Money Money Money

The relationship many barristers have with money is complicated. It’s not surprising. There’s a lot of it on show. A shift in perspective could be helpful.

Three conversations about money

Here are three real conversations I’ve had with barristers on the topic of income motivation.

#1 The Junior Barrister

JB:   No, I’m not in it for the money.
Me:  But you left academia.
JB:   Well…yes.

#2 The Senior Barrister

SB:   I need to clear about £200K a year.
Me:  What does £200K mean for you?
SB:   That’s what my wife earns.

#3 The Commercial QC

QC:  I want to net £2m this year.
Me:  Why two million?
QC:  Oh. You think I’m avaricious.
Me:   Not at all. Why not three?

It’s a complicated and emotive topic, certainly.

The correlation between wealth and happiness

Research suggests that when we reach a certain annual income level (about £85,000 in today’s money) we can relax about being able to afford Maslow’s basics, like food, shelter and super-fast broadband. This data is from this paper by Daniel Kahnemann and Angus Deaton which examines the correlation between money and emotional wellbeing.

In The Science of Wellbeing, a course originally designed for students at Yale, and downloaded over three million times on Coursera, Laurie Santos sets her students a series of challenges to help them debunk the myths about what will make them happy in school and in life. Spending your money on loads of awesome stuff is all very well, she explains, but hedonic adaptation will quickly return us to the same state of happiness as before we acquired it.

Further, in Happiness: Unlocking the mysteries of psychological wealth, a Wiley book by Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, the authors draw on thirty years of research into happiness to conclude again and again that there is a consistently low correlation between happiness and wealth, and they show how the differential only widens as income levels grow.

Another way of thinking about money

Given what the data is saying about the correlation between happiness and wealth, and the approach some barristers take to working longer and longer hours with the objective of earning more and more, what are some of the strategies that can help barristers make a decision about whether to take that additional case that will have them working ‘til 2am every night for the next three weeks, or deciding not to accept it, even though there will be a financial consequence?

Some useful advice can be found in this book by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton: Happy Money: the new science of smarter spending. It backs up the idea actually, money can buy you happiness, but not in the way you might imagine.

According to Dunn and Norton, buying experiences, investing in other people, noticing what you have, buying what you can afford and using your money to create time affluence are strategies that will increase your happiness and wellbeing. These are strategies that everyone can afford, regardless of the figure that’s showing in your bank account this month.

Choosing a different measure of success

In The Bar Hothouse, where income levels differ vastly and public displays of wealth are not uncommon, having a few strategies up your sleeve to help you keep perspective can be helpful.

Pretending that money isn’t important isn’t helpful because it will lead you to undercharge for your work. Benchmarking your income against someone else’s will make you miserable because social comparison does that to all of us. Picking a number at random won’t make the achievement of it meaningful. There will just be another number to go in search of very soon afterwards.

Learning to be happy with what you have already could lead to better outcomes for you, your family and all the people who are important to you.  Keep that in mind when you’re deciding whether you have time to squeeze in just one more case this month.

By Heidi Smith
Creator of Jurilogical.com

Heidi Smith writes about change and technology in the legal sector.  She is the creator of Jurilogical.com, an online resource hub for barristers.  Connect with her on Linkedin here.

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