A decade ago, we conducted a 20‐year longitudinal study of career and life satisfaction among the class matriculating at the University of Virginia School of Law in 1987. Here, we extend our repeated measures follow‐up from 20 to 30 years—from the time when respondents were a mean of 43 to the time they were a mean of 53 years old. The 2017 survey employed substantially the same instrument used in 2007, with the addition of a new section assessing potential period effects occurring over the past decade that might have influenced respondents' working conditions, including a stronger stress on economic sustainability. The 2017 response rate was 81 percent of those who had responded to the 2007 survey (constituting 58 percent of the class matriculating in 1987). We found respondents to have taken diverse career paths, with no single work setting accounting for more than one‐quarter of the respondents and with fully one‐third of the respondents changing jobs in the past decade. Marked gender differences in the professional lives of respondents persisted (e.g., women continued to be much more likely than men to forego full‐time employment “in order to care for children” (30 percent vs. 4 percent)). Working conditions at large private law firms stayed problematic, with the portion of respondents negatively affected by a stronger stress on economic sustainability being twice as high among those working in large firms (77 percent) than among those working in other settings (38 percent). Finally, both career satisfaction and life satisfaction again were found to be high, with 77 percent of respondents satisfied with the decision to become a lawyer, and 91 percent satisfied with their lives more broadly.

中文翻译：

---

律师在其职业生涯的顶峰时期：对工作和生活满意度的30年纵向研究

十年前，我们于1987年在弗吉尼亚大学法学院就读的班级中对职业和生活满意度进行了为期20年的纵向研究。在这里，我们将重复的测量随访时间从20年延长至30年，从受访者的平均年龄为43岁，而平均年龄为53岁。2017年的调查使用的工具与2007年使用的工具基本相同，并增加了一个新部分，以评估过去十年中可能对受访者的工作条件产生影响的潜在时期影响，包括对经济可持续性的更大压力。在对2007年调查做出答复的人中，2017年的答复率为81％（占1987年入学班级的58％）。我们发现受访者采取了多种职业道路，在过去十年中，没有一项工作构成的受访者超过四分之一，并且有三分之一的受访者更换了工作。受访者在职业生活中存在明显的性别差异（例如，“为了照顾孩子”，女性比男性继续放弃全职工作的可能性要高得多（30％比4％））。大型私人律师事务所的工作条件仍然存在问题，一部分受访者受到更大的经济可持续性压力的负面影响，在大型事务所工作的人（77％）比在其他地方工作的人（38％）高两倍。最后，发现职业满意度和生活满意度都很高，有77％的受访者对成为律师的决定感到满意，