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.

The final episode in our summer re-release series is the No-Asshole Rule episode. You may have worked in a workplace or more than one legal workplace where they said that they had a no-asshole rule.

Clearly, there are many people who have worked in similar workplaces because this episode is one of the most downloaded episodes. Again, it's one of the ones I hear about the most from people because there is so much agreement with the fact that the no-asshole rule is, in fact, a myth. Here are my thoughts about the no-asshole rule.

Today is going to be a little bit of a spicy episode. We'll get there in a minute. But before I talk about what I'm wanting to talk about today, I just wanted to remind you that I have a program called The Former Lawyer Collaborative, and in that program, I help you walk through the steps that you need to take to figure out what it is that you want to do that isn't practicing law.

It's so common that people contact me and they say, “I know I don't want to be doing this job, but I have no idea what else I would do.” I relate to that 100%. I have been in that exact position.

The framework that I've created that is inside The Former Lawyer Collaborative for you to walk through is a framework that comes from my own experience and the time that I've spent talking with other former lawyers and what I have seen work for people inside the Collab, because believe it or not, the Collab is, when I'm recording this, right around two years old, which is amazing.

I wouldn't exactly say time flies, but in some ways, I suppose. Time has lost all meaning in a pandemic. Anyway, so the Collab. Here is the deal. The Collab is for any lawyer at any stage who is wanting to explore other options to get outside of the lawyer box, the lawyer way of seeing things, like the 10 legal adjacent careers that lawyers consider when they think about leaving at first, just like compliance or even just like maybe I'll go in-house.

The thing is there's nothing wrong with those careers and you may well be suited for one of them. But what we do in the Collab is we help you figure out what is it that you actually want to be doing? Not just based on what your skills are. Like, what are your skills? Let's find something that matches that. But truly, what is it that would really be a match for who you are, your personality, your values, your strengths, etc?

If you've thought about joining the Collab, I always tell people there's no time like the present. You can go to formerlawyer.com/collab to see all of the information. You can enroll right there. Of course, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to email me at [email protected].

Okay. We are talking today about the no-asshole rule. I'm guessing that most of you who are listening have heard of this “rule.” It often comes up in interviews where you’re interviewing with a legal workplace, often a large firm, but not always, it happens in other contexts as well.

Here’s how the no-asshole rule is presented or what people hear. You’re in an interview and you’re trying to get a sense of the culture of the law firm and the person who you're talking with says, “Well, we have a no-asshole rule here. No one here is an asshole.”

Okay. First of all, can we just talk about what an extremely low bar we're setting in the legal profession that anyone thinks that this is something that is notable? It would be notable to be honest if you had a large law firm that had no assholes in it. But, spoiler alert, generally speaking, the no-asshole rule is a complete lie.

One, the fact that people have to tell you that we have a no-asshole rule or sometimes it'll be “We have a no-screamers rule or we have a no-whatever,” here's the thing, generally speaking, what they really mean is most of the people here aren't assholes or most of the people here aren't screamers.

In the best-case scenario, perhaps there's someone who believes that there are no assholes or screamers because that particular person has not encountered it. But the reality is that I do not know of a single large law firm that does not have people who you would characterize as an asshole and that does not have some screamers.

First, the low, low standard, the low, I mean, truly, one of our selling points is that someone is not aggressively awful, truly, these are the expectations that this is something that should be touted as an achievement by a law firm, the fact that it's considered an achievement is in and of itself an indictment of so many things, including the way that the legal profession operates and the way that law firms do business.

But here's why I think it's actually even more insidious than just like, “Wow, there are low standards in this profession and in these law firms.” Also, unfortunately, honestly, when people are saying that, it's probably not true because there probably are some assholes and some screamers who are there because they have large books of business.

The reality is that even if most people are not assholes and screamers, it only takes a couple of people who are really on the extremely malignant side of things to create an overall horrendous culture.

By the way, the entire system is set up to not actually remove people who are like that so then we have to ask what other things is the system allowing. But anyway, that's neither here nor there.

Not only is “we have a no-asshole rule” generally a lie, or at least untrue. Let's say untrue. The person may not believe that it’s a lie. And not only is it a ridiculously low standard for anyone to be thinking that that is somehow something notable, that should be a selling point of their workplace.

But also, I want to talk a little bit about the broader issue of how we use our language to obscure what's really happening in these abusive work situations. Because I don't think that we in the legal profession are being clear enough about what is happening when a partner or a senior associate is an “asshole” or a “screamer.”

There are plenty of people, plenty of partners that you will be having a conversation with someone as an associate. Everyone knows the person is extremely unpleasant. Everyone knows the person is a screamer. Everyone knows the person is an asshole.

I've literally read articles about Biglaw partners where one of the most consistent descriptors of these particular people, when the reporter went and interviewed those who had worked with them, was that they were an asshole.

The problem is calling someone an asshole, yes, it's an epithet, but it's so much broader than just like, “Oh, this person is a jerk.” The reality is that people who are described as assholes generally are actually abusing, they're being abusive to the people who work for them.

Whether it's verbal abuse, emotional abuse, in some cases, physical abuse, we've all heard those stories about someone who threw a stapler or something, and other even more problematic forms of abuse, when we talk about this as just an issue of someone being an asshole or someone being a screamer where it's just like, “Oh, they have a personality that's difficult or whatnot,” we're not being honest about what the real problem is.

The real problem is that there are people in these institutions who are being permitted to abuse the people who work for them and who work with them because it's not even just partners mistreating associates. Often, you have partners mistreating other partners as well.

I think by not calling it what it is, which is workplace abuse, which is verbal abuse, which is emotional abuse, by not using the correct term to describe how many of these people are operating in these systems, it allows the system to perpetuate, in part because there are people who might be in positions of power who could intervene or spend a lot of their relational capital in order to push for real change, I think when we don't characterize this behavior as abusive, when we normalize it—because let's be real, being an asshole is very normalized in the legal profession, especially in large law firms—we allow people who are in positions to potentially affect some change in those environments to not see the problem for what it is.

The reality is that in situations of abuse, I think most people would agree that if you know someone is being abused and you have some power to do something about it and you don't do it, then you're complicit.

But within these systems, we use this language that personalizes it only to the individual person and also doesn't recognize the tremendous harm, physical, emotional, mental harm that the behavior of people who are characterized this way does to the people who work for them.

There's a whole conversation to be had here about psychological safety and how you can expect someone to perform at a certain level when they're not psychologically safe, how incredibly unfair and not even consistent with the neurology, the biology of it, something like that is.

It is extremely problematic that we, in general, are unable to call a thing what it is in this profession. Because not only is the no-asshole rule generally a bit of a lie, but also the people who would be characterized as assholes in the rubric of the no-ass-hole rule are not just assholes, they're abusers.

They are people who are being abusive, psychologically, mentally, emotionally abusive, and it has psychological, mental, emotional, and physical repercussions than people who work for them. It continues because we, as a profession, wave it away. We, as a profession, label it as something less than what it actually is, and it needs to stop.

Frankly, if you are working in an environment where they think that having a “no-asshole rule” is somehow a badge of great distinction, I think it's definitely time to consider how healthy, psychologically safe, et cetera, that environment is because that's a very low bar to have for your work life and I think it's one that a lot of us have been trained to think is normal.

So that's what I have to say about the no-asshole rule. I would love to hear from you what your experience has been with this type of thing and what else you think we need to be more honest about in the legal profession in order to make it a safer environment for everyone. That's it for me for this week. I will talk to you next week.

Thanks so much for listening. If you would like to learn more about the framework that I use with all my clients to help them figure out what it is that they want to do that is not practicing law, then go watch my free masterclass, The Simple Five-Step Framework For Identifying An Alternative Career That You Actually Like. You can get the link to watch at formerlawyer.com/masterclass. Until next time, have a great week.