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.

Let's talk about why you do not have to IRAC your response to a question about why you are choosing to leave law. One of the things that causes anxiety for many of my clients is the sense that, “Okay, I'm pretty confident internally that this is not for me, practicing is not for me, and I need to tell people in my life about it, I need to talk to other people in other fields that are doing things that I'm interested in,” but one of the things that often holds people back from those conversations is this sense of “Well, what if they ask me why I want to leave and then don't find my answer persuasive?”

This was months ago now, but we were talking about this, I was talking about this on a coaching call. One of the things we talked about is that there is this tendency as lawyers to think that you have to IRAC all of your answers to all things. Specifically, if someone asks you a question about "Oh, why are you leaving?" or something around "Oh, but you've practiced so many years" or blah blah blah some costs, or the millions of things that someone might say, it can create a lot of anxiety for people if they feel “My reasons aren't good enough or I'm not able to explain why it's so bad.”

One of the things that I hear from so, so, so many of my clients is that when they found the podcast, one of the things that it helped them with was not feeling crazy and feeling less alone because there often is this sense in these toxic workplaces that we often work in as lawyers of it's so bad and yet it is really hard to convey to someone outside of the situation why it is so bad, which I talked on other episodes about the many reasons why that is, toxic work structures and narcissism and emotional immaturity, etc.

One of the things that I just want you to know as you're listening, if you're someone who's thinking about leaving and you also have this sense of being stressed out because what if you go ask someone about their job that's not a lawyer job and they ask you “Well, why are you planning to leave law?” and your answer isn't good enough, I think it's really important to know that, yes, you want to have reasons for your decisions.

But the fact that you're even worrying about this means that you are the typical type of person who becomes a lawyer, which is someone who cares a lot about the reasons for doing things and the why. Because part of why you want to leave is the internal experience that you have as a lawyer, there is an element of that that is never going to be able to be conveyed to other people because they aren't you and they can't be you.

I think putting pressure on yourself to make logical arguments such that they will convey to someone the visceral nervous system experience of what you're doing, it's putting unnecessary pressure on yourself to do something that is actually not what words are designed to do. Again, this isn't to say, “Who cares about your reasons? Don't tell anyone. If someone asks, be like, ‘I'm not saying anything.’” That's not what I'm saying.

I am saying that one of the things that can decrease anxiety about these types of questions is recognizing, “Oh, a large part of what allows me to know that this is right is my intuitive wisdom, my felt sense of the world, my felt sense of this experience, my felt sense of myself in this experience.” That is not something you have to justify or explain or prove.

The other thing is that often this concern of “I need to IRAC my reason or my response to questions about why am I leaving” is that there is often the sense that people are going to care a lot more than they actually do, especially when we're talking about having conversations with other people who are working in other fields and the reason you're reaching out to them is basically you're saying, “Hey, I'm really interested in the work that you do and I'd love to grab a coffee and chat for 15 minutes about what your day-to-day is like if you'd be willing to do that.”

Will most people at some point in that context ask you something about why you're thinking about leaving law? Yes. Are most people in that situation looking for some long-involved answer where they're emotionally invested in you convincing them? No, really not at all. Especially because of the conversation in these early informational interviews, which is something we talk about in the Collab all the time, those conversations are very focused on the person who you're speaking with.

Because you're essentially saying, “Tell me more about you, tell me more about your job.” Often lawyers, because of our jobs, have armored up. We assume the worst. We assume that we’ll get the worst possible questions in the worst possible way and we need to be prepared. In most of these situations, people at most might be looking for a one-sentence answer.

It is rare that someone is going to be like, “Well, I'm not sure that is a good enough reason.” Now, there certainly will be people who have that kind of reaction. In most cases, that is probably going to be someone who is more invested in your life, who has more connection to you, and even in those cases, I don't think that the thing that is primarily important or worth focusing on is how can I convince this person that I'm justified in wanting to do this?

I think focusing on being clear that you do want to do this, being clear about the effects that lawyering is having on you, and learning how to tolerate the discomfort of someone not agreeing with you or not seeing things your way is actually a much better use of your time and energy, emotional energy, than crafting this flawless argument with “Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion.”

Because often it's not really about those persuasive factoids anyway. Even if someone reacts poorly to the fact that you want to leave law, and even if the pushback seems to be a very intellectual, like, “I'm wanting reasons, I'm asking questions,” in so many situations, the thing that is fueling those questions is actually emotion. Whether it's fear, anger, sadness, or some combination of those things, regardless, whatever is fueling those questions, that feeling which the person asking may not even be aware is there, but the way to address that feeling is not with your logical IRAC, “Here's why I should leave, or why it's okay to leave, or why me leaving the law is a reasonable choice.”

To the extent that you can just take the pressure off yourself to craft the perfect argument that will result in everyone understanding you 100% and no one disagreeing with anything that you decide, take that pressure off yourself. Because that is a ton of pressure and as I describe it, you can see why people who are lawyers would feel this kind of pressure, make the perfect argument that makes everyone agree with you, but one, it's frequently not at all necessary. Two, it's not really helpful because it doesn't really tend to be actually addressing the underlying driving factors for the questions.

Ultimately, there is an element in all of this of you being able to say, “I know the truth of my experience and it is real. I don't need someone else to validate what I already know to be true even if what I know to be true about this job and the fact that I need to leave or I want to leave is contrary to a lot of things that I thought were true or that I might have thought were true in the past.”

You don't need to IRAC your response to “Why do you want to leave the law?” In fact, I think the best thing that you can do is to learn to actually listen to yourself. Because often the reason that we feel insecure when these questions are asked is because we've spent so much time listening to external factors as we've been trained to do as lawyers that we have not fully dialed into what we actually think and feel. Doing that is going to support you so much more in these conversations or with these types of questions than anything else you can do. Thanks so much for joining me this week. I'll talk to you next week.

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.