Building on an earlier survey (conducted in 2007) of Univ. of Virginia Law School students (class of 1990) 20 years out, in Lawyers at the Peak of Their Careers: A 30-Year Longitudinal Study of Job and Life Satisfaction, forthcoming in JELS (Vol.16:1), John Monahan (UVa) and Jeffrey Swanson (Duke) re-surveyed (conducted in 2017) those responding individuals 30 years out to gain some sense of how professional and life satisfaction may have evolved over time. Interacting the 2007 and 2017 response rates suggests that 58 percent of the (still living) UVa Law class of 1990 participated in both survey waves. While questions about how much one may reasonably generalize from a self-selecting sample of a single graduating class from a single elite law school certainly persist, that such longitudinal survey work is unusual evidences the degree of difficulty incident to such research endeavors. A summary of key findings follow from an excerpted abstract.
"We found respondents to have taken diverse career paths, with no single work setting accounting for more than one‐quarter of the respondents and with fully one‐third of the respondents changing jobs in the past decade. Marked gender differences in the professional lives of respondents persisted (e.g., women continued to be much more likely than men to forego full‐time employment 'in order to care for children' (30 percent vs. 4 percent)). Working conditions at large private law firms stayed problematic, with the portion of respondents negatively affected by a stronger stress on economic sustainability being twice as high among those working in large firms (77 percent) than among those working in other settings (38 percent). Finally, both career satisfaction and life satisfaction again were found to be high, with 77 percent of respondents satisfied with the decision to become a lawyer, and 91 percent satisfied with their lives more broadly."
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