Maintaining professionalism: emotional labor among lawyers as client advisors

Abstract

Dominant professional ideology dictates that lawyers behave professionally toward clients by using logical, rational reasoning and expression and by leaving emotion and personal feelings out of their work. However, this ideology overlooks the fact that lawyers who work in settings that feature high client contact often labor under very emotionally charged circumstances. As a result, lawyers must use emotional labor to cope with their own feelings while maintaining their professional display. Using qualitative data based on semi-structured interviews with twenty lawyers in the Midwestern United States, I show that the lawyers interviewed in this study cope with their own feelings by using emotional labor to suppress the spontaneous expression of personal feelings, while working to evoke a display of emotions that does not run afoul of traditional standards of legal professionalism. Their use of emotional labor to cope with their feelings came in four forms: expression of genuine emotion, deep acting, surface acting, and detachment. The findings suggest that despite wide scholarly discussion of alternative conceptions of professionalism, the need to expand these discussions among law students and practitioners is still pressing.