Smacked

by Eilene Zimmerman

  Dysfunctional corporate culture isn’t unique to law firms. Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford Business School and author of the book Dying for a Paycheck, said when he held a position on the Committee for Faculty and Staff Human Resources, he was struck by the fact that Stanford’s wellness program focused on exercise and eating better when all of the behaviors that caused people to be unhealthy—overdrinking, overeating, drugs—were caused by their work environment. “The corporate workplace has become increasingly inhumane,” he said. “No one gives a shit about people. Forty, fifty, sixty years ago, organizations used to be communities. They’re not anymore. That ended in the eighties, with the takeover movement, the financialization of everything. We live in a much more transactional world.”

  The memorial service finishes and people say their goodbyes. A group of lawyers that worked with Peter over the years head to a bar across the street to reminisce about and glorify a man they didn’t really know. Peter’s siblings head to their deceased brother’s house to spend the night. Evan is staying there, too, so he can drive his uncle to the airport in the morning.

  About midnight my phone rings. It’s Evan, and I can tell from his voice he is frightened. Unable to sleep, he went downstairs to poke through some of Peter’s things in the mudroom. He is trying to figure out who his dad was.

  Evan saw an earthenware vase Peter has had forever and in which he stored old pens, business cards, paper clips, and other odds and ends. It was sitting in a shoebox with some other junk, tucked behind boots, shoes, badminton rackets, and a deflated football. Evan emptied it onto the floor to look more closely at what was inside. He saw a thin piece of gold foil that appeared to have been ripped from the liner of a cigarette box, folded carefully, about the size of a pat of butter. He unfolded it. Inside were what looked like quartz pebbles. “Mom,” Evan says in a whisper, “I’m pretty sure it’s crystal meth. I took a photo of it and searched online and that is what came up. It looks just like the pictures. I’m kind of scared. What should I do? What if it’s on my hands now? Can something happen to you if it gets on your skin?”

  Crystal meth is the common name for crystal methamphetamine, which is usually smoked in a small glass pipe, but it can also be snorted, swallowed, or injected.

  I tell Evan not to worry. “I think you just don’t want it near your mouth or nose,” I say, although I have no idea if that’s true, because at that moment I still don’t know anything about the drug. I don’t know if you smoke, snort, or shoot meth—maybe you do all three. Maybe you can eat it too. “Just wrap it back up and put it in the vase and wash your hands really well. I’ll be up there tomorrow and I’ll take it and get rid of it,” I tell him.

  “I wish I hadn’t stayed here tonight,” he says, his voice weak. “It’s really creepy. I just don’t want to be here.” I ask if he wants to come home right now. I tell him he can come back tonight, and I will get his uncle a cab to the airport tomorrow morning or go up there myself and drive him. But Evan feels he should stay until the morning and say a proper goodbye.

  I hang up the phone but there is no sleep for me. I hadn’t known Peter was using methamphetamine too. I Google it and stare at endless photos of methamphetamine addicts, recognizing in those agonized faces some of what I saw in Peter—the jaundiced look of his eyes, the yellow-brown stains on his teeth, his accelerating hair loss, the sores on his hands and the side of his face.

  Long after the memorial service I speak to David Epstein—a scientist at the National Institute on Drug Abuse who heads its assessment, prediction, and treatment unit—about Peter’s descent into addiction, confounding because outwardly at least, he had a good life and still it did not bring him what he needed.

  “You mentioned that Peter told you he couldn’t see himself going on like this for the next twenty years,” Epstein says over the phone from his office in Washington, D.C. “I think addiction is primarily something that happens to people that look at the landscape of alternatives available to them in the present and the future, what will be available to them in any foreseeable amount of time, and if none of it looks good,” he says. “They run out of reasons not to try drugs.”

  PART III

  ■ TWELVE

  Big Law’s Big Problems

  PETER GRADUATED AT THE top of his class from law school in May 1997 and couldn’t wait to leave it behind him. Although he had always been somewhat melancholy, after law school he seemed consistently down, and those lows became more intense and darker as time went on.

  A landmark study of substance use and the mental health concerns of lawyers conducted in 2016 by the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation and the American Bar Association found that nearly 30 percent of lawyers suffer from depression, almost 20 percent from anxiety. The question on the survey asked about symptoms in the last twelve months, but when lawyers are asked about depression over the course of their careers, the figure is usually more than 40 percent, says Daniel Lukasik, who founded the website Lawyers with Depression in 2007, after he was diagnosed with major depression.

  Lukasik, who was a practicing attorney for twenty-five years, struggled with the disorder for much of his life but wasn’t diagnosed until he was forty. Now he is director of workplace well-being for Mental Health Advocates of Western New York and also runs discussion groups for attorneys struggling with depression and anxiety. “A common thread in the groups I run is the gap between what people thought the law was going to be and what it has become for them,” says Lukasik.

  The most common personality type for lawyers is “INTJ,” according to research conducted by LawyerBrain’s Larry Richard. It stands for introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging and is also one of the least common personality types among the general public. Richard has more than 25,000 sets of data on the personalities of lawyers and describes the typical mind-set as a “negativity mind-set,” which is essential, he says, for practicing law. “Lawyers are always looking for problems and do that by thinking dispassionately and being alert to irregularity—what is wrong, what could go wrong—and by being suspicious about people’s motives and agendas,” says Richard. The profession attracts people who are more negative, more skeptical, and more pessimistic than the average person.

  Depression, along with anxiety and intense stress, likely has something to do with the high rate of suicide in the legal profession, the fourth highest compared to other professions, according to a 2014 analysis by CNN (using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also known as the CDC). Studies have shown that years of unrelenting work stress can damage the prefrontal cortex, which we use for problem-solving, emotional control, verbal communication, and to form memories. Anna Rose Childress, director of the Brain-Behavioral Vulnerabilities Division of the Center for Studies on Addiction at the University of Pennsylvania, says chronic stress can make us more vulnerable to depression. “Stress reduces the ability to manage the dark side of life, the slings and arrows, the difficulties we face,” Childress says. “And that shows up in the form of depression or anxiety.”

  In October 2018, forty-two-year-old attorney Gabriel MacConaill was crumbling under a mountain of stress. MacConaill, a bankruptcy partner at the firm Sidley Austin in Los Angeles, was in the midst of a big bankruptcy case. The previous year, MacConaill’s mentor and two other attorneys in the bankruptcy practice group had left the firm, and his wife, Joanna Litt, says he felt overwhelmed with work. In the weeks leading up to the bankruptcy filing, she recalls, it was largely her husband and one other partner doing all the work. On October 14, a Sunday afternoon, MacConaill told his wife he had to run to the office for a few hours. He kissed Litt goodbye, drove his car into the office parking lot, and shot himself in the head. November would have been the couple’s ten-year wedding anniversary. A month later Litt wrote about her husband’s suicide in The American Lawyer. Her open letter to the magazine was titled “Big Law Killed My Husband.”

  MacConail
l and Litt met on the first day of law school and he, like Peter, graduated at the top of his class. Litt wrote that her husband was “the smartest person I ever met. He was also the kindest, most selfless person I’ve ever met.” MacConaill struggled with a drinking problem—intermittent binge drinking—something Litt now suspects was masking a deeper pain. He also had severe anxiety, was a perfectionist, and—although Litt didn’t understand it at the time—was likely battling depression.

  One night about two weeks before his suicide, MacConaill had been at the office more than twelve hours. Late that evening, on the phone with his wife, he said he felt as if his body was “failing” him. Litt got in her car and went to pick him up and take him to the emergency room. “Gabe got in the car and said, ‘If we go to the ER, that’s the end of my career,’ ” Litt told me. “But I knew he wasn’t thinking right, he was dehydrated and exhausted.” Litt even hired a nurse to administer fluids to MacConaill intravenously when he was home—which wasn’t often during this period—and his doctor prescribed Ambien to help MacConaill sleep. But Litt says the damage was done.

  “That case was what finally did it,” she tells me, crying and so engulfed by grief and pain I can feel it through the phone. “Big Law has a very toxic culture. In fact, we had talked about him just getting through this case and then figuring out what he wanted to do from there, how to get out. We talked about it extensively.” In her American Lawyer essay she wrote about urging MacConaill to quit, writing that he hadn’t smiled in weeks, wasn’t sleeping, and everything he said was negative. But he told Litt he couldn’t quit in the middle of a case. She noted the irony that he found it easier to kill himself than quit his job.

  “Here’s the thing,” Litt says. “You’ve got these individuals who really feel like if they make that kind of move, if they leave Big Law, they are a failure. And I think Gabe looked at it as if he’d be failing too.”

  * * *

  —

  LAW SCHOOLS DEVELOP LAWYERS, yes, but they also develop leaders; lawyers in this country play a very visible and influential role in private and public life. According to the American Bar Association, twenty-six U.S. presidents were also lawyers, and that includes Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. The legal profession has not only supplied the majority of American presidents but also, in recent decades, almost half of Congress.

  Lawyers occupy leadership roles as governors, state legislators, judges, prosecutors, general counsels of corporations, managing partners of law firms, and CEOs. For better or worse, they maintain our justice system and, in many ways, are responsible for preserving the most important aspects of our societal fabric.

  Yet law students get little leadership training. Deborah L. Rhode, a professor at Stanford Law School and director of its Center on the Legal Profession, says the majority of lawyers lack the “soft skills” needed to be effective leaders, like self-awareness and emotional intelligence. Instead, law schools wind up changing many students’ worldview and goals. The goals they had when they entered law school become less centered around justice and more focused on winning.

  Elizabeth Mertz, an anthropologist and law professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who has studied the pedagogy of law school, writes that first-year law students experience an often “jarring confrontation with the worldview and practices of a new profession.”

  In 2007, Mertz analyzed the language in a full semester of contracts classes at eight law schools. In her book The Language of Law School: Learning to “Think Like a Lawyer” she examines the way legal language changes how a law student (and eventually, a lawyer) actually understands a story—a client’s story, their opposing counsel’s story, even their own personal story. And the change, Mertz writes, is profound. “There are entirely new views of reality and authority, new landmarks and ways of speaking, altered conceptions of themselves and others (and their relations to the world around them) packed quietly into the reading lessons students encounter in the first-year law school curriculum.”

  One of Peter’s good friends during law school was a guy named Chris, who graduated number two in their class. During his first year of law school Chris, like Peter, felt as if he had been hit by a truck. Aside from the intense pressure and exhaustion from keeping up with the reading, Chris says law school taught him and Peter to turn their minds into “finely honed intellectual weapons. Everything suddenly became a competition and we were constantly comparing and contrasting,” he says. “How do you pull yourself out of that mind-set? It invades every aspect of your being, and ends up hurting you and those closest to you.”

  Nine years after law school graduation Chris was arrested for obstructing a drug investigation, after hiding an “eight-ball” (3.5 grams) of cocaine for his dealer, who was also one of his clients. At the time of his arrest Chris was working as a private criminal defense attorney in a mid-Atlantic state, having served first as an assistant public defender and assistant state’s attorney. He was also deep into addiction, snorting three eight-balls of cocaine and swallowing between fifty and seventy pills, usually Percocet or the opioid Tylox, each month. I tracked him down in New England, where he is slowly rebuilding his law practice. After his conviction and disbarment in 2006, Chris was sentenced to two years of probation (one of which he spent in home detention). He was recently readmitted to the bar. “You know, if I hadn’t been arrested I would have been smoking rocks and shooting up too, just like Peter,” he tells me as I’m leaving his office. “I would honestly have put a needle in my arm, I know it. I was buying coke, I was buying so much coke, and I remember thinking: I shouldn’t be doing this. But it was all about feeling better.”

  Peter certainly wanted to feel better. He was miserable both as a law student and a lawyer (he refused to even drive through New Hampshire ever again), and lived for each small success—a pat on the back from a professor, a client, an email acknowledging a job well done from a partner. It was the start of his addiction to whatever made him feel better, some small shot of dopamine that helped ease the constant self-doubt that plagued him.

  * * *

  —

  BEFORE THEY ENTER LAW school, prospective law students are actually healthier than the general population, both physically and mentally. “There is good data showing that they drink less than other young people, use less substances, have much less depression, and are much less hostile,” says Andy Benjamin, an affiliate professor of law and a clinical psychology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. Benjamin has led several research teams over the past thirty years in studying law student health and well-being. “Law students are a bellwether for the profession, that’s what our data show,” he says. They are the canary in the legal coal mine; if law students aren’t doing well, the profession isn’t doing well either.

  In the 2014 Survey of Law Student Well-Being, researchers surveyed 11,000 law students at fifteen American law schools and found a high incidence of drinking (41 percent had engaged in binge drinking in the previous two weeks), drug use, depression, anxiety, and suicide risk. Overall, 14 percent of students had used a prescription drug without a prescription in the previous year, most frequently stimulants (the most common was Adderall). Almost 40 percent of students tested positive for anxiety—14 percent for severe anxiety.

  In 2018, the American Bar Association named March 28 National Mental Health Day at law schools nationwide, in an effort to lessen the stigma of depression and anxiety in the profession. A month later, in April, Harvard Law School released the results of its first annual survey of student mental health. Among the 886 respondents, 25 percent suffered from depression (in the general population 7.7 percent of those ages 20–39 suffer from depression) and 20 percent were at heightened risk of suicide.

  Two of the best-known researchers to study how law school affects law students are Lawrence S. Krieger, a professor of law at Florida State Univ
ersity College of Law, and Kennon M. Sheldon, a professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri. In February 2015—just five months before Peter died—the pair published a paper titled “What Makes Lawyers Happy?” in the George Washington Law Review. Their research discovered that right after students begin law school they experience a significant spike in depression and negativity, as well as corresponding decreases in positive affect and life satisfaction. Students’ values and their motivation for becoming lawyers shift in the first year of law school, from internal values such as helping others and being community-oriented to more superficial and external values and motivation, like money, recognition, or pleasing and impressing others. And those values stick with them.

  After Peter and I left New Hampshire and law school life, I assumed the days of all-nighters and nonstop exhaustion were over. During the previous three years, I blamed our lack of a family life on the overwhelming demands and pressures of law school. With that behind us, I assumed Peter and I would do things like have dinner together after putting the baby to bed, maybe find a sitter and go to a movie now and then, take weekend walks on the beach, our daughter nestled into the little backpack we had bought for her. That was not to be. One night, about two months into his new job, Peter didn’t come home from the office. I woke up early in the morning and saw that his side of the bed was undisturbed, so I called his cell phone—a Motorola flip phone back then—and he picked up right away. “Where are you?” I asked. “You never came home last night. You never called. What happened? Are you okay?” Peter said he was fine, he had slept in his office, on the floor under his desk. He had to deliver the draft of something—a brief or a memo—that morning and decided to just stay all night and work on it. Anna was eleven months old; we had been in San Diego four months.