Lawyer Satisfaction in the Process of Structuring Legal Careers-4

Lawyer Satisfaction in the Process of Structuring Legal Careers-4

Basic Contours of Satisfaction in the AJD

Data Consistent with prior research, reported levels of job satisfaction in the AJD study are high: when asked to rate their satisfaction with 16 specific dimensions of their jobs, respondents consistently rate themselves as more satisfied than dissatisfied (see Table 1). In particular, lawyers express higher levels of satisfaction with their relationships with colleagues, their level of responsibility, the control over how they work, and the intellectual challenge of their work (all rated 5.39 or higher on a scale of 1-7), with somewhat lower ratings given to their performance evaluation process, the diversity of their workplace, and their opportunities for pro bono work (all rated 4.4/7 or lower). More strikingly, respondents' satisfaction with their career choice is very high: fully 79% of respondents report that they are extremely or moderately satisfied with their decision to become a lawyer. In contrast, however, when asked how long they plan to stay with their current employer, the data suggest a different pattern, with 44 percent of respondents expressing that they intend to be looking for a new job within two years-and almost one-quarter of these respondents express that they are already looking for a new position or plan to within one year.

These data present somewhat of a paradox: on the one hand, we find very high levels of reported satisfaction with the decision to become a lawyer, while on the other, we find fairly high levels of job mobility expectations, often taken as indicating lower levels of professional satisfaction (Kay & Hagan 2003). To get underneath this tension, we disaggregated these findings by the prestige of the law school attended by the respondents. As Bourdieu has argued (1977, 1998), schools are a key site through which students acquire their professional expectations-schools thereby play a critical role in the reproduction of social stratification, with students not merely acquiring the skills they require for professional life, but perhaps more trenchant, adapting to the dispositions necessary for the professional roles they are destined to take. This can be achieved because schools are themselves embedded in the reproduction of students' social origins: the prestige of the school that individuals attend is itself a function of their social class, so that in bestowing degrees and credentials, schools confirm and reaffirm students' anticipated status within the profession (Bourdieu 1998). Research on law schools-from Granfield's (1992) study Making Elite Lawyers to Stover's (1989) Making It and Breaking It and to Mertz's (forthcoming) work on the Language of Law School-indeed establishes that these are key sites in the development of students' expectations and aspirations.

Our measure of the law school hierarchy is derived from the rankings published in the U.S. News and World Report for 2003; each school in the AJD data set was assigned its corresponding U.S. News score and was then placed into one of six major groupings: the top 10, top 11-20, top 21-40, top 41-100, schools in the third tier, and schools in the fourth tier. Analyses reveal that these rankings correlate well with the measures of lawyers' social background available in the AJD data. Table 2 indicates that students attending top 10 schools report fathers' occupational prestige scores that are significantly higher than those from the fourth-tier schools, with reports of fathers' occupational scores declining in a linear fashion along with law school tier. The data on fathers' educational attainment display a similar pattern: more than two-thirds of top 10 school graduates had fathers who had completed some graduate education, compared to one-third of fourth-tier graduates.6

The law school rankings also map directly onto the settings within which law graduates work, an indicator that the social hierarchies that led students into particular law schools will also continue to be reproduced in their professional careers. The data in Table 3 indicate that more than half of the graduates from top 10 schools work in the megafirms of more than 250 lawyers, compared to just 4 percent of fourth-tier graduates, who are instead working predominantly in small or solo practices. Even when they work in the public sector, graduates of elite schools are more likely to be working in the more prestigious federal government positions, while lower-tier graduates are more likely to work for state government.

Given these patterns, it is perhaps not surprising that measures of job satisfaction also track the hierarchy of law schools. While our initial examination of job satisfaction resulted in somewhat of a paradox, noting high levels of satisfaction at the same time as high job mobility intentions, examining these same measures by law school tier sheds considerable light on this disjuncture. The data in Figure 1 indicate that almost 60 percent of top 10 graduates expect to leave their positions within two years, while only 27 percent report that they are extremely satisfied with their decision to become a lawyer. However, substantially fewer (41 percent) of the fourth-tier graduates intend to leave their employer within two years, while substantially more (43 percent) of these graduates are extremely satisfied with their decision to become a lawyer. These patterns suggest that there is in fact a convergence, rather than a divergence, between expressions of career satisfaction and job mobility intentions: the most elite students are the least satisfied with their career choice and the most likely to be thinking of leaving their employer, while lower-tier graduates express high levels of career satisfaction and high levels of commitment to their employer.

It may be, however, that this relationship between law school tier and job satisfaction has more to do with the practice settings in which these lawyers work, rather than being a direct consequence of the law schools they attended. After all, the most elite students are the most likely to be working in large corporate law firms (see Table 3), so their lack of satisfaction may be the result of where they work, rather than the dispositions they acquired in law school. To investigate this possibility, we restricted the sample to those respondents working in firms of more than 100 lawyers. The data in Figure 2 confirm that even within these large law firms, the most elite graduates continue to express lower levels of career satisfaction than those from the fourth tier (26 percent of elites report extreme satisfaction, compared with almost half (49 percent) of those in the fourth tier). Similarly, we find that top 10 law school graduates are more likely to intend to leave their employer within two years, compared to their fourth-tier counterparts (59 versus 27 percent). These patterns suggest that the relatively lower satisfaction of elite graduates is not merely driven by their work settings, and that there is an independent relationship between law school tier and expressions of satisfaction that requires further investigation.

By incorporating patterns of social stratification into our analysis of satisfaction, we find that expressions of satisfaction map fairly clearly onto the hierarchy of law schools-and that attention to social hierarchies resolves the apparent tension between lawyers' career satisfaction and their mobility intentions. We find a pattern consistent with Bourdieu's (1998) model, in which schools not only play an important role in the transmission of social reproduction but are also important predictors of the dispositions and aspirations that shape new lawyers' careers. Below, we build on this approach by relying on multivariate analyses, which allow us to further explore the interplay between the social origins, values, and credentials of lawyers across various practice settings.

Satisfaction as Process: Mapping the Structure of the Legal Profession

We begin by exploring the determinants of job satisfaction, which Hull (1999) has argued are best conceptualized as a multivalent concept. Following this approach, we conducted a factor analysis of the 16 measures of job satisfaction reported in Table 1, which reduced the 16 measures of satisfaction into four factors; factors were extracted using principal component analysis and were then saved as standardized scores with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1.7 The first factor represents "job setting satisfaction," consolidating ratings of recognition received at work, relationships with colleagues, control over the work, and job security. The factor for "work substance satisfaction" reflects the intrinsic interest of the work, while the third factor, "social value satisfaction," concerns the reported relationship between work and broader social issues (workplace diversity, opportunities for pro bono work, and the social value of the work). The fourth factor, "power track satisfaction," comprises two items: satisfaction with compensation levels and satisfaction with opportunities for advancement. We then estimated four separate models of job satisfaction-one each for satisfaction with job setting, substance of work, the social index, and the power track.

Table 4 outlines the means and standard deviations for the variables used in all analyses.8 Just over half of the respondents are male and just over half are married, but fewer than one-third have children and only 16 percent are more than 36 years old. Eightythree percent of respondents are white, with 38 percent living in major metropolitan areas (New York; Chicago; Washington, DC; Los Angeles; San Francisco; and Boston) and another 23 percent living in other metropolitan areas (Atlanta, Houston, Minneapolis, and St. Louis); each region was modeled as a dummy variable, with the excluded category representing those living in nonmetropolitan areas. To control for the effects of practice setting, we relied on a series of dummy variables; the measure of firm size relies on the total number of lawyers employed by the entire firm.9 The excluded category is small private firms (of two to 20 lawyers), which also accounts for the largest concentration of respondents (28 percent). The mid-sized firms of 21-100 account for 14 percent of respondents, 9 percent work in large firms (101-250 lawyers), and 25 percent work in the megafirms of 251+lawyers. We find a smaller proportion of respondents working outside of private practice, with 8 percent working for state government, 3 percent for the federal government, and 2 percent working in sole practice; less than 11 percent of respondents work in nongovernmental public settings and in business. Of course, the grouping of lawyers in private practice according to firm size conceals much variation within each of the work settings-for example, even among the megafirms of 251+lawyers there exists a hierarchy of firms according to profitability, associate-to-partner ratio, and whether firms have a two-tier partnership track (e.g., of equity and nonequity lawyers) (see, e.g., Henderson 2006). While this article cannot address the full range of variation within each setting, the groupings employed in the analyses below reveal important cleavages in the hierarchy of lawyers working in private firms.