The Lawyer's Personality

by Joseph Shaub

Susan Daicoff is a remarkable person.  (Of course, I’m biased, since she, too, is a lawyer and a mental health counselor.)   After receiving her law degree from the University of Florida, she entered practice in the late 80's - her concentration being the highly technical fields of securities, banking, tax-law and hostile takeover defense.  Eventually, she moved into academia, teaching business law and tax at Capital University Law School, in Columbus, Ohio.  

From this very traditional and conservative legal background, Daicoff switched paths in the early 90's, and after engaging in post-graduate work in psychology, began studying lawyers and their well-being.  In the last five years, she has taught courses and given scores of presentations throughout the world on the personality of lawyers and the best approaches for obtaining professional and personal satisfaction. 

In 1997, Susan Daicoff published the most comprehensive article extant in the legal literature on research into the lawyer  personality.  Lawyer, Know Thyself: A Review of Empirical Research on Attorney Attributes Bearing on Professionalism, 46 American U. L. Rev. 1337 makes fascinating reading.  In it, Daicoff exhaustively surveys the universe of research addressing the personal attributes of pre-law students; law students and attorneys.  She determines that the research clearly indicates a lawyer’s personality consisting of the following elements: 

Individuals who choose to enter law school seem to generally share the following characteristics as children: They are highly focused on academics, have greater needs for dominance, leadership and attention and they prefer initiating activity.  Reading is emphasized (and remembered pleasantly in later years).  Their fathers tended to be on the dominant and strong side.  It was found, in a comparative study, that concern for emotional suffering and for the feelings of others tended to be less emphasized than in the childhood homes of dental or social work students. 

Studies of pre-law students indicate that their mental health is similar to that of the general adult population.  We find these people demonstrating definite needs to be leaders, to attract attention and to avoid feeling inferior or assuming subordinate roles.   

Numerous studies have explored law students’ motivations for going into the field.  Most early research addressed the predominantly male student population and found that the primary motives were “interest in the subject matter of the law, a desire for professional training and desire for intellectual stimulation.”  Respondents tended to value money and prestige, but only secondarily.  Altruistic concerns were relatively unimportant to this group.  In recent studies, gender differences do tend to assert themselves, with female law students being more inclined toward altruistic, as opposed to practical, utilitarian and materialistic goals.  However, follow up studies reveal that attorneys with these more “realistic or materialistic” goals tended to be far more satisfied in the practice than those who would characterize themselves as “humanitarian.”

This, of course, is consistent with work done on law students/lawyers and psychological type.  As mentioned in an earlier column, law students and lawyers are distinguished by their preference for a “thinking” approach to problem-solving over a “feeling approach.”  Thinkers tend to be impersonal, rational and logical in their approach to life, while Feelers tend to value harmony, affiliation and personal values.  One study observed that the ISTJ type, described as “dependable and practical with a realistic respect for facts, who absorbs and remembers great numbers of facts and is able to cite cases to support his evaluations, and who emphasizes analysis, logic and decisiveness,” had the lowest drop-out rate in one law school study, at 6.7%.  By contrast, the ESFJ type, which is characterized as “concerned chiefly with people, valuing harmonious human contacts, being friendly, tactful, sympathetic and loyal - one who is warmed by approval and bothered by indifference,” had the highest drop-out rate at 28.1%.  (Indeed, in the later, comprehensive study of lawyers and psychological type by Larry Richard, the practical, factual, impersonal ISTJ type described 17.8% of the legal community while the harmonizing ESFJ combination was found in only 2.7%.) 

While law students present as dominant, competitive, leadership oriented, socially confident and relatively anxiety-free, the leading studies addressing their intrapersonal lives presents a different picture.  In the leading study co-authored by U.W.’s Andy Benjamin in 1986, and replicated consistently, law students themselves report far more anxiety than the general population.   These people also reported significantly elevated symptoms of “psychiatric distress,” primarily in the categories of obsessive-compulsiveness and paranoia.  Up to 40% of these students at some point in their law school careers reported elevated levels of clinical depression.  These students were followed for two years after they began practice and the symptoms remained a significant factor in their lives. 

Quoting from Daicoff, “The authors assert that law school may be responsible for this phenomenon, suggesting that law school has such a pervasive, socializing effect that it causes law students to become unduly paranoid, hostile, and obsessive-compulsive...Benjamin and his colleagues suggest that “unbalanced development of student interpersonal skills” may be one of the factors contributing to law students’ psychiatric distress. This suggestion emerges from the study’s finding of an association between elevated distress levels and interpersonal concerns.  Also, because legal education does not assist or encourage students to acquire interpersonal skills and often concentrates exclusively on the development of analytical skills, students may ignore the social and emotional consequences of decision-making...Law students may be Thinkers rather than Feelers before coming to law school, but law school’s exclusive emphasis on “objective thought, rational deduction and empirical proof” likely exacerbates these tendencies, perhaps resulting in emotional distress present throughout law school and for years thereafter.” 

Every study of law students’ well-being finds significantly higher levels of distress.  This is coupled with the universal finding that pre-law students experience no higher degree of anxiety, depression, paranoia or hostility than their peers.

How do law students tend to cope with this distress?  A 1994 report of the American Association of Law Schools revealed that students frequently turned to alcohol (and to a lesser extent barbiturates, marijuana and cocaine) as a coping mechanism.  Of equal concern was the almost universal resistance of law students to the notion of reaching out to others for assistance.  A study of University of Michigan law students, for example, demonstrated that they tended toward social isolation when under stress. 

All of these tendencies accompany law students into practice.  While studies addressing the psychological attributes of attorneys are less numerous than the law student reports, they are entirely consistent with the data cited above.  Lawyers are overwhelmingly achievement-oriented, competitive and aggressive as compared to the rest of the population.  We tend to highly value notions of “truth” and “justice,” are rights-oriented and we employ rational/logical decision-making processes.  Lawyers tend toward social isolation when experiencing personal distress and have a significantly higher incidence of alcohol abuse and depression than the general population. 

The picture that emerges from Susan Daicoff’s exhaustive survey is one of a vast group of active, intellectually curious and generally secure young people who are funneled into an intense indoctrination process and emerge as a fairly homogenous group that has learned how to “think like lawyers,” but who have not quite found a way to integrate this indoctrination into their personal lives and relationships. 

Those lawyers who tend toward values of affiliation; interpersonal harmony, flexibility and empathy may feel like fish out of water and are the most at risk.  These people are far more likely to experience personal distress and dissatisfaction with their career choice.  Daicoff has recently written that the emerging movements in law (stretching beyond conventional ADR), such as therapeutic jurisprudence, preventive law, holistic justice, transformative mediation and collaborative law are avenues toward deep career satisfaction for these people.  Daicoff terms these approaches, collectively, “comprehensive law,” the two goals of which are (1) to optimize human well-being and (2) a concern for things beyond the strict legal rights of the parties involved.  A future column will describe these approaches and their originators.  For those interested in pursuing the subject sooner rather than later, please e-mail me with a request for references and I will send along a current bibliography.

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