Too many American lawyers are miserable. Though they have chosen a profession that often makes them wealthy and respected, they have high rates of depression and suicide, and the majority of practicing lawyers would counsel young people to choose a different career path. The Great Recession has only worsened matters, as more and more of those young people decide to wait out the bad economy in law school, only to end up competing for a shrinking number of available jobs. Meanwhile, those who are able to get the elusive job in the big firm find that professional values have been sacrificed to short-term metrics.In The Lawyer Bubble, Steven J. Harper explores how the legal profession came to this sorry state. He investigates the troubling mismatch between the number of lawyers produced and the number of law jobs available, skyrocketing rates of attorney dissatisfaction, and an overall sense that what once made the law a unique vocation is disappearing.
