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.

I’m pretty sure I appreciated this story a lot more than my son.

I’m not going to spoil the ending, save to say it is a fantastic lesson about how useless an arms race is.

And what does this possibly have to do with alternative legal careers? Only everything.

Lawyers, and indeed our whole culture, is steeped in the idea that we must fight fire with fire. Opposing counsel sends out third party subpoenas? We send out even more. Didn’t get the job you wanted? It must be lack of credentials, so you need to go get more.

Please, reconsider. It is possible to become an artist without going to art school, a journalist without going to J-school, a spiritual leader without going to divinity school, an executive without getting an MBA. Of course, if you want to become an MD or a CPA, you are going to need that specialized schooling, for credentialing. But unless you absolutely need a credential to be in a field, you can probably find a way to get to that new career without another expensive stamp on your passport. The stamp is an external validation that you’re qualified.

What you really need to succeed in your new endeavor, though, is internal validation. Internal validation is deceptively simple: do what it is you want to do. Make art, write articles that include interviews, get in touch with your Creator, seek out opportunities that require more than legal acumen.

What do you think you could do this week that would give you some of that internal validation? Drop me a comment and let me know.

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.)

How about write up a list of 10 jobs you would love to try if only you could. I won’t even ask you to tackle the daunting task of explaining why, exactly, you can’t do these jobs. Just make the list. We can talk logistics another time. After you write the list, be open to receiving information about them, from whatever source. As in, if your secret list includes becoming a chef, and your honey surprises you with a Valentine’s Day dinner at a high-end restaurant kitchen or cooking classes, well, just go with it. Listen. You don’t have to do anything else.

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. Just before I moved from the DC area to Tennessee, this other Jennifer Alvey was accused of killing her 20-month old daughter in 2005. She admitted that she had shaken her adopted daughter and caused the girl’s head to hit a coffee table and fracture. The other Jennifer Alvey pled guilty to reckless homicide in June 2008, and is awaiting sentencing.

At the time, I didn’t think too much about the consequences that sad episode might cause for me. Yes, she and I not only had the same unusual name, we also were fairly close in age–I’m in my early 40s and she is in her late 30s. And in 2005, my son was a toddler. But if you read the stories (silly assumption #1) you would see that she had lived in Tennessee for quite a while; I moved here in 2006. Also, the other Jennifer had married into the Alvey name, while I was born with it. Though she probably is a distant relative; the Alveys in western Kentucky immigrated en masse from eastern Maryland around 200 years ago, and the branch that didn’t move on to Chicago or Texas has stayed centered around western Kentucky. (More geneaology than you needed to know!)

But a client-someone I knew from several years ago, but had lost touch with-while looking to get back in touch with me stumbled across the stories, and for a while thought maybe I had gone rather bad.

That story of mistaken identity ended happily enough, since he persevered through some mutual acquaintances. Though I do wonder if some resumes I’ve sent out have been deleted on the assumption I’m a convict, rather than a contrarian.

Just in case, though, let me tell you that my son is just fine, but if he doesn’t stop pestering our very tolerant kitten hourly, he might have to go to his room for another time out.

I’m sure the other Jennifer Alvey wishes she could say the same for her daughter. When I read about those situations, I’m always reminded of a saying, “You’re not a bad parent if you occasionally think about killing your children, only if you act on that thought.” May we all be given the grace to think before we act.

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.

The other biggie for me was discovering the pleasure of working with people who weren’t pathological naysayers. People who had hope, optimism, and a positive outlook on life. As Martin Seligman points out in his book, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, law is the only profession in which the most successful members are quite pessimistic (see the Why Are Lawyers So Unhappy? chapter). It’s understandable, because the job of a lawyer is to look for the downside and protect against it.

But if you have a creative bone in your body, law firms in particular are a completely toxic environment. Creative folk do their best work when hopeful and optimistic. Even if you’re writing about awful topics like suicide, the creative part of your brain is happy, because it’s making a new story, though an individual character may not be doing so hot. Creativity is not born of fear, but good lawyers often are. That’s not a judgment, just a fact. Yet I did not truly understand the implications of those facts for my psyche for a very long time, until I had already committed to leaving law and jumped. So I thought I’d share with you, in case it helps you screw up the courage to make the leap. If the legal environment is destroying you, know that another environment really will be better.

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? After all, it’s the economy and likely will bounce back, and the firm will need these folks again.

Let me share some insight I got once when talking to a partner I used to work for. He called himself “part of the working rich,” and yes he was seriously whining about it. While not all partners share that view, how many do you think do? I imagine quite a few, maybe even the majority of BigLaw partners. They don’t see having vacation homes, expensive primary residences, expensive cars, expensive travel, etc., etc. as something optional—they’ve earned it, is the feeling I always got from partners.

So that is one part of the why partners won’t take salary cuts. Plus, many are mortgaged to the hilt. A pay cut would make them cut into their lifestyle. Ain’t happening.

Another reason also stems from a sense of entitlement, but this one is more about associate pay. Namely, the whole lock-step system of salary based on number of years out of law school. Law firms are locked into some big salary increases for associates every year, and one of the few ways to cut attorney payroll costs is to cut, well, the number of attorneys. Because giving no raises seems out of the question for most firms. They fear the people they want to keep will get irate and leave for greener pastures.

I know, it’s heresy to suggest that associates be compensated by merit. They’ve demonstrated their merit by getting good grades in law school and working at a BigLaw firm, right? And they’re going to work lots of hours, so they deserve that salary guarantee.

Except, that kind of logic really doesn’t work in today’s economic climate. And in the end, it doesn’t really benefit associates. Partnership is a black box in part because associates don’t get honest feedback soon enough. Instituting merit compensation could certainly help clear up some of the mystery. (Of course, it would require actual honesty during reviews, which could be wildly unrealistic.) I mean, isn’t that how most professionals know how they’re doing, they get raises or don’t?

Granted, merit compensation could be (and in many firms, would be) abused. But so what else is new? (Lawyers finding ways to abuse other lawyers—tell me it ain’t so.) The billable hours system is a lousy way to live for just about everyone involved.

And, not feeling guaranteed a salary increase would actually be good for associates, because they wouldn’t feel it’s such a risk to try something else without such a high-salary guarantee. Merit salary would help them see those guarantees are worthless, anyway. More on that next time.

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.

Specifically, Matthews was writing about, and readers responding to, the situation of a very bright kid in one of the Virginia suburbs of DC, who has already tested out of basically a year’s worth of college coursework before he has graduated high school. His GPA kind of stinks for his level of ability (a 3.25), largely because he often didn’t complete assignments. Because of that, several colleges have turned up their noses at him, including UVA. He has gotten admitted and a scholarship to some places, and most likely he’ll do OK. I hope so, because the world clearly needs some talented chemical engineers to get us out of our current environmental morass, among other things.

What really got me going were the letter-writers who all rode in on their high horses about how critically important it was that brilliant people FOLLOW THE RULES and do homework and assignments. Because, yanno, you have to follow rules in life and where will you end up if you can’t follow rules? I mean, you might become some derelict like Albert Einstein, for God’s sake. Or even Galileo.

The letter that pissed me off the absolute most was the one from some petty little mother named Madeleine French. OK, I should not call her petty or little, because I don’t know her. But her letter comes off that way. She talks about how one of her daughters, who seems from the letter to be bright and capable, but probably not gifted on a seriously high level, was in a quandary with what she was going to do with her life after graduating from William and Mary. Here’s the exact quote:

When my older daughter, a senior at William and Mary, declared in January that she “didn’t know what to do with the rest of (her) life,” I was positively apoplectic. Her story has a happy ending, too: she’ll be starting law school at Villanova next fall.

I have an alternate interpretation of that happy ending: Here’s yet another person who got pushed into law because it pleased her parents. Within six years, she will more than likely be miserable in law, if the experiences of so many former lawyers I know are any indication. Oh yeah, another victory for mindless societal conformity. Just what the world needs, another lawyer. (Note to anyone considering a counseling or psychology degree: GO FOR IT!!! You have an unending client base with lawyers.)

So let me get this straight, Madeleine French: Your highest and best ambition for your beloved daughter is that she become a cog in the wheel of corporate America?

This kind of fixation on credentials equaling success or quality makes me UTTERLY BATSHIT. Good grades do not imply genius; they simply say that the student had an ability to comprehend the materials and be diligent enough mastering them, and jumping through whatever pedagogical hoops there are to demonstrate that. Now, for most average and slightly above average students, the system works OK, I suppose. And, oh how great and glorious, we get a new generation of people who have been taught how to conform.

[Check out a really great talk by Sir Ken Robinson about how conformity in schools is ruining creativity in kids, just when society is going to need it the most. Also, here’s another great post about the topic at Quinn Creative.]

While our educational system is great for the societal institutions that need conformity to function—government, large corporations, schools, and of course, law firms—conformity doesn’t do much to promote innovation and real, honest-to-God advances and changes in the world. Too bad. With the current environmental, financial, and fuel crises, not to mention the failing war on terrorism, we could really use some original, highly creative thinking to get us out of this sad mess.

Oh, but wait! The original thinkers got ground down by having to dot all their i’s and cross all their t’s, so they have gorgeous penmanship but are also deeply convinced that no one gives a shit about their brilliant solutions. Since the message of conformity is that deviation is not only worthless, but very, very bad. So they blog and eek out a living somehow, maybe even as a lawyer, while their real talents lie wasting away.

Of course some conformity is necessary for society to function. But right now, we’ve completely overdosed on it as a society. We’re testing our children to death and giving them homework largely to make us feel better, because there’s no evidence that homework produces better learning. (As a personal aside, the 3^rd graders at my son’s Montessori school do not ever have homework, and yet regularly blow the lid off Tennessee’s standardized tests. The schools that pass out homework like Ritalin, their record is much more mixed, even in wealthy areas. Not that I think standardized tests do much to demonstrate good education. Good teaching to test, maybe. . . but passion for learning, no. And, the United States with its reams of homework still ranks 24^th out of 29 developed nations in math education.)

The hostility toward accommodating truly gifted kids by giving them a pass on homework that is the equivalent of reading Dick and Jane as a high school seniors baffles me. We’re quite willing to accommodate learning disabilities, and give some kids longer to complete tests, for example. And we should be doing that. But why can’t it work the other way? Why can’t we just say, OK, extremely gifted/genius student, you can choose your homework, just get your teacher’s approval first? Seems a lot better result for everyone involved—genius kid gets challenged, contributes to class, teacher gets her jollies from having some kind of homework completed, and society ultimately gets an even more productive genius.

The only ones who lose are the bureaucratic noodges. Oh, darn. Well, they can always go to law school.

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. I definitely ran up against this. It is now easier to at least get some interviews, now that I am four jobs deep in publishing—I’ve been out of law practice so long, even the more clueless employers probably figure I can’t easily go back to practicing law.

But boy, I wish I could have figured out a good way to leave off that JD when I was transitioning out of law. Even with functional resumes, which I think are a must for career changers, there’s going to be this three-year gap between college and your first real job (assuming you went full-time to law school. If you went at night, it would be much easier to leave off the JD). I suppose if you listed summer jobs during those years, it might not catch a hiring manager’s eye.

[To digress: that’s the weird thing about resume reviews. On the one hand, all the “experts” say that potential employers only spend 60 seconds, max, looking at a resume. And yet, a tiny typo toward the bottom of the page is supposedly the kiss of death. The truth is somewhere in between.]

One strategy I did use with some success is to include a professional summary at the top, emphasizing things like analytic skills, strategic thinking, quick learner, etc. Next, I had a section called “Representative Achievements,” which discussed results and specific projects, not job titles. So something boring to other attorneys, like supervising a document review, was retooled into “Supervised team of attorneys and paralegals to review 100+ boxes of documents in three months, coming in before deadline and under budget.” Definitely corporate-speak, but much better than legal-speak for job-hunting purposes.

Anyone else with some good ways to emphasize transferable skills and downplay degrees? Please post in the comments, we’d love to hear from you.

Depression and Its Toll on Lawyers

The California Bar Journal is running an article “Depression and Its Heavy Toll on Lawyers,” in its May 2008 issue.

Here are some of the more eye-popping stats:

• According to a Johns Hopkins University study, lawyers suffer the highest rate of depression among workers in 104 occupations.
• A University of Washington study found that 19 percent of lawyers suffered depression compared to 3 percent to 9 percent in the general population.
• And a University of Arizona study of law students found that they suffer eight to 15 times the anxiety, hostility and depression of the general population.

So no, we’re not imagining that often our fellow lawyers really are more hostile than, say, rocket scientists (who are at least as smart as lawyers, but in different ways and vastly different work environments).

One of the lawyers’ assistance program licensed clinical therapists, Tim Willison, quoted in the article makes this observation about lawyers and emotions: “Emotional stuff is seen as a weakness.” Cf. my post on A Law Student Tells It Like It Is.

The great thing about this CA bar article is the news that Daniel Suvor, a George Washington Univ. 3L who is chair of the ABA’s Law Student Division, is spearheading some focus in law schools about the problem. Hallelujah! (Or, Alleluia if I’m singing in the choir, but I digress.) I’m a big fan of early disclosures, generally, and law school seems like an excellent time to alert future lawyers that they are going to have to deal with depression, either their own or their colleagues’. I can say from experience that dealing with depressed lawyers can drive you crazy and into depression yourself.

Funniest part of the article:

. . . Willison points out, the initial reaction from a lawyer to [the idea of attending] group support is often incredulous: “‘You want me to sit in a room full of attorneys and you tell me that’s going to help?’ I have to offer some reassurance.”

Heh heh heh.

A Law Student Tells It Like It Is

My new hero for the day is Amelia Rawls. She is a 1L at Yale (don’t roll your eyes yet), and wrote a piece that appeared in today’s Washington Post about whether Ivy grads are, well, nice people or not. Now, she isn’t making a completely broadbrush statement that everyone who attends an Ivy isn’t nice. Instead, she observes:

I’m saying that sometimes some of these students will denounce world hunger but be unfriendly to the homeless. They will debate environmental policy but never offer to take out the trash. They will believe vehemently in many causes but roll their eyes when reminded to be humble, to be generous and to “do what is right.” . . . It is these people, though, who often climb America’s ladder of success. They rise to the top, partly on their own merits yet also partly on the backs of equally deserving but “nicer” people who let them steal the spotlight.

Being a graduate of a nice, small, regionally strong liberal arts college, and then having gone on to a top 10 law school, I have experienced precisely what Ms. Rawls describes. I have to admit I was shellshocked when I got to law school at how really un-nice most of the folks there were. Not that everyone I went to college with was nice, but I was (and remain) deeply dismayed by how little value lawyers place on things like kindness, compassion, forgiveness, and having a moral compass in the face of large quantities of money. There’s such a contempt in law for those so-called soft skills.

Soft implies weak to most lawyers and leaders of corporate America, which is a shame for so many reasons (see my friend Quinn’s discussion, for instance, of soft skills in the workplace). People who possess those skills can make a high-pressured workplace more bearable, and thus more productive. Unhappy people don’t do their best work. I know, I know, many unhappy lawyers think they do, because they are working so hard. But half of their labor is pouring enormous energy into getting themselves to do something they dislike, shouting down their own values and senses of self. That is a huge freaking lot of work, I can say from personal experience. But think about it–it means at best, only half of an unhappy’s person true potential is showing up at work. Yikes! for that person, even that lawyer, and for society as a whole.

The Blinders You Rode in With

When I accepted that first job that wasn’t practicing law, I got a lot of questions. A big one was: Well, what can you do if it doesn’t work out? Isn’t that kind of a dead-end job?

(For those of you who have not committed my CV to memory, my first post-law job was as a reporter and editor for a legal publishing company in Washington.)

The truth is, I didn’t have pat answers for such questions. Hell, I didn’t even have non-pat answers. But I did know that practicing law was making me miserable pretty close to 24/7, and I thought that this new direction might at the very least improve that to a mere 8 hours a day of misery, if it turned out I didn’t like it. I was plenty scared, but the alternative, continuing to work in a law firm, seemed an even scarier choice.

So I jumped.

And it turns out I was often miserable in that job, but not for reasons I would have predicted. Having a highly dysfunctional boss will make you miserable in any job you have. (Of course, many lawyers are pretty dysfunctional, so sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the solution to your particular miserable situation is switch bosses/firms or switch careers altogether; more on that in another post.)

On the other hand, I very frequently enjoyed the hell out of my new non-lawyer job. And because I enjoyed it, I soaked up a lot of knowledge about the legal publishing business, and publishing in general, which helped me down the road. Because of course there was another path I could follow that would lead me out of there into something better.

What’s behind the question, “what will you do if it doesn’t work out?” is a wheelbarrow-load of fear. Lawyers in firms, particularly, cart these huge, honking blinders around with them about career paths, and how you must not deviate from the safe, known path if you want to achieve career success. So if you jump out of the law firm world and it’s not to government or in-house, your legal career is shot, absolutely forever.

Just to be clear, that idea is complete horseshit.

There are always options. If I had really wanted to, I know I could have found some small law firm to work at after spending two years at a large legal publisher. Or I could have cozied up to some of my more favorite sources at non-profits and found a gig as a staff attorney. I’m not saying I would have snapped my fingers and had it happen, but those certainly were some options I had when I wanted to leave.

But I loved writing, so I decided that I was in publishing. And for several years thereafter, got a lot of questions about whether I thought I would go back to practicing law. People believe what they want to believe about your background and experience, but I have managed to convince enough editors, etc. that I did not expect to be paid as an attorney that they gave me a chance and hired me.

There’s a quote that I love for this situation and many other trials and tribulations during the alternative legal career search:

Leap, and the net will appear.

—John Burroughs