I'm posting I'm Billing Time Again along with an excerpt from Chuck Newton's Third Wave Law Firm Blog, Happiness Equals Reality Divided by Expectations

According to the New York Bar Association, turnover rates among mid-level associates in this city’s law firms is 36 percent. The whole system is predicated on burnout.

In 1981, Maslach, now vice-provost at the University of California, Berkeley, famously co-developed a detailed survey, known as the Maslach Burnout Inventory, to measure the syndrome. Her theory is that any one of the following six problems can fry us to a crisp: working too much; working in an unjust environment; working with little social support; working with little agency or control; working in the service of values we loathe; working for insufficient reward (whether the currency is money, prestige, or positive feedback).

It seems to me the first two of the six problems will most probably result in burnout in big law leading some to try a Third Wave practice. However, the working with little social support, little agency or control is probably more conducive for Third Wave burnout.

Farber often calls burnout “the gap between expectation and reward." I can tell you that in a Third Wave practice this gap is greatly cut.

"The great paradox of efficiency is that the more we speed up, the more acute our frustrations when we’re forced to slow down. Is it not possible that these ambient frustrations function as chronic stressors, and—in some subtle but crucial way—contribute to feeling worn out? Americans, Gleick writes, spend an estimated 3 billion minutes a year waiting on hold with the software industry; they race to airports only to wait for hours; they start to jitter inside elevators if the doors take more than four seconds to close. (Elevator engineers even have a term for how long it takes—door dwell—before people start jamming their fingers on the door close button, which is usually a placebo, a function already disabled by litigation-conscious building managers.)

'Gridlocked and tarmacked are metonyms of our era,” Gleick writes. “To be gridlocked or tarmacked is to be stuck in place, our fastest engines idling all around us, as time passes and blood pressures rise.

If one of the surest recipes for burnout, as Michael Leiter has said, is the sensation of inefficiency—particularly if we’re still expending energy and seeing little in return—then there may be something about the modern office that conspires to burn us out. In 2005, a psychiatrist at King’s College London did a study in which one group was asked to take an IQ test while doing nothing, and a second group to take an IQ test while distracted by e-mails and ringing telephones. The uninterrupted group did better by an average of ten points, which wasn’t much of a surprise. What was a surprise is that the e-mailers also did worse, by an average of six points, than a group in a similar study that had been tested while stoned."