A Hellscape of Gamma

Why Lawyers tend to be low-SSH

I used to be a lawyer. I noticed most lawyers are gammas or deltas. Even lawyers at the top tend to be more gamma than alpha. There’s a reason for the stereotype that senior partners/lawyers are always after female subordinates, but in creepy ways. I don’t think the profession lends itself to higher SSH men. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the legal profession.

There are several reasons for this, and indeed, speaking as one with extensive and in-depth experience working with and against lawyers in various courts and arbitrations, it’s really not too much of a mystery why the legal field is largely populated with Gammas.

1. The lawyer is not his own boss. Whether he’s a prosecutor working for the state, a defense attorney who is nominally working for his client but is actually working for the state, an in-house corporate attorney who is working for a corporation, or an independent attorney who is nominally working for his clients but is actually living in constant fear of the judges before whom he appears, the lawyer is never his own boss and never has truly independent agency.

2. The law intrinsically values subject matter experts. Each lawyer has his own little specialty; one of the most maddening behaviors of lawyers is the way that the very first thing any lawyer whose services are retained wants to do is hire another lawyer who specializes in the actual area required. And although this is totally insane from a normal perspective, it actually makes some degree of sense because the effective law is not, as most people believe, the black letter law of the law statutes, but rather, the interpretive law set out by the previous judicial rulings that set the legal precedents that override the written law.

3. The legal system systematically rewards liars. For all the talk of perjury and disbarments, lawyers are never, ever, punished for blatantly lying about the other side. They can blithely invent imaginary motivations, accuse the other side of committing great moral and criminal offenses, and impugn the character of their opponents with complete impunity. Cartel assassins and crack whores working the urban bus stations have more moral integrity than the vast majority of lawyers. The entire field is essentially optimized for Gammas; the US legal system is about the closest thing to rule by Gamma that the world is ever going to see.

4. Success doesn’t require results. The compensation system for lawyers is about as unfair and unrelated to the results delivered as it is possible to be. Imagine if ditch diggers were compensated, not on the basis of how many ditches they dug, but on how much time they spent thinking about what shovel to use, and they were paid the same regardless of whether they dug a single ditch or not. As a writer, whose many hours of literary work usually precede any compensation or even any guarantee of compensation, I find the lawyerly insistence that they should be paid “for their time” without even having to deliver anything at all, let alone a positive result, to be deeply offensive and contemptible.

5. A law degree is a credential, and Gammas love credentials because they can be acquired without any real risk of failure. All a credential signifies is that the holder has put in the necessary time to acquire it, it says absolutely nothing about his abilities, his track record, or the likelihood that he will deliver the services required.

6. Both court cases and arbitrations are essentially a competition in competing narratives, and Gammas are the champions of spinning their own narratives. One thing I’ve observed is that Deltas tend to be failures in litigation and arbitration, because their narrative is always “I am the nice and reasonable party, therefore you should accept my narrative, and not that of my honorable opponent, whose narrative is, through no fault of his own, less perfectly aligned with the truth than mine.” Meanwhile, his Gamma opponent is accusing both the Delta lawyer and his client of every offense up to and including sodomizing the animals in the local zoo, so when the judge inevitably decides to split the difference, the Delta loses in a big way.

Only people with zero experience of court or arbitration are sufficiently ignorant to tell other people that “they should sue” or make stupid threats of taking someone to court. Even if you’ve been reliably successful in multiple legal contexts, you know that subjecting oneself to the uncertainties and incoherencies of the legal system should only be done in cases of absolute necessity, because it’s a hellscape of Gamma.

Actual arbitration is worse than this. Seriously, you can’t imagine it until you see it.