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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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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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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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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Friday Files: Wouldn’t Wanna Be Ya

Sometimes, you just feel for people. Even though you know that most BigLaw partners are huge pains in the tookus, when one screws up so majorly and publicly, you feel something. Gratitude, if nothing else, that it wasn’t you who did it.
It’s the worst nightmare of every attorney: an email goes astray to a reporter. [...]

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