Women and the Law.

I found your article, "Why are women leaving the law?" intriguing, but may I suggest that you might have missed one of the fundamental reasons why not only women, but men too, leave the law and often regret having become attorneys in the first place.

The practice of law is enormously stressful in any case as we are responsible to our clients for their well-being. But this stress is massively increased by the lack of respect for our profession due to the reputation of lawyers as "ambulance chasers" who encourage unnecessary litigation and complicate everything in order to make more money. This poor reputation is particularly disturbing for those attorneys who want to utilize the law to make civilization more civilized. The impression much of the public has is that the legal system is "of, by, and for" lawyers. All this reduces the pleasure of practicing law.

May I suggest that the first steps toward retaining more lawyers in the profession is to reform the practice in several fundamental ways that make us friends of people and business, rather than terrifying them both:

1. Simply stop passing so many laws--the cascade of laws, especially Federal laws over the last 50 years makes everything in life more complicated and puts everyone at risk of selective prosecution by rogue prosecutors, especially as the requirement of "mens rea" has declined or even disappeared;

2. Encourage mediation and arbitration as a faster, cheaper, and fairer ways of resolving disputes;

3. Stop filing class actions that get next to nothing for the alleged victims while enriching attorneys;

4. Prosecuting attorneys must be punished whenever they withhold...