Incivility Takes a Toll

The Stress Factor

Delving into causes of stress was a key focus of the 2001 survey, in light of the 1999 finding that 91 percent of respondents found their work life increasingly stressful. Several survey statements probed for causes of stress besides those already mentioned above, namely incivility and the legal profession's sinking public image. The survey found that:

• 91 percent of respondents agreed that lawyers must practice much more "defensively."
  
  
• 90 percent indicated that the increasingly complex nature, breadth, and specialization of the law make it harder to keep up every year.
  
  
• 85 percent said that the practice of law is not as economically rewarding as it used to be.
  
  
• 66 percent agreed that lawyers can't economically serve the clients who need their services.

Surfacing in both interviews and respondents' written-in comments were other causes of stress, such as increased judicial workload, lack of staff and resources for the courts, higher numbers of pro se litigants, excessive district attorney and public defender caseloads, lack of mentoring, an increasing "I want it yesterday" mentality in today's world of e-mail and faxes, and malpractice worries - to name a few.

Unreasonable client expectations are a chief stress-inducer, attorneys report. "The public sometimes perceives that lawyering and litigation are supposed to be war," says Fond du Lac attorney Nick Casper, chair of the Bench-Bar Committee. "They create this expectation that lawyers be aggressive. That feeds into the idea that lawyers aren't supposed to be cordial to one another." And that, in turn, helps to trigger the downward spiral of incivility and yet more stress. What's more, when clients make bad decisions that lead to bad outcomes in court, they often lay all the blame at the lawyers' feet.

Information overload is another key stressor for everyone, but it's probably even more frustrating for the general practitioner. "I think it's getting harder to be a small-town general practice lawyer or even a smaller firm," Mowris observes. "In this day and age, it's hard to keep up on too many areas of the law." He adds that the State Bar will try to alleviate that difficulty by making available CLE covering limited areas of the law. An attorney could go to the Internet to access recent seminars and articles on specific legal areas.

Mowris also suggests that lawyers reach out more to each other for help when they face a case that's not routine for them. "One of the things I use," he says, "and I think others should use more is the Lawyer-to-Lawyer Directory [part of the State Bar's annual Wisconsin Lawyer Directory]. If you have a question about a matter that's outside your area of expertise, call somebody."

Other Bar initiatives may help relieve other frustrations. For instance, the Seize the Future project may help attorneys find ways to serve clients who can't afford legal services, by looking into such practices as unbundling or making better use of attorney-supervised paralegals. The Public Trust and Confidence initiative aims to bolster public opinion about not only the law profession, but also the whole legal system.

In addition, stronger publicity efforts could show the public a more complete picture of what lawyers and judges are about. Negative publicity too often dominates. As just one case in point, Mowris cites an incident in which a Wisconsin attorney defrauded several bankruptcy clients. The lawyer never filed the clients' claims, but then took their money and ran - a subject of much media coverage. "What the public doesn't know," Mowris points out, "is that all attorneys pay into a security fund to pay back people who have been ripped off by lawyers. Plus, volunteer lawyers take over those cases to try to help people and repair the damage done by a bad lawyer."

One bright spot did emerge, however, in this year's survey. When presented with a statement that their practice "does not have much impact or importance beyond the task they are conducting," 66 percent of respondents disagreed. Or, to restate that positively, 66 percent believe that what they do on the job every day does indeed matter.

"Despite the stress, the problems, and the disagreements we have, most of us feel the law is a great and satisfying profession," Lamelas says. "Maybe in future surveys we could include more questions about what we do like about our jobs and what we can do to enhance that."