TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Law, Medicine Lose Allure As Discontent Increases

ADVERTISEMENT

By ALEX WILLIAMS The New York Times

Published: January 13, 2008

You can't say law firms aren't trying.

At the Chicago office of Perkins Coie, partners recently unveiled a "happiness committee," offering candy apples and milkshakes to brighten the long and wearying days of its lawyers. Perhaps this will serve as an example to other firms, which studies show lose, on average, nearly a fifth of their associates in any given year, in an industry in which about 20 percent of lawyers over all will suffer depression at some point in their careers.

Last year, Cravath, Swaine & Moore tried a more direct approach, offering associates a bonus of as much as $50,000, on top of regular annual bonuses that range from $35,000 to $60,000.

At the august Sullivan & Cromwell, partners in 2006 began a program, groundbreaking in white-shoe firms, encouraging the uttering of "thank you" and "good work" to harried underlings, as reported in The Wall Street Journal.

Probably not a bad move at a firm that had been hemorrhaging associates at a rate of about 30 percent a year.

So now who's going to cheer up the doctors?

As of 2006, nearly 60 percent of doctors polled by the American College of Physician Executives said they had considered getting out of medicine because of low morale, and nearly 70 percent knew someone who already had.

In a typical complaint, Yul Ejnes, 47, a general internist in Cranston, R.I., said he was recently forced by Medicare to fill out requisition forms for a wheelchair-bound patient who needed to replace balding tires. "I'm a doctor," he said, "not Mr. Goodwrench."

Law and medicine - the most elite of the traditional professions - have always been demanding. But they were also prestigious. Sure, bankers made big money and professors held impressive degrees. But in the days when a successful career was built on a number of tacitly recognized pillars - outsize pay, long-term security, impressive schooling and authority over grave matters - doctors and lawyers were perched atop them all.

Now, those pillars have started to wobble.

"The older professions are great, they're wonderful," said Richard Florida, the author of "The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life" (Basic Books, 2003). "But they've lost their allure, their status. And it isn't about money."

Or at least, it is not all about money. The pay is still good (sometimes very good), and the in-laws aren't exactly complaining. Still, something is missing, say many doctors, lawyers and career experts: the old sense of purpose, of respect, of living at the center of American society and embodying its definition of "success."

Changing Definitions Of Success

In a culture that prizes risk and outsize reward - where professional heroes are college dropouts with billion-dollar Web sites - some doctors and lawyers feel they have slipped a notch in social status, drifting toward the safe-and-staid realm of dentists and accountants. It's not just because the professions have changed, but also because the standards of what makes a prestigious career have changed.

This decline, Florida argued, is rooted in a broader shift in definitions of success, essentially, a realignment of the pillars. Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago.

"There used to be this idea of having a separate work self and home self," he said. "Now they just want to be themselves. It's almost as if they're interviewing places to see if they fit them."

Indeed, applications to law schools and medical schools have declined from recent highs. Nationally, the number of law school applicants dropped to 83,500 in 2006 from 98,700 in 2004 - representing a 6.7 percent drop between 2006 and 2005, on top of the 5.2 percent slip the previous year, according to the Law School Admission Council. (Maybe they've been talking to actual lawyers. Forty-four percent of lawyers recently surveyed by the American Bar Association said they would not recommend the profession to a young person.)

The number of applicants to medical school, meanwhile, has dipped to 42,000 from 46,000 in 1997, although it has recovered from a low of 33,000 in 2003.

Students are focusing now on starring in their own creations, their own start-up businesses, said Trudy Steinfeld, the executive director of the Wasserman Center for Career Development at New York University.

Unquestionably, many doctors and lawyers still find the higher calling of their profession - helping people - as well as the prestige and money, worth the hard work. And the stars in either field are still that: commanding the handsome compensation and social cachet. But to others, the daily trudge serves as a constant reminder that the entrepreneur's autonomy simply can't be found in law or medicine.

"We'd all seen the visions, watching 'L.A. Law' or 'Ally McBeal,'" said Catherine Kersh, 32, a former litigator at a large firm in Los Angeles. "It did seem glamorous."

Reality, she quickly learned, was different. Kersh recalled a two-week stretch in which she and a team of associates were holed up in a conference room with 50 boxes of documents. Every day, for 12 hours, they fastened Post-it notes to legal briefs.

"You look around at the other associates, trying to remind ourselves, why did we go to law school?" said Kersh, who now works for a nonprofit group that administers scholarships.

Speeding Up The Conveyer Belt

As law firms demand ever more billable hours, said Lawrence J. Fox, a partner in the Philadelphia office of Drinker Biddle & Reath, lawyers find less time for pro bono work - the very thing that once gave them a sense of higher calling. Increased competitive pressures also mean that young associates are often locked into arcane sub-specialties, like pharmaceutical product liability.

Doctors face similar pressure. Complaints about managed care crimping doctors' income and authority over medical decisions are nothing new, but the problems are only getting worse, several doctors said.

"Remember the 'I Love Lucy' episode in the chocolate factory?" said Ejnes. "That's what a medical practice is now like. They keep turning up the speed on the conveyer belt, and before you know it, you're stuffing chocolates in your pockets."

Increasing workloads and paperwork might be tolerable if the old feeling of authority were still the same, doctors said. But patients who once might have revered them for their knowledge and skill often arrive at the office armed with a sense of personal expertise, gleaned from a few hours on www.WebMD.com, doctors said, not to mention a disdain for the medical system in general.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT