Beyond Smart

"Many industries have, over the last thirty years, gone on to embrace emotional intelli-gence as the attribute that can both predict and achieve superior individual and organiza-tional performance. Emotional intelligence is also key to better physical and mental health, resulting in lower organizational costs from attrition, healthcare, and professional liability. Businesses like Google, Aetna, and Johnson & Johnson have built programs for their entire workforce around enhancing emotional intelligence. Doctors, to whom we lawyers like to compare ourselves, are including EI in medical school admissions and physician training because it promotes both good medical care and physician health. Perhaps no other profession relies so heavily on cognitive intelligence as law. Through changing application requirements, law schools continue to prefer the most logical appli-cants, and they rigorously employ the Socratic method in classrooms to ferret out any nonrational tendencies that remain. Law firms and law departments hire the top and presumably most rational law school graduates and then enforce cultures of strict ration-ality. Emotion is what we in the law business have been intent on eliminating. So, emotion-al intelligence may seem like an oxymoron to us. What do lawyers need it for? While some lawyers flourish in their work, troubling data on law people have been ac-cumulating for years. Even before the Covid pandemic and the lockdown's well-documented impact on workers generally, lawyers suffered outsized levels of emo-tional distress-six times the level of depression, for example-as any other professional group, outdoing even those oft-maligned dentists. The extremely high rates of suicide and substance abuse (both still underreported), divorce, and health issues among lawyers tes-tify to a degree of personal dysfunction that is astonishing. As testament to this dysfunc-tion, lawyers leave the practice of law in droves, and those who stay are often deeply dis-satisfied. A distressed, unhappy lawyer may well be on the front line advising our clients on critical issues. It should be no surprise that reports of client dissatisfaction have soared in recent years, and that malpractice liability is an increasing concern"--