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.

Hi, today I want to talk to you if you are a stay-at-home parent who worked as a lawyer and then stayed at home with your kids for some period of time and you are now thinking about coming back to the workforce because I regularly receive emails from people who practice law and then left for some period to stay home with their kids and are looking at returning, for a lot of those lawyers, they are realizing, “Oh, I definitely want to get back into the workforce, but I very much do not want to be practicing law.”

In many cases, if you are one of these people, you were glad that you got to leave because you feel about legal practice the way the lawyers who I typically work with as a career coach feel, which is to say not great. But stay-at-home parents in particular face a unique set of challenges when they're thinking about coming back to the workforce because of course, every lawyer who thinks about moving from practicing to something else has some sense of “Can I do this? I don't have transferable skills,” et cetera, et cetera.

If you are someone who has been working as a stay-at-home parent, there is this additional layer of “I already feel like it's going to be a struggle to get back into the workforce. Can I really layer on top of that, not going back to what I did before?” Because people have the sense of “Well, I can go back to practicing law because I can tell people I used to do this and I can do this again and here's the evidence that I did this before.”

First of all, I want to say I completely get that and if you are someone who has been working as a stay-at-home parent and you are now looking to move back into the workforce in a different way and you have this sense of “I feel like this is my only option and I'm not excited about it and this sucks,” you are definitely not alone. Because like I said, I hear from people like you, lawyers like you all the time.

I just wanted to talk a little bit about what it can look like if you're someone who is thinking about moving back into the workforce and you are a lawyer or were a lawyer and don't really want to be a lawyer again, but aren't really sure how to make that happen.

The first thing is that I think it's really important to remember with this kind of transition that there's the logistical piece and then there's actually figuring out what you want to do. Yes, those are both important and relevant, but they're also two separate things.

Many times when lawyers are thinking about moving from being a stay-at-home parent to going back to legal practice or the force in some other way, these two things are combined in their minds, which makes sense, but it makes it really hard to actually know whether you want to do something else and then actually target that other thing, something that is not practicing law.

If you are a stay-at-home parent who worked as a lawyer and you do not want to work as a lawyer when you return to the workforce, the first step is to figure out what it is that you actually want to do, which is really the first step for anyone, including someone who is currently practicing as a lawyer.

There's a reason that the way that the framework in the Collab is structured so that you are first going through some reflection, brainstorming, values, exercises, and other personality and strengths assessments, and then getting to things like informational interviews, and then ultimately resume, LinkedIn update, all those things, the reason for that is our natural response or thought as lawyers is often to do that last piece because it seems more practical.

But the reality is that you really do need to start with the values and the strengths and the personality, because it is infinitely easier to do that later work, like resume, LinkedIn, etc., once you know what you are actually targeting, and it's really hard to figure out what you want to target if you keep thinking about, “Well, how am I going to put this on a resume? I don't have things that I can put on my resume to position myself for this.”

I think it's really important if you are a stay-at-home parent thinking about going back to the workforce and you don't want to go back into legal practice even though that's what you were doing before you stayed home, then the thing that you want to focus on is “What do I actually want to do?” I think that can be difficult especially if you are in this position, this position of moving from being a stay-at-home parent back into the workforce, because again, there's this sense often I find that people have of this urgency.

I get that and there's nothing wrong with that. But I do think that it is important for you to think about, “Okay, how do I want to prioritize things? Am I in a position where I just need a job now? Is it basically a bridge job into the workforce, then ultimately, I will get more clarity on what it is that I actually want to do?” Because if it is a bridge job, then one of the most important things that I think you can get clear on is what the bridge job is going to be for you and what it is not and to target your re-entry job based on what things you want the job to do for you.

If the reality is that you feel like you really need to get back into the workforce and start making some money and then you, after that point, will have the ability to spend some time figuring out what it is that you want to do, then that is completely fine and that makes sense and that's what you should do. It's easier to do that when you aren't expecting the bridge job to be the thing for you.

Again, I think the process for you as a stay-at-home parent returning to the workforce in terms of figuring out what it is that you want to do that is in practicing law is basically the same that it is for every lawyer who's thinking about leaving law, the details of how you go about it and it in what order you do things might be a little bit shifted but really, again, the two big questions are “What is it that I want to do and do I need a bridge job? What is my immediate circumstance?”

Of course, this is why both of those questions are things that I work with my clients on all the time and both of these things are significant components of the framework inside the Collab that lawyers work through when they're figuring out what it is that they want to do that is not practicing law.

But I think the most important thing that you can know as someone in this position is you are not doomed because I often hear from people and they have this sense of “Well, I used to practice law and then I stayed home and now I'm doomed. My only option even though I absolutely do not want to do it is to practice law because that's the only way that I can make this move back into the workforce.” That is not the case.

There are lots of options for you. There are many ways to position yourself for something different that is not practicing law. Really, it's just a question of figuring out what that thing is in order to formulate that strategy.

If you're someone who's thinking about coming back into the workforce and you really don't want to practice law, just please know that you have options. There truly are options. Your sense that you don't have options is honestly, in my experience, very similar to other lawyers' sense that they don't have options. It’s often more a function of the restrictiveness of our industry, the restricted thinking of the legal profession, and less so actually something that is true.

So yeah, if you are someone who is thinking about getting back into the workforce after being a stay-at-home parent for some period and you are like, "Yeah, it would be great to be able to figure out what it is that I want to do and I don't know how to do that, where would I even start,” the Collab is my entry-level program for lawyers that helps them figure out what it is that they want to do that is not practicing law.

You can join at any time and you just go to formerlawyer.com/collab, and you can see all of the information about everything that is included in your membership. Once you join the Collab, you're in for the lifetime of the program as long as it is around. There's a lot of flexibility in terms of timeline. There isn't a ton of pressure to do things at a particular pace. It is very much something that you can individualize to yourself.

Yeah, if you are a stay-at-home parent who's thinking about coming back into the workforce and you want to figure out what it is that you want to do that is not practicing law, join us in the Collab. That is it from me for this week, I will 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.