The Difference Between Doctors and Lawyers
Since I started my series about Medicine and the Law, I’ve been thinking a lot about a debate I used to have with my friends when I was younger. Some of my friends wanted to be lawyers, others wanted to be doctors. At that time, doctors were paid more than lawyers. Since that time, lawyers are paid more than doctors.
At the heart of this debate were a few simple questions:
- Who works harder, doctors or lawyers?
- Who should get paid more?
- Whose job is most important?
I’ve always felt that doctors worked harder than lawyers. That medicine is a profession with no restrictions to work hours and that law is a corporate type of job with restrictions. I understand that in every profession there are difficult and less difficult specialties. Radiologists, physiatrists, and dermatologists are all doctors but they definitely don’t work as hard or as long of hours as surgeons, traumatologists, or intensivists. Similarly, litigators are under a lot of stress and must work after hours to prepare for cases. If clients get in trouble after hours, they must attend to them. On the other hand, there are contract lawyers that review contracts and don’t spend time in front of judges or juries. So in both professions there are those that work hard and long hours.
One key difference for me is that doctors are responsible for care at all hours of the day and night. If your doctor doesn’t see you when you need him/her you can die and bad things can happen. If your lawyer doesn’t see you, perhaps something bad can/will happen, but you can always get another attorney or if you get in trouble one will be assigned to you.
I guess both doctors and lawyers must take their work home at night. But when you are a doctor and someone is in the hospital, you must field calls from nurses all night. Lawyers don’t really have the same sort of torture and can sleep.
I definitely feel that doctors have more important jobs than lawyers. I know I am biased and that many of you will probably be upset and disagree, but the truth is that all across the world you can live without a lawyer, but you can’t live without doctors.
So who should get paid more? Well, in most other countries outside the U.S. doctors do not make much money. They probably get more respect but don’t get paid as much. I still feel that doctors should get paid more than lawyers, but the payment mechanism of this country continues to punish physicians. But this is for several reasons including the inability of the government to pay for the aging population, the rising costs of healthcare, and the sheer necessity of providing care to everyone in need. Perhaps those facts reveal that medicine is more important than law — those that cannot afford lawyers simply don’t get them and they do fine. But people need doctors to stay healthy and doctors but there are too many people that need doctors and it is too expensive for the government to pay for them all.
One final note is that I think it is interesting that the payment mechanism in law has not changed. Lawyers continue to get paid exorbitant hourly wages. The more senior attorney you are the higher your hourly rate. Lawyers get paid more for longer cases or more complicated ones. And most importantly, there is no incentive for lawyers to make things short and sweet — doing so decreases their billable hours.
But doctors have an incentive to work fast. They don’t get paid hourly. In fact, when they spend more time with someone it reduces their economic productivity.
I don’t need to spell out how to change this system. Anyone with a pea of a brain could figure out how to incentivize physicians to work more effectively.
Hopefully none of my lawyer friends are reading this!
JC, MD
Dr. JC is a medical doctor who has a passion for health promotion and education.17 Responses
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I’m afraid you don’t know much about the legal profession. Criminal lawyers are indeed under substantial deadlines and often great stress on behalf of their clients. Have you ever been wrongly accused of malpractice? Have you ever been put in front of the medical licensing board? Your livelihood is at stake and it is often a single attorney’s actions which determine the rest of your future as a physician.
And as you mentioned there is a great deal of range within the profession. The most tedious of lawyers are simply parsing a linguistic code and applying it to a specific case. Similarly, the most tedious of doctors are no more than well-trained mechanics. Neither deserve half of the money or prestige attributed to the exceptional practitioners of the same field.
The lawyer gives you your freedom, the doctor your life. I personally can not do without — and think as you will on Patrick Henry’s famous quote:
Lawyers and doctors both have strict jobs that demand more out of them then they ever want to give. I am in neither profession so I do not have a biased but I believe doctors have a harder job out of the two.
Doctors are forced to deal with patients every hour of the day. Lives of people are always in the hand of the doctor. Justin mentions “Give me liberty or give me death” but their suspects are alive after court cases. Patients could die if there is a problem in the Operation Room.
Lawyers work hard and long hours to provide freedom to their clients. They are always going over contracts and evidence to contradict the opposing argument.
Lawyers keep people free. Doctors keep people alive.
My vote needless to say is Doctors. Doctors have a harder job than lawyers.
I do not get why we are talking about doctors and lawyers here. At least after these cases they are alive and functioning regardless of the outcome! People at the center of these cases are PEOPLE, with lives and families and people who love them. YES everything should be done that is humanely possible to restore them to a somewhat level of functioning, ONCE EVERYTHING HAS BEEN DONE the person is no more – not on this planet anyways.
I completely understand the position of Mrs. Shiavo’s parents. I can’t bare to think about what they went through for all those years – I sampled it for 14 weeks and almost lost my mind – those poor people. You want so badly to believe that the person is going to be OK. Once the person actually looses conscousness the same feelings as death sets in for the loves ones. Has anyone ever heard about the stages of grief? Anyone ever heard about denial?
For me it was 7 years ago and I can look back now with much clearer thoughts. I wanted my wife to live so bad that I would have also kept her alive no matter what condition she would have been in. Let me ask you one question: HOW FAIR WOULD THAT HAVE BEN TO HER? Do you think she would have wanted to live like that? Of course she would have chosen life – BUT NOT LIKE THAT!
I’m glad that Mr. Shiavo had the ability to let his wife go and not live as a vegetable. And for those who talk about him being with someone else – HIS WIFE HAS BEEN GONE FOR 12 YEARS – should he live as he is also dead? I didn’t date for over 4 years after my wifes passing and believe me I didn’t really want to and only did so after much convincing by people who cared about me.
The right thing happened here, I would not have said this 7 years ago, but after having so much time to reflect I am glad that he had the ability to let his wife move on and the power to move on himself!
Your whole argument is premised on the assumption that all lawyers are corporate lawyers, or work for big firms. You also don’t seem to recognize how great and complex the legal needs of people living in poverty in this country are. And your commenters are right to bring up criminal lawyers but there are also a whole bunch of other lawyers providing essential legal services that are not criminal. I am a public interest lawyer, as are most of my friends. We represent people caught up in the criminal justice system (who are overwhelmingly poor and minorities, and often mentally ill), we represent victims of employment discrimination. In my case, I represent prisoners who are abused (sometimes to death, but in the best of cases, before that can happen), and people with disabilities who have lost the ability to work and are being screwed over by their insurance companies when it comes to long-term disability benefits. We get paid at most 1/4 what our friends in firms make, it is (for perverse reasons) more competitive to get a job in our field, and we also get paid far less than doctors. And in fact, what we do does affect people’s lives in all sorts of ways. Sometimes it is life and death, sometimes it is the ability to have shelter, to have access to benefits for food, to maintain ties with your family, to earn a living, etc.
I’m not suggesting that lawyers are “more important” than doctors. If forced to choose, I might choose doctors, but I don’t find the question particularly interesting or useful. I just want to make it clear that you are talking about a particular type of lawyer and a particular type of client, and you may well be right when it comes to them, but your comments suggest a real blindness to the experience of people living in poverty in this country and the extent of their powerlessness in the legal system without the work of public interest lawyers.
I’m a prosecutor, busily catching up all those minority and mentally ill people in the criminal justice system. I roll out at least two nights a week on search warrants, and after 18 years on the job I’ve reached my maximum salary of $92,000.
I had no idea I was so much better off monetarily than an 18 year experience doctor!
Seriously, I do my work because I love it. There’s more to satisfaction than a pay check, and I’ll never complain. If I wanted to do something else that paid more, I would. I suspect there are few doctors who quit, because most of them don’t doctor just for the money.
I disagree with you. People are always going to need lawyers. To get them out of legal trouble. Doctors don’t always know what they’re doing. No offense. And I never heeard of a lawyer killing one of their clients.
Doctors make more than lawyers — $250,000 for an anesthesiologist, $92,000 is nothing.
Just remember that there are plently of lawyers out there who are getting rich off of doctors for frivolous claims. Forget about who’s job is harder (the answer is medicine because it takes a minimum of 7 yrs of post-graduate training compared to three for lawyers)…the true question is who’s job is more respected. I haven’t heard too many doctor’s jokes that start out “What’s the difference between a dead dog in the road and a dead….” We work harder, train longer, and generally get reimbursed well…but at least we aren’t the topic of sleazeball jokes. Lawyers are a necessary evil…nothing more. And the answer to the joke is that there are skid marks in front of the dead dog…not the dead lawyer.
Both Doctors and Lawyers are important but based on data world wide and and our national well being it would seem we have an abundance of one and a shortage of another.
Obviously, you’ve never had to work with lawyers who are dealing with/appealing death-penalty cases. The phrasing of the question is a set-up to pit doctors and lawyers against each other — furthermore, it really self -aggrandizing — a set-up to promote the status of the doctors as ‘gods’ — all so-much-better and all-so-much-morally superior than the the rest of humanity.
The truth is that we really all need each other…no man (or woman) is an island — so it really doesn’t help compare professions by asking “who works harder” or who is better or smarter. Nurses often work harder than both lawyers and doctors and often don’t get nearly the same compensation.
I’m a South African lawyer.. we’ve got very few doctors and very difficult healthcare circumstances and heaven knows I think doctors are way more important.
But i think what we sometimes forget is that humans individually make the choices that end them up needing doctors and lawyers… lawyers get to solve conflicts between people and doctors perhaps conflicts within people..or the outcomes of choices people make.
The HIV pandemic in SA has to be seen to be believed but it takes place because of choices (and they are informed choices believe me) that people make.
So although doctors and lawyers are important – lawyers are helping people avoid the consequences of their own idiocy more directly while we feel more compunction for the person suffering physically from their poor choices..
There’s no conflict at all between us either and I think although doctors work harder when they’re younger in their carreers and get to slack off later – it works the other way around for lawyers, you work harder as you get older..
And there are NO goalposts.. there are lawyers (cheap and poor) and lawyers (filthy rich) and doctors and doctors likewise ! Life ain’t as tidy as the question assumes ~!
What are you, twelve? My dad can kick your dad’s ass. Because he’s an engineer, and tecnhology is what has made our whole society possible.
Neither profession is more important than the other. I say this as a practicing physician and lawyer. Because these are separate and distinct fields of study and practice, a practitioner of the other, though well acquainted with the quirks of his field, cannot presume to know everything about the other profession to warrant a conclusion.
As to who is more important, doctors tend to be the popular choice because of the ridiculous academic preparation, the long hours of work, all the hype that goes with the stethoscope and scrubs, and the age-old “good doctor” stereotype. While we are in the business of handling and saving lives, sometimes attention need be drawn only to cases where no lives hang on the balance. In a way, they also do not have the burden of having to ponder on legal implications at every turn.
All doctors undergo the same required training before they settle into their more comfortable specialties. It may be true that most doctors start off idealistic, sadly a few end up slaves to their doctor’s fees behind the mask of continuing discipline.
Lawyers on the other hand bear the brunt of ridicule because of the actions of a few misguided fellow practitioners, the protracted and tedious adversarial nature of litigation, and the number of “compromises” they have to make along the way. But the study of law is unique, and though it requires less time, is by no means any easier than that of medicine. The same goes with actual practice. Curiously, the level of government supervision and legal ethics impose higher standards of integrity on lawyers. The efforts of lawyers maintain a certain degree security not only to lives but to the world economy, and to the justice system as well. In comparison to the medical field, the legal field is far- reaching and almost all-encompassing.
The courtroom drama captures the imagination and respect of many, and often times the wining client sees his counsel as a god. Similarly, the ER scene and hospital demi-gods can make for popular media features.
The money each makes differs per country. In my opinion, regardless of profession, how much you make depends on how enterprising you are. Unfortunately, medical and legal ethics discourage running the profession like a business.
Doctors rarely want to have anything to do with legalities, much less having to deal with lawyers. Lawyers on the other hand rarely ever want to dabble with medical details, and the fact that the two professions clash over medico-legal issues does not in reality strengthen the notion that the medical field is a fertile area for litigation.
In fairness to doctors, many all over the world are underpaid and over-worked. The same can be said for lawyers.
We love to hear about exceptional individuals who work selflessly for the welfare of the impoverished many. Many doctors and lawyers work in the spirit of service. They immerse themselves into the crevices of society, concealed from the wealth-loving public. Similarly, the legal profession is tainted by the poison of a few “bad-apples” within the system. But bad-apples exist also in comparable numbers in all professions. The medical profession is not exempted. And who do we call when our reputations are in danger? Lawyers!
I agree completely that life must be held precious above all other mundane things. But a life without justice is no life at all. Doctors may need lawyers just as lawyers may need doctors. Its funny how we often think too highly of ourselves over the next guy, until the time we find ourselves needing him.
A salute to all Doctors and Lawyers who faithfully and ethically practice their professions!
well put jc.when one looks at the amount of stress that doctors go through.its obvious they desrve much more.
http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#29-0000
In the United States, those working in each category of occupation that requires the M.D. or D.O. degree make appreciably more than any category of lawyers for which data are reported. If there were some clean of way of separating New York securities lawyers and lawyers who do class action plaintiffs’ work, maybe you could show that those few individuals, on average, make more than most categories of doctors.
I wanted you to highlight about dealth sentences by lawyer.
“Lawyers continue to get paid exorbitant hourly wages. The more senior attorney you are the higher your hourly rate.”
You confuse what one bills with what one gets paid. Regardless of where you practice, these are never the same.