About The
Happy Lawyer
Are
Lawyers
Happy?
Happiness:
A
Primer
What
Makes
Lawyers Happy and
Unhappy?
A
Happiness Toolbox for
Lawyers
Preparing
for
a Happy Career:
The Law School Years
Lawyers'
Stories
Seeking
Happier
Ground
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Richard Thaler
and Cass Sunstein,
in their important bestseller Nudge:
Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and
Happiness,
demonstrate how
the architecture of choice shapes public and private
decision-making.
Their
insights could be
used by a firm
seeking
to maximize lawyer choice while moving towards a
better work-life
balance and
overall level of happiness within a firm. Thaler and
Sunstein note, for
example, that people derive roughly twice as much
unhappiness from
losing a
certain amount of money than they derive happiness
from winning the
same
amount. A $50 loss causes the same value of negative
feelings as a $100
win
causes positive feelings. Most people, in other words,
are “loss
averse.” When people think about what
they have lost, or
what they didn’t get
that most people got, they are not happy campers. This
would explain
why most
lawyers who are told “You can give up 20 percent of
your pay in return
for
working proportionally fewer hours” might be unlikely
to accept the
offer, Instead,
they will continue to grind away their
unhappiness-producing 2,000
billable
hours. However, if new hires are told, “We expect you
to put in 1600
billable
hours for $X (an amount equal to, say, 20 percent less
than what is
paid those
who produce 2,000), but you have the option of working
2,000 hours and
receiving a bonus (an amount that
would bring pay up to the level currently paid for
meeting the
2,000-hour
expectation),”
a much higher number of recruits might opt for the
reduced pay and
reduced
hours, thus improving the overall psychological health
of the firm.
Why? Because
the reduced hours for reduced pay, having become the
default option, no
longer
is associated in the new lawyer’s mind with “a loss.”
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