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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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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Get On Your Hobby Horse

It used to be normal, even expected, for adults to have hobbies. You know, something you pursue just because you like it, not because it could land you a job, a client, or whatever eventually. But in our mad-rush existence, hobbies are one of the first things to go. And that’s more than a shame, [...]

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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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Exploring Who You Are

Do you know who you are? It’s easy to answer that kind of question with a job title, but that won’t help you figure out your next job move. What you really need to know is:

What lights you up?
What do you believe about the nature [...]

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The Toolkit for Beginning Lawyer-Writers

To be a writer, all you have to do is write. Which sounds all fine and well and good in theory, but most lawyers immediately start worrying about the quality and quantity of their efforts, and quickly conclude that since they are not the next Ernest Hemmingway or even produce the volume of work of [...]

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Lawyers Who Want to Write

So you think you might want to be a writer rather than practice law? Maybe it’s been a secret ambition for a while, secret even from yourself. Yet it’s not that unusual an ambition for lawyers wanting to get out of law practice.
Law is a wordy profession, even though it’s filled with poor writing and [...]

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The Lawyer Personality

Hey baby, what’s your type?
This isn’t just a schmutzy pickup line. Do you know your Meyers-Briggs Personality Type?
I took my first MBTI (Meyers-Briggs Typology Indicator) test the year I graduated law school. Oh yes, studying for the bar will drive you to many realizations, and one of mine was that this law crap was boring [...]

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