The Definitive Which is Harder: Law vs. Medicine?

Frequent Questions

As someone who practiced law for a number of years and is now a doctor, this is a question I get asked frequently. The simplified answer is, of course, medicine is harder. But they are different, and depending on the scenario, sometimes one is harder than the other. There are even rare individuals for whom law school and law might be more challenging.

First, the school. Medicine involves the sheer memorization of a massive number of facts that don’t necessarily make intuitive sense—like what CYP substrate metabolizes a certain drug. Law, on the other hand, is a large collection of rules all made up by people. Generally, these laws are created with a common-sense rationale or process in mind. So law not only has far fewer facts, but there’s a good chance you can intuit the rule much more logically. And if a rule doesn’t make sense, usually that helped to memorize it as well. The frequent holding that there’s no digital expectation of privacy due to hackers is silly, because by that logic you shouldn’t have any expectations of privacy in your house due to cat burglars.

The only counterbalance to this is that law school exams are issue-spotting, so you need to remember the rule and discuss it from scratch. Medical school is almost all multiple-choice, so it does give you at least a bit of a memory prompt. Except, of course, if you have a contrary embryology professor doing evil fill-in-the-blank quizzes.

Law does require the ability to be somewhat abstract and address the pros and cons of every issue. There seemed to be one or two people every year coming from a strict science background who’d have trouble with this. So I’d project a few doctors would have serious issues with this aspect of the law and might find medicine and medical school less difficult. I’d guess no more than 1-2%, however. Law school also prioritizes writing skills to a much higher degree so anyone for whom English is a second language would likely find law school potentially much harder.

In law school, I’d probably do all the required reading in about 3-4 hours, frequently before class. I read very fast, around 1000 words a minute during law school. I met the only person who I knew well who read faster than I did law school. I went into the lounge to read a easy reading science fiction or maybe a Tom Clancy like techno-thriller, I forget. I passed her by and she had just started War and Peace. When I left several hours later she was almost done. She did very well in law school. The only time I’d pull a constant study session was literally the night or two before the exam, pouring over an outline one of my more organized classmates had prepared. One semester I tried working harder and keeping up with things, maybe studying 12 hours a week. It did not move the needle any. I was a good law student and graduated with honors. Law school was one of the best times of my life; Eli Manning was the quarterback. I’d go out to the square with friends. We’d grill out and watch The Sopranos and Rome.

I like to say medical school tried to kill me. I’m not being metaphorical. One night studying during my second year, I randomly took my blood pressure and technically it was a hypertensive emergency. Personally, I think I studied or worked probably 70-80 hours a week on average during medical school. It felt like school was 9-to-5, and then I’d go to a coffee shop or the library to study until maybe nine or ten at night. Then I’d study a good 8-12 hours on Saturday and maybe a 3-4 hour block on Sunday. My performance in medical school wasn’t a dumpster fire, but it wasn’t great. I passed all my classes and avoided remediation. I’d guess I was in the 25-30% range in terms of performance.

So there’s of course a range and I think it’s mainly due to memory. If you have an exceptional ability to memorize medical school might be easier; however, that probably would only hold true for the top couple of percent of doctors for memorization. The other factor is reading and processing speed. High reading speed will make law school easier. My build with not great memorization, but high processing is essentially optimal for law school and predictive of medical school being not a fun time.

The Actual Practice

Now moving on to the actual practice. Admittedly, at this point my medical practice has been mainly residency. However, this is close enough to actual practice I feel I can answer.

The actual client intake or consultation I’d actually say is easier in medicine. They are both surprisingly similar, however. You are trying to interview someone to develop an actionable plan to determine and address their legal or medical problem using your professional body of knowledge. What makes this harder in law to me is that usually legal problems involve a very lengthy time period for the narrative or case so to be speak. While certainly there is a history to medical issues usually I’d say they can be very focused compared to legal issues. One key addition in medicine is you aren’t limited mainly to narrative or testimonies you also have objective data like labs and physical findings you can use to inform your plan. In addition, medicine has a larger number of obviously pertinent questions you can jump to finetune the diagnosis you are trying to make.

Now on to the idea that the practice of law is harder because there’s always someone on the other side trying to tear your work down. This is bullocks. In law, there is an expectation you will lose cases and that ultimately the facts do matter. That means that as long as you aren’t doing something incompetent you aren’t committing malpractice. As a practical matter having a live opponent actually makes the practice of law easier because it provides an acceptable rationale for an adverse outcome. Also, really your opponent in medicine is far more formidable and always wins in the end.

Law also involves far more time to spend on each case. There are very successful lawyers who work on 3-4 big cases a year. Frequently, spending more time on each case can be billed on an hourly basis. While there’s frequently an opportunity to bill in medicine for time spent in reality productivity is far and away the compensation mechanism. Law also involves being familiar with your cases, but again these are real facts that make sense. For hospital medicine witnessing an attending keep the details of 20-25 patients loaded in their brain is intimidating and a little awe inspiring when you realize how abstract many of the details are from medications, medical history, and the course of treatment.

One area I’d rank law as more difficult on is paperwork burden. I’d estimate law as being 70-80% paperwork. Detailed and involved paperwork that will be examined closely for any error. In addition, the paperwork is basically bespoke writing for many practice areas. While many times there are forms and templates, generally they take far more editing than medical notes do. Medical notes are also I’d say far more formulaic. I’d place the paperwork burden of medicine at around 30-50% of job time.

Law is also more difficult for many people in terms of psyche burden and moral injury. There are a lot of questionable situations in law. I encountered far less in medicine. People appreciate doctors far more. I remember eating out one time after a difficult shift my intern year. Some anonymous person picked up the check. I’m sure it was the family of patient I was caring for, that kind of thing wouldn’t have happened as a lawyer.

The difficulty in medicine again goes back to the vastly greater level of knowledge one is expected to have loaded in one’s brain. This does change and you need to keep up with it. Law actually changed very slowly in comparison even if people had fantasies about their lawyer keeping up with the major divorce law changes as they came out reading legislative updates. In reality, I don’t think that would ever really happen. Really major updates got talked about and didn’t happen that often. Bankruptcy law would remain largely the same until major revisions every ten years or so it seemed like.

I did notice that, as I went around with more established providers, they became very adept with experience. I’m guessing that once one has practiced medicine for a number of years that it could become easier for that person, even though the objective difficulty remains much harder. In medicine, you see a huge number of patients and get much more opportunity to practice and reinforce your knowledge.  As I said, lawyers deal with far fewer cases, so I think the effective skill ceiling in medicine may be much higher. So, in D and D terms, I don’t think you could really experience your way much past, say, a mid-30s lawyer, but you could hit a 99 with medicine in terms of skill just due to the number of reps you’d get in.   

So, takeaway, for the vast majority of people the practice of medicine will be more difficult per each level of experience so to speak. However, I do believe that eventually the practice of medicine may become easier than law for that person because medicine can achieve a higher effective level of skill.