Good day all. In the category of “Why am I not surprised?” we have a report that lawyers are generally sick people. Well, to be more specific, (We all know they are sick), lawyers are unhealthy people.
When I say unhealthy, I mean that they are not in the greatest health, and apparently they also drink a lot. Here are a few details from Financial Review:
Lawyers working in firms, from top-tier to sole practice, have the lowest health and wellbeing of all white-collar workers; not only that, they are the highest users and abusers of alcohol and nicotine, a study has found. The study by PsychSafe principal consultant Dr Rebecca Michalak involved more than 800 white-collar professionals including 370 lawyers from firms and the bar, and about 170 lawyers working in government or in-house counsel roles.
Gee, I wonder why lawyers smoke and drink so much? It can’t be the fact that pretty much everyone hates their guts now, could it?
The key finding of the study was that lawyers working in law firms, with their strenuous workloads, overtime and high pressure, is producing professionals with the lowest psychological and psychosomatic health and wellbeing than all other professionals.
Anyone who’s watched lawyers on TV, (the fictional shows, not the ads by the ambulance chasers, can see how overworked the associates are. Just take a look at an episode of “Suits” when the character Louis Litt tears into the staffers.
According to the study, which was undertaken with the support of several state law societies, lawyers were also more likely than other professionals to be exposed to toxic behaviour in the workplace including verbal abuse, mistreatment, bullying, competition and destabilisation from colleagues as well as sexual harassment.
Ok, if this is supposed to make me feel sorry for those in the legal profession, it isn’t working.
In another dangerous revelation for firms and the profession, substance use and abuse among lawyers is twice that of other professionals.
Lawyers, at least those who deal with criminal law, probably get discounts from the dealers they get off. I can see why they would be snorting some of Columbia’s main export.
Far from guiding and mentoring, the main perpetrators of mistreatment in firms were typically male partners who were older than their subordinates and often likely to target female employees. Mistreatment was leading to higher absenteeism and staff turnover rates, with lawyers being three times as likely to resign after being badly treated.
Nope, still not feeling any sympathy.
Most victims’ experiences, however, went unreported, while those who did raise concerns or challenged their perpetrators often faced more negative experiences as a consequence. Factors including an unethical climate in the workplace, destructive leadership styles and poor human resources policies and practices are also affecting organisational culture as well as job performance, satisfaction and commitment.
Good luck filing charges against a law firm. They wrote the manual on “Circling the wagons.”
McCabe Lawyers principal Terry McCabe said he was among those who suffered depression and anxiety throughout his career. It was problem the profession had to deal with honestly and head-on. “We need to acknowledge we are human beings before we are lawyers,” he said. “If we don’t, we are going to continue to lose good people from the profession.”
Excuse me? You consider yourself a human being before being a lawyer? And you haven’t been disbarred yet? Everyone knows lawyers are the lowest form of life on the planet, even lower, in some cases than pedophiles. Lawyers are a necessary evil, but I have no problem with ripping them up, provided laws aren’t broken. I do have a few potential solutions to their problems.
First, they can bring back dueling. Having a pair of lawyers facing each other at dawn, with either pistols or swords seems like a good way to solve the issues of overbearing managers and burned out associates. I could also see changing the legal structure a bit and introducing the fictional system known as Gowachin Law into the current legal system. What is Gowachin Law you ask? It was something created by the author of the book, Dune, by Frank Herbert.
The Gowachin regard their legal practices as the strongest evidence that they are civilized. Gowachin law is based upon the notion of a healthy disrespect for all laws; the purpose of this notion is to avoid the stultifying accretion of a body of laws and precedents that bind Gowachin mechanically. In a Gowachin trial, everything is on trial: every participant, including the judges; every law; even the foundational precept of Gowachin law. Legal ideas from other systems are turned on their head: someone pronounced “innocent” (guilty in other terms) by the court is torn to pieces by angry spectators; judges may have bias (“if I can decide for my side, I will”), though not prejudice (“I will decide for my side, regardless”); defendant and plaintiff are chosen at trial by the side bringing the complaint choosing one role or the other; torture is permitted; all procedural rules may be violated, but only by finding conflict within procedural rules.
There is also one final aspect to a trial in a Gowachin style court. The losing lawyer is immediately killed by the winning lawyer.
We have to many lawyers in this country and they have done tremendous damage to this nation, as well as to the world in general. If they get sick and die, well, they aren’t getting any sympathy from me, and probably 90% of the people that has ever had to deal with them.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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