Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. I practiced law for 10 years and now I help unhappy lawyers ditch their soul-sucking jobs. On this show, I share advice and strategies for aspiring former lawyers, and interviews with former lawyers who have left the law behind to find careers and lives that they love.

Hello, everyone. This week we are going to talk about one of the most asked questions, or not even necessarily just asked, but one of the questions that so many lawyers who are considering maybe leaving the law have. It is the question of do I actually need to leave the law? Do I actually want to leave the law or is it just my particular job? How do I know whether it's just my particular job or whether it's the law entirely? This is a really great question. Literally, I have conversations with people about this every week, so we're going to talk about that today.

Before we do, I just want to let you know, I don't know that I've mentioned this on the podcast before but I have started working with a very, very small handful of people one-on-one. If you're someone who has thought about getting help figuring out what's next, if you've maybe considered the Collab but thought you really would prefer to do work one-on-one, I am currently booking clients one-on-one on a super limited basis. I typically start at most one new one-on-one client a month. If you're interested, just go to the website. It's right there in the menu, click on the one-on-one link and you will see all the information about what's involved and how to book a consult with me.

Let's talk about this question of "Do I actually want to leave the law or is it just this particular job?" Because so many people express that this is one of the big questions that's keeping them from taking action in one direction or another. The thing that's interesting about this question is yes, it often comes from lawyers who are earlier in their career, but not always. What I'm saying is you often have a situation where someone has practiced for a number of years, if not, even many years, and people will often say, "Have I given the law a fair shot? Have I given it enough of a chance?"

Sometimes people will say things like, "You know, I feel like I have imposter syndrome, but I wonder if I practice for a couple more years, would I feel less of that and would I like it more?" These are all sorts of variations on this question. Of course, the most lawyerly answer ever is it depends. It's true that it depends. But here is what I would say to you if you are one of those many lawyers like I once was wondering, "Do I actually not want to be a lawyer? Or is it just this particular job? Is there something else that I could find that would work for me?" The first thing I think that you want to ask yourself is, "Do you have a specific other type of legal work in mind that you're really interested in doing and that you know a lot about, that you know what the work is like, you know how it's different from what you're doing now, and you believe that it's a good match for you and your skills, for your personality, for your values for what you want your life to look like, for what you like, and what you dislike?"

Because I find that often, when people are struggling with this question, they are struggling with it because lawyers often feel like they cannot fully embrace the reality that they want to leave the law unless they have definitively proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no role within legal practice that could be a fit for them.

It's this sense of like, "I have to justify the way that I feel about this." In many ways, it's almost as though you are trying to build a case, for or against, in this case, continuing working in the law, and that it has to be this airtight case that can stand up to cross examination and scrutiny. Certainly, I am not in any way trying to diminish the reality that it's incredibly important to make well informed decisions and to consider all of the various factors in your life, who you are when you're making decisions about your career. But I often find that lawyers who are really stuck and find this question kind of intractable and vacillate back and forth between "I want to leave, but maybe I don't know enough about the profession yet. Maybe I haven't given it enough of a chance", these sorts of things, it is very common that part of what is fueling that vacillation is this feeling that they have to be able to justify to any person who might in theory ask why they're leaving or why they want to leave, that they need to be able to justify it such that that person would agree with them that they should leave.

First of all, you're arguing with an imaginary person. The reality is that there are people who will never accept your reasoning no matter how airtight your argument is. It's not really about justifying your reason to any random person, it's about you figuring out what it is that is the right move for you. To be honest, no other person is going to look at all of the factors in your life, all of the things that are going on, in the same way that you are. This includes people who are very close to you.

So often when people are struggling with this question, one of the reasons they tend to struggle is because, for example, they have a very well meaning family who are telling them, "You know, maybe you haven't given it enough of a chance. Have you thought about doing this or that?" There is this sense that people feel like they cannot respond to those kinds of questions unless they can definitively prove that they have eliminated every possible option. So, really, what I want to do today is just tell you that you don't have to do that. Because ultimately, I find that in the vast majority of situations where people are struggling with this question of "Have I given the law enough time, or do I really want to leave?" on some sort of inherent level and on some intuitive level, they know the answer.

What they're really struggling with is allowing themselves to trust the wisdom and discernment that they have that is within them, and also trusting that they are the person who has the most information of anyone to know what the legal profession is like, to know whether their current job is something that they need to get away from, to know whether the law as a profession is something that they need to get away from. A big part of answering this question is learning to trust yourself more, which can be very hard as lawyers, because we have been very conditioned to look to external authority as more valid than our own internal authority. That's one piece of it.

Then like I said, circling back to something that I said earlier, a big part of the question as well is "Is there something specific that you want to do in legal practice that you are not doing? Is this job not just something that you have thought might be good but that you have looked into? You've had informational interviews with people who are doing that job? You know what their day to day looks like, you know what you are like, you know what your personality is, you know what your values are. You can imagine yourself in that job, doing what those people do day to day, and actually enjoying it and wanting to do it.” If that's the case, then there's probably a decent chance that you should at least explore the possibility of moving into that other legal job.

But if that's not the situation that you're in, it's most likely true that you don't so much have a question of whether or not you should leave or stay. It's more a question of being able to trust yourself, and sometimes a question of really practical things like, "Do you really feel like you can leave financially at this point, as opposed to with a little bit more of a plan and a little bit more of a runway?" That just gets you into really practical questions of making a plan, figuring out what you need to do to make it work.

When you're thinking about this question of, "Do I really want to leave or is it just this job?" first consider "Is there actually another legal job that I want to do that I actually know something about?" If no, then it's probably more about either trusting yourself, just learning how to trust yourself and/or figuring out some really practical things that are standing in your way in terms of practical realities, like figuring out what you want to do next, figuring out the practical things like money and student loans and those sorts of things.

If there is another specific legal job that you're interested in, then the question is, do you know enough about that job to really know that that's the thing that you want to pursue? If you don't know enough about it, the first thing you should do is go get more information, talk to people, and actually figure out is that a job you want to be doing or is it just something that you're holding in your back pocket? If you do have a specific legal job that you're interested in, then go get more information about that job and see whether it's really true that you want to do that job or whether it's one of those things that you've just been holding in your back pocket to think about at some future point, and the reality is that maybe it isn't a great fit for you. If that is what you discover, then ultimately, you can set that aside and think more about whether leaving is the right fit for you. Then that takes you back to trusting yourself and figuring out the logistics.

Please know this is such a common question. There are so many people who go through it. We talk about this in the Collab all the time. I talk about this with my one-on-one clients all the time. This is a question that you will most likely have to work through. If you're someone who's thinking about leaving the law—and the reality is that there are ways to get clarity around this question—you don't have to feel like you can never truly know the answer because you can't literally do every job in the legal profession, even though as lawyers that tends to be the way many of us feel. You can get clarity and the way that you do that is by doing the things that I've talked about in this episode.

Thanks so much for listening. I absolutely love getting to share this podcast with you. If you haven't yet, I invite you to download my free guide: First Steps to Leaving the Law at formerlawyer.com/first. Until next time, have a great week.