How Money Saps Lawyers’ Creativity

When your response to a problem is to solve it with an instant, money solution, your creative muscles atrophy. You start to think you aren’t creative, and aren’t a decent problem-solver. You start to believe that money has to have your back, because you yourself are not up to the task. That’s how you end up stuck in a high-paying, soul-sucking law job.

Why You Don’t Have Time To Find a New Legal Career, Pt. 2

What if you pushed “making nasty idiots happy” to the very bottom of your priority list? What if “being perfect” got pushed off your list entirely, and got replaced with “being pretty darn good under the circumstances”? With those pointless time-sucks gone, what space would open up in your life?

Why You Don’t Have Time To Find a New Legal Career, Part 1

It’s one of those hallowed excuses in American culture and especially among lawyers: I just don’t have time. Occasionally it’s even true. But not nearly as often as it’s used as an excuse for staying stuck in a legal career you loathe. For example, I once had a client who was working at a BigLaw firm on

It’s Not Your Horrible Law Job. It’s You.

Unhappy lawyers often think that their problem is simply their horrible job. But there’s also another truth at work: Some of the horridness of your job stems from your own toxic attitudes. ttorneys, and lots of other people, tend to think that their attitudes about money, mistakes and certainty are truth, when really they’re a choice about how you view the world.

The Happiness Lottery for Lawyers

Make a list of how you would spend $50 million from that winning lottery ticket. Does your spending reflect the person you long to be? What do they say about your purpose in life? Are you happy with that message?

The Lack Blitzkrieg

When you’re on the verge of something big and momentous, the gremlin, aka inner lizard, often shows up with a monstrous splash. That’s what a Lack Blitzkrieg is.

Instrinsic Motivation for Lawyers: All in One Place

Lawyer misery is depriving us of a lot of talent and energy that would be much better used to improve the world instead. Many bright, creative people are lawyers, and their gifts are not used in a typical BigLaw or Lawyerland setting. We as a nation and a planet have a whole heaping pile of

How Lawyers and Everyone Else Blew 9/11

Ten years ago, when September 11 became September 11, I felt that deep, shared national longing to find meaning in the senseless and horrific acts of violence. And, like so many, it motivated me to find more meaning in my own life. I was living in the D.C. area then, and was so struck by

Bonuses = Toxic Law Firms, Pt. 3: This Is Your Brain on Bonuses

So it is actually true that as a lawyer, you are often dealing with crazy, dysfunctional behavior, whether or not your colleague has a drug or drinking problem. If they are motivated chiefly by money, they behave like an addict.

Are You Really Hungry, Unhappy Lawyer?

For unhappy lawyers who start to get serious about leaving law, the lack attacks can become acute. The best way, maybe even the only sustainable way, to derail a lack attack is to focus on what you do have, and be very genuinely, consciously, grateful for it.