Ron Fox has spent 15 years badgering the legal establishment to reform as the tide of unhappy lawyers abandoning careers ran "rampant." A national career consultant, Fox said as many as 70 percent of practitioners are disaffected.

Tony Tye, Post-Gazette Laura Stone, a lawyer turned teacher, reads the C.S. Lewis book "The Chronicles of Narnia" to her fifth-grade language arts class at the Community Day School in Squirrel Hill. At right are Amelia Fisher, center, and Gali Blumenthal, both 11. Stone, who spent 20 years in corporate practice, got her teaching degree five years ago. "I finally decided I needed a life," she said. "A lot of times I was working all night." Click photo for larger image. Related coverage After law, they found a life

His laments -- that the law has forsaken professionalism for the bottom line and that students are ill-prepared and beaten down in law school only to work for slave drivers -- are reiterated in a new book by the University of Pittsburgh's Distinguished Professor of Law, Richard Delgado, and his wife, Jean Stefancic, a research law professor.

"How Lawyers Lose Their Way: A Profession Fails Its Creative Minds," describes a field in crisis and one that Delgado says is losing 40,000 practitioners a year -- about the number that are admitted each year to the bar. The couple's review of lawyers' lives found that no matter the age, location or type of law they practice, lawyers as a group appear to be "a very, very unhappy, uptight, overworked, driven bunch of people."

Delgado and Fox, who practiced law in Boston for 20 years before founding the Center for Professional Development in the Law to help lawyers find fulfillment, say dissatisfaction is affecting doctors, teachers and other professionals for some of the same reasons: Their work is being squeezed into tightly accountable units by authorities who nitpick their autonomy and require tasks unrelated to their skills.

"We think the unhappiness of lawyers is the worst," said Delgado, "because the rate of depression is higher and starts earlier." Fox said it takes most lawyers who leave the profession 9 to 12 years to act.

Not all lawyers who have left the law equate their move with an escape from hell.

Laura Stone had once considered joining the Peace Corps. She took those sensibilities into her law career but spent 20 years in corporate practice.

Most of her experiences were good, she said. The Pittsburgh firms that employed her were flexible, so she could work around her children's activities, "but I finally decided I needed a life," Stone said. "A lot of times I was working all night."

Stone got a teaching degree from Duquesne University five years ago and has since been teaching language arts to fourth and fifth graders at Community Day in Squirrel Hill.

"Instead of staying up all night preparing for a closing, I'm reading persuasive essays on how to make the world a better place," she said. "I've traded the corporate board room for poetry."

She also traded a hefty salary for a simpler one.

"I started at the school making less than my starting salary was 20 years ago. We sold our house" in Sewickley, "got rid of the country club, took the kids out of private school. I resigned my boards. We moved to a townhouse in Squirrel Hill, streamlined, simplified and everyone is happier," Stone said.

While it's true some attorneys make a lot of money, the pay vs. the hours worked at many firms, particularly at smaller offices, abets the alienation many say they are feeling.

For example, surveys show an experienced associate at a small office may make as little as $50,000 a year. At nonprofits and public interest groups, the pay typically is even lower.

Even high-paid new associates at big law firms, where pay can start near the six-digits, find the balance between work and a personal life to be a tough trade-off. After adjusting for hours that often run deep into the night and spill over into weekends, many wonder if the struggle to obtain an hourly pay rate in the $25-an-hour range is worth it.

An estimated 1 million people in the United States have law degrees, and of those who practice, about 30 percent are in firms larger than 50 people. Many law students are creative types who "really think they were going to help people," said Nikki Nordenberg, a career counselor whose clients include the Allegheny County Bar Association. "But our society doesn't value creativity, and the legal system doesn't either."

Many young lawyers never even talk to a client, she said. "At any given time, at least a third of the people I'm dealing with would walk out of the law tomorrow if they could." The demands for billable hours, she said, is akin to factory piecework, creating "white-collar sweatshops."

Greg Miller, the partner in charge of recruiting at Downtown law firm Buchanan Ingersoll, one of Pittsburgh's largest, said the firm is trying harder to meet the needs of associates. It has established an anonymous feedback survey and an ombudsman's office for junior lawyers to report problems and contentions.

"We view our junior lawyers as an investment," said Fran Muracca, Buchanan Ingersoll's chief operations officer.

Joanne Martin, associate director of the American Bar Foundation, thinks the numbers of unhappy lawyers have been overblown. The foundation co-sponsored a national survey of lawyers who graduated from law school in 2000 and found "no evidence in the data of any pervasive unhappiness in the profession."

But the report did find that lawyers "with the highest incomes report relatively less satisfaction with the work they do and the practice settings in which they work than those earning far less from the practice of law."

It's in those lower-paying areas where lawyers are desperately needed, said Fox.

Public interest lawyers, he noted, tend to be paid the least, even though they take on cases that arguably have the most impact on society's disadvantaged, such as lower-income residents facing eviction from their homes or unaware victims of environmental crime.

David Herring, the outgoing dean at Pitt's law school, agreed with Fox that a big issue confronting the legal profession is the need for more attorneys to enter public-service work and meet the needs of the middle class that finds most legal services too expensive.

The high cost of legal service and legal education was one of many criticisms leveled against the profession 13 years ago by the prestigious MacCrate Report. Herring said many law schools, including Pitt's, have since added practical clinics to the curriculum in response to MacCrate's call for better preparation.

"We could make it a better education by opening the third year to opportunities for practice," said Herring, who for years has worked to find funding and expand the outreach of Pitt's legal clinics.

It would help if the overseers of bar admissions put less emphasis on tests on arcane matters of law, he said, and instead took into consideration real-world experience that students get from clinical programs and public-interest work.

Such reforms, however, are difficult, Herring acknowledged. "The industry has certain standards and approaches. There would be a lot of resistance," he said. But, Herring added, such a shift would also help "change this mentality that you're a loser if you don't go to a big firm."