Part of the explanation is simply economic. Since the severe recession of 2008, the number of clients willing to pay top dollar for high-priced legal service has declined precipitously. Many of the nation’s largest law firms—those employing over 1,000 attorneys, often referred to as “Big Law”—have been forced to reduce their staffs. In dozens of cases, they have had no choice but to merge or file for bankruptcy, economically unable to sustain their operations.

But look deeper still and other more fundamental problems emerge. One is the increasing popularity of law school rankings. In order to compete for students and tuition dollars, law schools do what they can to improve their standing, which means in part encouraging as many students as possible to apply and to take jobs with high-paying firms when they graduate. And for any school to move up in the rankings, another needs to move down.

An even more serious problem is the way law firms keep score. One prevalent measure is PPP, or profit per partner, introduced by The American Lawyer in 1985. When such statistics began to be published, firms that thought they were doing well suddenly discovered that they were being outperformed by peers. Soon bidding wars ensued for top earners, who are sometimes referred to as “rainmakers.”

In one respect, ranking law schools by job placement rates and law firms by profits sounds like a good idea. It provides a seemingly fair and objective basis for prospective students, employers, and clients to assess performance. But such rankings have a tendency to bring out the worst in those they evaluate. For example, as soon as law firms begin measuring their performance by the revenue each attorney generates, money begins to supplant all other means of assessing performance.

Lawyers whose work is gauged above all by billable hours experience great pressure to make every minute count in the dollar column. Noble aspirations that may have drawn young people to the law in the first place—serving their fellow citizens, making the community a more just place, and securing democracy—evaporate thanks to this constant attention to money. Soon pro bono work seems a waste of time.

To professionals who choose careers in fields such as law, medicine, and teaching, it is demoralizing to be treated as a unit of production. Even some of the lawyers earning millions of dollars report that they find little or no fulfillment in the work they do. In essence, by stoking the flames of competition between law firms and attorneys, the current system has engrained what economists call a “zero-sum” mentality. There is only a relatively fixed quantity of legal work to be done, and for one firm or attorney to command more of it, others must make due with less. At many big firms, just beneath a veneer of cordiality lurks a shark-like ethic of eat-or-be-eaten, winner-take-all, cut-throat competition.