 Americans
perform
that assessment, however imperfectly, and set down a
path that they
hope will
lead to a satisfying career of practicing law. The fact
that so many of
them,
perhaps 20,000 or so, will end up disappointed has many,
varied causes.
Some of
the disappointed were never meant to be lawyers, their
talents and
passions
pointing elsewhere— perhaps in the direction of
winemaking,
printmaking, or
teaching. Other unsatisfied
lawyers embarked on their careers with unrealistic
expectations about
law
practice. They considered themselves the best and the
brightest,
excelling in
college and graduating from top law schools, and they
believed their
hard work
entitled them to fulfilling and happy careers. High
expectations and
feelings
of entitlement to great jobs might account for the
higher levels of
dissatisfaction among graduates of the nation’s
highest-ranked schools
compared
to those lower on the pecking order. People who go into
sanitation work
do not
expect to be made deliriously happy by their jobs. They
haven’t dreamed
since
junior high of joining the sanitation force. “It’s a job
isn’t it?”
they might
say, and they are pleased to have one. Once at work,
however, they find
some
things about the job they like—the camaraderie, the work
in the
sunshine, the
sense that they are serving their community—and, you
know, they begin
to feel
pretty good about their job. When reality fails to match
high
expectations,
however, as it probably does for many lawyers, the
result can be a
gnawing
sense that a better career choice could have been made.
Finally, one other point should be made about the surveys that place lawyers somewhere in the middle of the career satisfaction continuum. What it means to be, say, “fairly satisfied” with a job might mean very different things to different types of lawyers. For the trial lawyer, whose career is marked with the emotional peaks and valleys that result from our adversarial process, “fairly satisfied” might in fact reflect a perceived ratio of quite high highs and quite low lows. Trial work is a “high amplitude” career. On the other hand, a “fairly satisfied” transactional lawyer might be one who finds modest pleasures in the daily practice of law but keeps wishing for a bit more of an emotional charge. One person’s “fairly happy” is not the same as another person’s “fairly happy.” |