5.2
Personality Styles

Two personality styles that are common in the legal profession and are thought to have an impact on mental health are perfectionism and pessimism.

Perfectionism is a personality style that involves the requirement or need to be or appear to be perfect. This goes beyond high standards, to the point of constantly being critical of oneself or others and having a fear of failure. This can lead to a variety of mental health, physical health and relationship problems. Perfectionism is also associated with workaholism, burnout and procrastination. The University of British Columbia Perfectionism and Psychotherapy Lab theorizes that perfectionism is so problematic because it “actually creates the presence of stressors or failures and increases the negative impact of stressful events in a person’s life.”

According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, pessimism is “the attitude that things will go wrong and that people’s wishes or aims are unlikely to be fulfilled”. Pessimists also see setbacks or negative events as pervasive and permanent, in contrast to optimists who see these as temporary. As with perfectionism, pessimism can lead to different mental health, physical health and relationship problems.

The irony is that while these two personality styles are considered maladaptive in most areas of life, these are often seen as highly desirable in the legal workplace. As Roza Milani points out in Ethics and Wellbeing: How the Elevated Incidence of Mental Illness is Impacting the Profession, the legal profession attracts, reinforces and rewards perfectionists and pessimists. 

Perfectionism can provide the desire and drive to excel in law school and throughout one’s career. The high standards and competition that exist in the profession can continually reinforce and exacerbate one’s perfectionism while negatively internalizing inevitable mistakes or events that don’t go as expected, even when an outcome is outside one’s control. 

Pessimism is often seen as a virtue for lawyers while optimism can be risky as it may lead to overly confident or risky behaviour. Dr. Martin E P Seligman, Paul R Verkuil and Terry H Kang in Why Lawyers are Unhappy, 2005, explain this concept as follows:

Pessimism encompasses certain “positive” dimensions; it contains what we call – in less pejorative terms – “prudence”. A prudent perspective, which requires caution, scepticism and “reality-appreciation” … enables a good lawyer to see snares and catastrophes that might conceivably occur in any given transaction. The ability to anticipate a whole range of problems that non-lawyers do not see is highly adaptive for the practicing lawyer. Indeed clients would be less effectively served if lawyers did not so behave, even though this ability to question occasionally leads to lawyers being labelled as deal breakers or obstructionists. 

Fortunately, these personality styles can adjust with appropriate professional support.

Last modified: Friday, 3 October 2025, 9:15 AM