Susan Daicoff, author of Lawyer, Know Thyself: A Psychological Analysis of Personality Strengths and Weaknesses, has written another book titled Comprehensive Law Practice: Law as a Healing Profession. Click to read the Table of Contents and Introduction. Excerpt:
I have been researching and writing about the legal profession since the early 1990s, when I became interested, as a lawyer enrolled in a graduate program for clinical psychology, in lawyer distress, dissatisfaction, wellbeing, and ethical decisionmaking. That research led me to survey 40 years of empirical research on lawyers. I concluded that there were about eight distinct traits that distinguished lawyers from nonlawyers, psychologi- cally and decisionmaking preference-wise. In the mid-1990s, I argued that these “lawyer traits” were adaptive to the modern practice of law, which at the time demanded that lawyers be unemotional, rational, objective, amoral, zealous, and partisan advocates and representatives of their clients.
However, a number of developments in the law and in the world since then have eroded that
model, leading the profession to where it is today — on the brink (or in the midst) of change. I am not convinced that the traditional adversarial model of law and lawyer- ing was optimal, anyway, but recent developments have placed even greater stress on it, forcing change forward.
In response to the pressures on the legal profession, many proposed solutions. These solutions ranged from stress management, to mediation, to sheer innovations in the law. In the 1970s and 1980s (and, in some cases, as early as the 1930s), seeds were sown for a new legal profession by a number of insightful pioneers, trailblazers, and innovators. By 1990, many of these individuals had begun formulating and experimenting with new ways of practicing and adjudicating law and resolving legal disputes. ...
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