Sarah Cottrell: 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.

This is my last week talking with Annie Little about some of the observations that we have about the legal industry based on the book Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. This week, we are talking about the final of four reasons that he gives for why people experience such misery in the jobs that he defines as b*llsh*t jobs, which can in fact be lawyer jobs.

This fourth and final reason is misery based on knowing that one is doing harm. This is definitely something that many lawyers experience and Annie and I talked through some of the ways that we've seen it manifest, some of the ways that you might be experiencing it, and some of the things that you can think about if you feel like this is one of the things that is keeping you trapped in your job, potentially your b*llsh*t job.

I also just briefly at the beginning of this last episode in the series wanted to thank Annie for joining me. I really appreciated all that she had to share. If you are interested in learning more about Annie, you can always go to her website, thejdnation.com, and find all of her info there. Okay, let's get to this conversation on the misery of knowing that one is doing harm.

Okay, Annie and I are here to talk about the final misery that is identified by David Graeber in the book Bullshit Jobs, which again, if you have not listened to our previous conversations, you can go back a couple of weeks where we talked about this book, how he defines b*llsh*t jobs, and why we think this is an important conversation to have about lawyers and the legal profession.

Today, we are talking about one of the four miseries that he identifies that people experience when they're working in a b*llsh*t job. This misery is the misery of knowing that one is doing harm. Oh, it's like an opportunity to drop the word one into a conversation as a lawyer.

Anyway, okay, so the really obvious application of this, Annie and I talked about this before we started recording, is obviously, if you're a lawyer, and you literally feel like the person, the entity, or whatever, who you're representing is asking you to do something that is itself substantively actually harmful.

I'm not saying that those things don't exist and they don't happen but I think that in those contexts, people tend to be pretty aware, I guess, that that's happening and there is a level of moral conflict.

I think the situations that I have seen that I think is much more pervasive are less so that people ultimately feel like closing a deal, they don't feel like the closing of the deal is itself a loan problem or the suing someone for breach of contract and recovering for a client who actually has a breach contract, that that is wrong in some way.

It's the fact that so many lawyers feel like the way that we go about achieving those ends is harmful in some social way. My example as a former litigator, and this is something that so many people who are litigators who come to me talk about is this feeling of you're doing all this discovery, all of these depositions, reviewing all of this stuff, and filing all these motions, most of which are going to be denied and there's a sense of almost futility about it.

It's not like, “Oh, the lawyer themselves is necessarily making work because the suit is happening and someone wants to pursue it,” but ultimately, people have this sense often of just like, “This is not engaging and all of this back and forth is not ultimately contributing to the good of society, even if the ultimate goal that's being pursued by the lawsuit is itself a fine goal.” That's something that I think is extremely pervasive in our profession, that so many people feel like, in a certain sense, the existence of their job is not a social good, even if the object of the job is fine. Does that make sense?

Annie Little: It does. It's a systemic misery. Because just think about how many of us, how many people go to law school thinking, “I want to make a positive change. I want to help people.” You can do it in ways that seem much more obvious.

I worked at legal aid and it's like, “Okay, I was practicing poverty law and domestic violence law,” but even in those kinds of situations, oftentimes, we were working in a system where it was like, “How is this actually helping my clients to keep their water and electric on? Why is just this filing this piece of paperwork that frickin important and if I can't get my client to sign it by five o'clock tomorrow, they're not going to have water or power? Can't we all just do this better?”

It's the system of it where we want to be in the system to make things better. But the larger thing is the system is so much greater than we are and even big groups of us are that we have this thing, at least for me, I had this sense of driving forward like, “Well, the little stuff I'm doing is helping because I can't really affect any other greater change in this larger system of harm.”

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I see that a lot with my clients who practice criminal law. Either criminal defense, public defenders, district attorneys, people who went to law school because they wanted to help people contribute to the greater good and then find themselves in systems that are often like they were designed to burn people out, but also create a lot of distress for people because they see the limits of their individual ability to really meaningfully do or achieve the kinds of things they're wanting to achieve that it's so limited because of the overall system. Because the changes that they're hoping to affect are so much more systemic. That, I think, is incredibly hard when you're someone who has chosen that particular area of practice because you care about those changes happening.

Annie Little: And the misery comes from how has the system been set up in such a way that it's almost impossible to make the kinds of change that I was hoping to make? And that in a sense, we were told we could make. There was nobody along the way, especially when you're applying to law school and you're new in law school, there's no one saying, “I thought I wanted to do environmental law.”

Anyone who goes to law school thinking they want to do environmental law, they're not thinking about, “Oh, I want to go work for a law firm or a legal department for a company like an oil company, or basically a big polluter, and help them to figure out how to fit in between the regulatory scheme so they can maximize profit and the actual impact on the environment is not the real concern.” That isn't exposed to us until I feel like it's too late.

I did an internship for environmental law with a law firm and I was like, “Okay, I don't like doing these spreadsheets where I'm explaining the cost of meeting these regulations versus the penalties if we don't versus the cost of influencing politicians. I don't like it. I'm done.”

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think there is an element of so much of legal practice that can really just be about not just balancing risks, but balancing costs, and most people who went to law school did not do so because they were like, “What I really want to do is balance costs.” That was not the motivation for the majority of people. Certainly not the majority of people who end up working with me.

I also think there's a similar thing in terms of how people think about something going into law school versus when they're coming out and actually practicing. Impact litigation, important needs to happen, I think there are a lot of people who go to law school with this vision of ending up doing some impact litigation.

The reality is that even though that work is necessary, important, and does serve a social good, the people who are doing it are still having to litigate. Often, so many people who are drawn to that type of work because they care about making change, they're the people who are going to be ground down by all of the back and forth and ridiculous disputes about interrogatories and the other side, filing frivolous motions or just the volume, especially just the volume that is often involved in really litigation of any kind at this point in the electronic era.

I think that's another piece of it. You have people who made the decision to do a type of work that, again, has an ultimate drive towards social good, but the actual experience of them doing the work can have a very negative effect on them as an individual because the way of doing the work, the function is very contrary to their personal flourishing.

Annie Little: Well, yeah, and the process that they go through exposes them to like, “Oh, my God, not only is this miserable for me to go through, but you can see how it's not beneficial.” The next closest thing is like, “Well, this is actually harmful.” One thing, I was never a litigator, but just because I worked in smaller firms, we had big clients, but our biggest clients were the ones doing the really sophisticated stuff.

We did have some smaller clients and I hated when I would hear about somebody coming in and sometimes I would sit in with litigators in a consult, somebody comes in, we talk to them, I would help them understand the underlying real estate issue and then the litigators would help explain to them what the process would look like, and ultimately, the cost to them.

Because of the way the legal process works and litigation works, it's extremely expensive. Here we come, balancing costs again. The responsible thing to do as a lawyer, and I don't think that there are a lot of lawyers who don't do this, it's just a really crappy part of the job is being like, “Okay, well, here are the damages. We could potentially get these additional damages, but it's very speculative and there's no guarantee.”

Honestly, it sounds like getting to a point where you get this other side to at least settle is going to cost a lot, let alone if we actually go to trial where we can't guarantee we would win. I would just be sitting in those meetings being like, I mean, we're definitely helping them by telling them, “It’s probably not worth your time and money to go through this,” but you're like, “Dang, isn't this what the legal system is for?” But justice.

It's the stuff that falls in between small claims and regular courts. It's basically the entire middle class and thinking of it that way. It's that big spectrum. It's just not worth it. It's not like we're doing harm, we're explaining to potential clients, “This is the garbage of the system, and by all means, we could help you to do it, but here's what you need to understand about what it's going to look like going through and it's probably not something you want to do.”

Sarah Cottrell: Right, and I mean on the civil litigation side, this is something that you come to know even if you're not thinking about it super consciously. You know that either cases are being pursued because the client has sufficient money to pay and determined that pursuing the suit was worth it or if it's a plaintiff and it's a contingency fee situation because that particular person was judged to have a good enough case, they actually would recover enough to make it worth their while.

There are a huge swath of legitimate grievances that fall outside of that on the civil side and I think even that can make the experience of being a civil litigator feel, this is a technical term, icky because you know that unless you're in a very limited set of situations where you're doing something pro bono or it's some sort of nonprofit work, that you're only taking and pursuing cases that it's not based on the validity of the claim, it's based on the likelihood of recovery.

Annie Little: Yeah, and I think part of that feeling of “I am doing harm,” which whether or not that's legitimate, is that the sense that I'm perpetuating the system because I have student loans to pay, I need to eat, I need to support. These are very legitimate needs. I can't do only pro bono work in the absence of a huge grant. I can't take these cases. In a sense, by default, you feel like, “I'm perpetuating the system. I'm not able to change the way this works.”

That's where the misery comes in. Like I said, everything comes back to not being a cause where you’re like, “I feel like I can work the system. I know how to do all these things to support the clients that I do take on. But there's this huge chunk of legitimate grievances, claims, whatever, that I can't take on, and by not taking them on, I'm perpetuating this harmful system,” which is just like really, do we need to have that additional layer of misery on top of everything else?

Not to say, “Well, don't think about it or it's not worthwhile to think about,” it's like, “You're going to think about it because you're a thoughtful person who's operating in the system.” But I think the big part of why we're talking about this stuff is to validate the way you're feeling as you're going through it. You're not a bad person or you're not imagining things.

You're not the only one who sees these things and experiences that discomfort around where you fit into the system and how the positive impact you can make is shockingly limited from what we were under the impression of when we went to law school.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, and I think to circle back all the way at the beginning, our very first conversation about this book, we're saying all of these things not to be like, “Your job sucks and you should quit.” I mean, your job probably does suck if you're listening to this podcast, and there's a nonzero chance that at some point, you should quit, but that's not what we're trying to say here.

What we're trying to say is there are so many lawyers who are feeling all of these things that make it very difficult. What you're doing is difficult and painful, potentially. All of that is real. This book, in the way it steps through these individual miseries that people experience in b*llsh*t jobs, are ways of seeing why it is that it feels the way it does, because so many lawyers in these situations know that it doesn't feel right, know that they're miserable, they're experiencing all of these miseries, but no one has actually named them for them or said, “Yes, that's real. That is a real feeling. That makes sense. It's not illogical.”

It's not because you're weak or can't hack it, which is the story that so many people tell themselves, it’s because of these things, these are real things that create misery.

Annie Little: Yeah, and for me, why I even read this book by an anthropologist to begin with and was yapping to you about it was that I found it very helpful to realize that this occurs across industries. We're talking about it in the legal context because that's who we work with, that's where we come from but I think for me, it was really helpful to have this sense that, “Oh, God, it's other jobs.”

He covers so many different types of work. For me, I don't want to say it made me feel better because I don't know, I feel weird about saying it that way, but I felt a sense of relief in that it's not like, “Oh, it's the legal profession that is really awful. I picked the wrong profession. It's the legal profession only and why can't we change it because it's just this one profession that is so egregious and so terrible and so it's like this backwards way?”

I was like, “This is actually really pervasive,” for all the reasons we've already discussed, and just to be like, “Not only you're not alone as a lawyer, but this is a very human way to feel about this stuff. The reactions that you're having,” or these senses that something is, like you said, icky but we can't quite articulate it, it's not unique to lawyers, it's a very human thing.

For me, that feels even more validating that it's not like, “Oh, I'm this type of person, that's why I feel this way.” The way that things are structured in most workplaces is really dismissive of our human nature and our human needs.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, and I think the other thing that is really helpful about his discussion in this book is, to your point, he shows how this phenomenon occurs in all sorts of different jobs but it's not all jobs. Not to be like #notalljobs, but a legitimate concern that a lot of lawyers have when they come to me is, “Is this just what it is to be an adult with a job? This misery that I'm experiencing, is this just being an adult who is responsible?” essentially is how people will phrase it when they're talking to me.

I think this book does a really good job of showing that there are lots of jobs where this experience happens but it isn't just the nature of being an adult with a job.

Annie Little: Yeah, that's really important, especially because one of my other passions is reading about generational studies and stuff. I think especially for millennials, I mean, millennials are the ones who coined the term adulting and there are all kinds of commentary on millennials and all that stuff so I feel like this applies to all lawyers, but for my millennial clients in particular, and myself being one that felt like an additional sort of ding against me where it's like, “Not only can I not hack it, and not only am I feeling this is just what work is like, and no matter what I do, I'm going to feel this way, it's going to be awful and oh my god, how many years till retirement? I can't make it.”

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Take heart, lawyers.

Annie Little: I'm really glad you brought that up, actually, because when I was thinking about leaving the profession of law, I think talking about in retrospect, especially I don't speak in a particularly nuanced way and sound like I was just like, “F*ck this, I'm done,” ultimately, yeah, I got there, but it took years for me to get there.

Having all of these different thoughts and other things, it took a long time to sift through it and to realize that I really genuinely thought that people who said they liked their jobs, whether they were lawyers or not, I thought that they didn't actually like the work, they liked the benefits of it.

I was a lawyer a long time ago, I was like, “Being able to work from home one day a week,” or having a ping pong table at work or some garbage. Like I said, I'm old, but I was like, “I really just think people like the perks of their jobs, there's no job that is going to be enjoyable for me.”

Maybe that's available to some people, but for the type of work that I'm going to find challenging enough or interesting enough, I'm going to have to sacrifice that part of the experience. I'm like, “That's just not available to me.” That was more so than the money factor or just being able to convince somebody that my skills were transferable or just finding something else to do.

To be clear, that was a big concern. Those were big concerns. But my overarching concern was I'm looking for a job that I'm not going to hate but I really feel like that's the bar, just something I don't hate. I didn't think that it was possible to find work that I liked, that was enjoyable, and met all of that other criteria. I was like, “That might be true for some people, but just not for me.”

As I've worked with lawyers over these many years, I find that that's pretty common, even if I just bring up to people, I'm like, “Well, what kind of work do you think you would actually enjoy?” It's like, “(A) Never thought of it. (B) How is it relevant? Why does that matter?” But I think that's another reason why I really liked this analysis from this book, it's an anthropological perspective, it’s like this is a human thing.

It's not you as a lawyer enduring all of the common experiences that we as lawyers have that make us feel like, “Well, this is why I feel this way. Because I feel like I don't like this anymore or I don't want to do this anymore, I'm the black sheep of the legal profession. I just need to tuck my tail between my legs and either suck it up and just keep working at this job or tuck my tail between my legs in shame and leave.” That's absolutely not true.

If you're feeling that way, understood, but I'm hopeful that this book that we've been talking about can help lawyers understand that it's not because of you being a lawyer or a type of person who became a lawyer, there are jobs that make us feel this way in every type of work.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that is a great note to end on. Do you have anything else that you think people should know about b*llsh*t jobs and lawyering?

Annie Little: No, I think that's it. Honesty, guys, you don't have to read the book.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, you can skip it.

Annie Little: We’re dorks. We like it but you don’t have to.

Sarah Cottrell: You can get the general gist. Go look at the table of contents in the see inside function on Amazon and you’ll see it. But yeah, well, Annie, thank you so much for joining me for this series of conversations. It has been, I don't know if I should say fun, it's been a type of fun to rant about all of this with you and I really appreciate all of the things that you shared.

Annie Little: Oh, and I appreciate you making a series out of this. I appreciate you in general, Sarah, you're a fabulous friend and you listen to my rants about all kinds of things but thank you for recognizing the value in this because I'm really hopeful that lawyers will find this super helpful.

Sarah Cottrell: I am too.

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.