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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Goldilocks and the Legal Career Coach

You may have heard that you shouldn’t sell therapy short just because the first therapist you chose wasn’t a good fit. The same goes for legal career counselors—the first one, or two, may not be right for you.
You know I’m a fan of career counselors and therapists. But I’ll bet you didn’t know that I [...]

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Finding a Career Coach

Some of the best money I ever spent was on a career coach who helped me actually get out of law. I’d been wanting to find that miraculous alternative legal career, but I kept getting in my own way. Having someone who could help me sort out what was fact (I’m highly creative) from fiction [...]

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Plunging into the Alternative Legal Career Search

Writing and changing to an alternative legal career have a lot in common. Your mindset going in is all-important.
I started a piece yesterday, a fiction project that may be a short story or a novel. Can’t tell yet. I’d had an idea bugging me for nearly two weeks, and finally confronted the blank screen, intending [...]

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But I Have No Marketable Skills Except Law

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard some version of “I can’t do anything except practice law,” well, I’d have more money than I currently do. Probably enough to buy an iPhone, at any rate.
And it’s really funny, because most non-lawyers assume exactly the opposite, that if you’ve made it through the [...]

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