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.

Today, I want to talk about a question that comes up pretty frequently for my clients, for many of my clients, and that question is something along the lines of, "Am I just doomed to hate work no matter where I work because corporate everywhere just sucks?" Here in our late-stage capitalist dystopia.

This is actually very related to a question that I talked about several months ago on the podcast, which is that I find that very many clients who I work with and also many people who listen to the podcast have this question of “Well, is it just that I don't want to work?” So if you haven't listened to that episode and you have ever had the thought “Maybe I just don't want to work. Maybe I just hate working in general,” definitely go listen to that episode because I talk a lot more about that on that episode.

But like I said, this question of “Am I just doomed because corporate everywhere sucks?” it essentially boils down to “Is it going to be impossible for me to find a job that is actually better for me? Because ultimately, a corporation is dedicated to advancing its own ends and not primarily to supporting its employees. Does that just mean it's a fundamental mismatch of the environment?”

Here's what I will say about that. One, I have seen many people leave law and go into other things including various types of corporate jobs, and find that change to be a very good and helpful change. One of the things that I think is very important to remember when you're thinking about making a change to any other type of work, whether it's working for another company, working for yourself, whether it's going into some sort of government work, for example, the reality is that every job has things that aren't great.

I think it is even something that you absolutely love, this whole idea of “Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life” is, I think, not very helpful because the reality is that there are things about any job that will at times be annoying or unenjoyable or whatever.

But when you're a lawyer and you are in an environment that is so geared towards, almost engineered to bring about human happiness, especially with the billable hour model that is so structured around things that are so incompatible with being human, I think it can be hard to see that the challenges in your environment and the things that are making your life difficult, the things that make your job feel intolerable and soul-sucking are not the things that every person experiences at their job, including plenty of people who work for corporations and companies.

In other words, when you have had or are having a negative experience as a lawyer in your job, it can be easy to imagine that essentially, there isn’t, to not really be able to imagine a different way that still falls within those corporate parameters, and a different way does exist. In fact, many different ways exist. I think the important thing to keep in mind is that it's very hard to see what the actual full range of those options might look like when you are in that type of environment.

The reality is that there are many people, many lawyers, who have gone on to work in other fields for other companies that have had the experience of seeing, "Oh, it's not just that I never want to work for a company again. It's that I needed to find a place that was more aligned with my values." And that can be in several different ways.

That can be with respect to the overall company itself. That can be with respect to the way the workplace is structured. That can even become as granular as what department are you working in? Who are the individual people in that department? And how is that run? Who is your supervisor and what are they like?

I think especially if you work in a law firm, it is hard to envision the ways in which that matters because you do have this experience of having no boss and everyone is your boss at the same time. The idea of having a workplace that's structured differently is just hard to imagine how it would work.

If you're someone who's like, “Maybe I am just doomed because maybe I just can never work for a corporation or a company again,” maybe. It's certainly worth exploring are there other avenues for work that might be a better fit for me, whether that is self-employment, whether that is freelance, whether that is some other combination of things.

But I think one of the things that's important to keep in mind is that it is most likely premature to be considering that question when you have not had other experiences that give you a sense of the way that it can be different or at least have not had conversations with people who are having a different experience than the one that you are having in your workplace.

I think one of the things that can be really hard to see when you have to envision it as a theoretical or a hypothetical, it’s not like you need to find the platonic ideal of a corporation or a company where everything is perfectly managed and et cetera, one that doesn't exist.

But also there is a lot of distance and space between the way that most legal workplaces are run and organized, the way the workplace is structured, the specific pressures of the workplace, especially again, when it comes to billables.

There's so much space between that and whatever the platonic ideal of the corporation might be if such a thing even exists. You don't need to be looking for the perfect flawless corporation or company in order to find a place where the environment is going to be better than an extremely toxic environment.

I think sometimes people feel this pressure of, “Well, I'm in this really terrible environment here at this law firm, but should I really leave unless I can find essentially this perfect other alternative?”

The thing that I think is really important to keep in mind in this process is that you can make a move and experience a huge quality of life increase and overall work and job satisfaction increase, all of those things, not by identifying the perfect company, but simply by identifying a place where the environment in which you would specifically be working is overall better and more conducive to your specific well being.

That's the long way of saying that I don't think that you're just doomed to hate your job no matter where you go because corporate everywhere is terrible, the end. I think that there are a lot of options that exist for people that create better work and life circumstances for them.

The real question for you is how do you identify what that would look like for you specifically? Because yes, there are some things that are going to be common amongst all people, but a lot of the things that will make a workplace really the right fit for you are specific to your own values to the way that you work, to your personality, all these other things, which, as you know, if you've listened to the podcast for any length of time, is part of why when I work with my clients, those are some of the things that we are going through at the very front end of the process.

If you join the Collab and come into my small group program, the framework there will start you with these kinds of things. Your values, your personality, your strengths, et cetera, et cetera. If you're interested in joining the Collab, you can always go to formerlawyer.com/collab. You can see all the information there and enroll. But otherwise, take heart, you are not doomed, a better work-life is possible. I've seen it over and over and over and over again. Thanks so much for listening. 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.