An excellent start. It accomplishes very well one of the most important functions of a first draft: to clear away the brush and show the question around which the next draft can grow.

We can leave for another moment the question of whether the science bears out the hypothesis of vicarious trauma. After we've read Frank Putnam in a couple of weeks it would perhaps make sense to return to this question in a revision. The essay's central idea doesn't depend on any particular theoretical formulation for its overwhelming force. We could also say that lawyering for individual clients not only means forming a personal relationship, but also one directly fraught with the client's vulnerability and the lawyer's responsibility. However we formulate the nature of the resulting psychic cost to the lawyer, it can't just be dissociated, as you say. But on that point Larry Joseph's "Something Split" in Lawyerland, which we are also about to read, is succinct and disturbing.

So how should practice involving individual clients, like other types of practice—by social workers, psychotherapists, school counselors—that involve similar "empathy costs" be organized to be psychically fulfilling, or at least not damaging, to the lawyer? The best route to improvement, I think, is to put that question at the center of the next draft.