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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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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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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Some of My Best Friends Are Lawyers

So looking back on my posts, one might reasonably conclude that I don’t like lawyers. Not so! Some of my dearest, closest friends are lawyers. Most of them are practicing law, even. Just not in BigLaw. Were they in BigLaw, or even MediumLaw, I daresay they wouldn’t have time to be a friend.
Back in law’s [...]

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Law Firms and Work-Life Balance–um, rite

So I’ve been reading a couple of blogs that discuss whether law firms are becoming more hospitable to those who want a work-life balance. (Here, and here.) I think ultimately, law firms will change some of how they manage their resources, just because of the sheer number of Millennials. But I’ve been waiting since the [...]

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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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The Truth About Your Evil Colleagues

I tend to believe the best about people when I start working with them — for example, that they are telling me the truth, working in good faith with me, being honest when we have conflicting agendas — so of course I am often wildly disappointed in people and frequently disillusioned. (That’s why it’s important [...]

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