Lawyer Pessimism and the Alternative Career Search

I’ve written before about how law is one of the few professions in which pessimism pays off. The more problems you can foresee, the more disasters you can envision, the more likely you will be to keep your client out of a legal quagmire.

But that personality trait is one of the single biggest obstacles to an alternative legal career search. Because instead of hope, you see certain doom to all of your efforts to do something different.

Even among well-adjusted, non-depressed people, job searching is plain hard. You need perseverance and creativity, and a definite willingness to throw a bunch of crap onto the job search wall and see what sticks. You don’t control much of the process.

Lawyer pessimism sabotages the process of career change in ways both subtle and obvious. It’s obvious when you don’t send a resume for a known job listing because you think there will be so many more applicants more qualified than you.

But the pessimism sneaks into your thinking by controlling your perceptions of what you might even be qualified for. As lawyers, we want proof of skills and talents. And not just any proof will do—that’s where the pessimism comes in. It has to be unassailable, court-grade proof that you are, for example, a quick learner. The fact that you can absorb a metric ton of information about contact lens solution marketing, for example, from a document review means nothing to many lawyers. Because (and here’s the pessimism talking) you haven’t done that marketing work yourself, you haven’t taken classes in marketing, and you certainly couldn’t pass yourself off as a marketing expert to anyone who knows diddly about marketing.

Note that all those good reasons don’t have anything to do with whether you actually absorbed, processed, and can apply all the knowledge you just plowed through—knowledge gained as an incident to your main work, at that. None of those reasons speak to whether you do, in fact, learn quickly.

Don’t let pessimism take your career search for an unjoy-ride. Distract it by asking pessimism to work out where you could move to save some money, and whether you could trade in your nice shiny current car for something a little less shiny, but paid for. Stuff like that.

Then you and hope need to go off in a corner while pessimism is busy, and dream up some what-if scenarios. What if my resume lands in the hands of someone who has switched careers like I want to? What if the shoe-in for a job I want completely botches the interview through arrogance or complacency? And then, make some moves according to those hopes and dreams. No, they won’t all work out, but it only takes one of them to work out, and see your career search bear some well-deserved fruit.

Have you fought the good fight against pessimism, and won even one tiny victory? Are you in the midst of a battle with pessimism right now? Comment or email me, and let’s share strategies with the community of alternative legal career seekers.

Jennifer Alvey is a recovering lawyer who writes, edits, and contemplates life for a living. Sometimes she even coaches lawyers who want to work on writing. You can reach her at jalveyATwordsolutions.com.

Suspect ADD? A Few Insights for Attorneys

If you’re unhappy in law because you

• hate the lack of creativity in it,
• despise having to show each tiny piss-ante step of reasoning when it’s freaking OBVIOUS how you got there,
• get bored and pissed with all the pointless bickering back and forth about commas and such–except when you’re really exorcised about something you wrote,
• rail at all the ridiculous workplace rules about listening to music on your computer (for example),
• seethe at the dress codes with such specific rules about flip-flops v. sandals,
• billing time is the albatross of your existence, plus
• buckling down to work often feels impossible, even though you know you should,
• miss deadline often, and
• are late to work often

you may want to contemplate whether an evaluation for ADD makes sense.

Post-it pile on ADDer desk

(Here’s one quiz to get you started.) Just because you did well in school doesn’t mean that you are immune from ADD. The authors of one of the ADD bibles, Driven to Distraction, are MDs who practice in Boston, and are ADDers themselves.

There’s More Wrong Here Than a Personality Mismatch

One of my dear friends is working her way out of law. Now, for most of my friends, this would not be surprising. But for this particular friend, I was completely staggered. She has the perfect personality for law. I don’t mean that as a slam. I mean that she is able to keep her cool in trying circumstances, doesn’t get overly ruffled by emotional or even mean outbursts, is very smart and very capable. But she’s had it.

Why now? Because she’s fed up with getting shit on, to be honest.

The way that law firms, particularly, let dysfunctional assholes ruin the workplace is unconscionable.

You Don’t Need More Passport Stamps

I was reading a new book to my son tonight, “The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig.” I picked it out mainly because he adores the Three Little Pigs fairy tale, and I figured it would be in the same vein, but with a more sympathetic view of the wolves.

Oh, how marvelously wrong I was. I’ll give you the plot summary.

Little wolves set out to build a house for themselves. They start with bricks. Enter Big Bad Pig, who can’t blow the house down. So he quickly fetches a sledgehammer and knocks it straight down. House #2, concrete. BBP, pneumatic drill. House #3, barbed wire, iron bars, armor plates, heavy metal padlocks, Plexiglass and some reinforced steel chains. BBP, dynamite. Finally, the wolves say, “Something must be wrong with our building materials. We have to try something different. But what?”

And then, a flamingo comes along pushing a wheelbarrow full of . . . flowers.

Lawyers and the CareerBuilder SuperBowl Ad

Admit it–if you’re thinking about leaving the law, you have felt EXACTLY like CareerBuilder’s brilliantly subversive commercial from the SuperBowl: “If you make loads of money, but hate going to work every day, your coworkers don’t respect you, you always wish you were somewhere else, you cry constantly, you daydream of punching small animals, and you sit next to this guy . . .  it’s probably time. As a rule.”

So what do you do, aside from watch the commercial a few dozen times and forward it to all your similarly discontented friends? (I am exceeding grateful YouTube hadn’t been invented when I was still practicing, because I know I would have spent entire weeks on it then.)

Friday Files: No, I’m not that Jennifer Alvey

Yes, I’m back. I didn’t really go away, but let’s just say that the intermission was longer than anticipated.

One of my favorite characters lately is Thursday Next, from the Next Octology series by Jasper Fforde. (Several reviewers call the series “Harry Potter for grownups.” Possibly this means I’m not really a grownup, since I love Harry Potter. But I digress.) For various and sundry extremely good reasons, Thursday spends a couple years hiding away from the real world in Bookworld. When she returns, most of her acquaintances and friends ask, “Have you been in prison?”

I mention this because I share the same name as a woman who lives maybe 10 miles from me.

What do you get when leaving law?

When I was thinking about leaving law, I focused a lot on all the things I would lose:

• Money
• Status
• Long hours
• Working weekends regularly
• Achingly boring work
• Colleagues who were anything but collegial
• A known career path
• Did I mention money?

I was right about nearly all of those things. But the most amazing things about my new career were the unanticipated gains. At the top of the list, how much better I felt doing work I actually enjoyed. My soul ditched the gazillion-pound albatross it had been lugging around while doing work it despised. I had no idea how heavy that burden was until it wasn’t there.

Do Law Firm Layoffs Have to Happen? Part 1

So Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal axed 37 attorneys not long ago. Plus another 90 or so support staff. If you are one of those people and reading this, my condolences to you. Getting laid off sucks, no matter how bad the job.

[Aside: Don't miss this funkalicious article in the WaPo written by a guy who got laid off and has yet to find a job.]

Of course the question always arises, couldn’t the partners have sucked it up and taken a bit of a pay cut so that other attorneys wouldn’t be out on their duffs?

Educating Lawyers

No, this isn’t a rant about legal education (though I should do about a dozen of those, shouldn’t I?) It’s about how our educational system pushes bright, talented kids to pursue crap they don’t honestly have a passion for. Like, say, law. And all too many of you know how that ends up—talented people who are depressed, miserable, and not really making use of their innate talents and abilities. Bleah, all the way around.

I got to thinking about this when I read a debate in Jay Matthews’ column in the WaPo, over the education of really and truly gifted kids—the kind who read The Hobbit in first grade, and get it; the kind who can do calculus in sixth grade. THAT KIND of gifted, not just smarter-than-the-average student type of gifted.

Dumbing Down Your (Legal) Resume

So the question of whether to dumb down your resume came up on the Career Track chat on washingtonpost.com. Specifically, the question was whether to leave off advanced degrees.

Here’s the short version of the debate:

I was having trouble getting a job and so began leaving off my MA thinking that employers would think I’m too young to have one (I was 23). Long story short, after doing so I received 5 offers for interviews and got a job. Few months later I told my boss about that casually and he laughed and told me I never would have been hired if he knew because he would have thought I’d want too much money. Unfortunately our society punishes very educated individuals sometimes.

When you are transitioning as a lawyer to nearly any other career field, you’re going to have to tackle this beast: Employers fear that you’ll want too much money, simply because you have a JD.