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.

So, when I was writing down podcast ideas for this quarter, the episode that I'm recording right now for you today, the title that I gave it was “Reddit and Fishbowl Are Great Except When They're Not.”

The reason this idea came to me, well, there are a couple of things. So, first of all, if you've heard me talk about Fishbowl at all, you'll know, so let me back up. I'm assuming most people know that Reddit is a platform where people talk about all kinds of things. Fishbowl is a platform specifically where people talk about jobs and career stuff.

For the most part, both of those platforms are anonymous. You don't know who you're talking to or who's talking to you, whether they are who they say they are or whatever, which can be great in lots of circumstances, especially if you're in an industry where there is not a lot of exchange of information non-anonymously because of all of the neuroses—many understandable—that lawyers have.

But I have told people in the past that I have a Fishbowl account, and I will occasionally go on there to just see what kinds of questions are being asked. I am not anonymous on Fishbowl, to be clear, at least not intentionally. If I ever do post anything, I try to post it under my own name.

Anyway, the point is I will often go on there to see, well, if I go on there, it's not actually often, I will go on to see what are people talking about? What are people asking about? Like a little bit of a reminder of the battle days at the firm.

The reason I say that I don't go on Fishbowl often is that honestly, for me, there's a kind of descent into the lawyer mindset that happens—or that I can feel—when I am, I don't know, looking at a forum that's related to lawyers. Whether it's like Biglaw or trial lawyers or whatever, it's just kind of grim, honestly.

It's just kind of grim. Seeing people talk about their jobs and ask questions about their jobs in the way that lawyers do when they are anonymous on something like Fishbowl or Reddit—which I'll get to that in a bit—is a very visceral experience when you have been in a similar place and needed and wanted to get out.

So I will hop into Fishbowl, and then eventually I'm like, “I literally can't. I can't read anymore because it's too much.” Then I'll bounce out and basically wait till I get an email from them that's like, “Hey, your account is going to be shut down if you don't log in within the next number of days.” Then I log back in.

Because the lawyer mindset that I'm talking about is the sort of prestige mindset, all of those ideas that I feel like get baked into many of us as lawyers when we're not even in law school yet. When we're still in the “But which law firm? And which law school? And what are the rankings? And what is your LSAT score?” And all of these things that, in the grand scheme of a life, really don't matter but feel like it really, really, really, really, really matters a lot, especially when you're 18, 19, 20 and don't have a fully developed prefrontal cortex. But a lot of that mindset persists.

So I love that there are things like Fishbowl that exist for people to ask questions that they would not otherwise get answers to in our profession, because our profession needs to have more information transparency. If the only way that it's really going to happen is if it's anonymized, then in my view, that's better than nothing.

I feel similarly about the various law subreddits. So here's the thing. For a long time, when people would join the Collab, I always ask, “Where did you find me? Where did you hear about me?” For the most part, it would be a little bit people finding the podcast directly and then mostly people find me on Google. Occasionally, for a friend, like, "A friend of mine who's in the Collab," or, "A friend of mine listening to the podcast," or whatever.

Maybe some time in the last year, it started to be more frequent that people, when they were asked, “Where did you find out about Former Lawyer?” would say Reddit.

To be honest, the first time that I saw that, I was like, “Oh gosh, people are talking about me on Reddit.” Which, not necessarily. They could just be talking about the podcast. Whatever.

The point is, I am aware that there's some kind of discussion or mentioning—at least of Former Lawyer—on Reddit, which is great. Again, love it. I have never attempted to look for anything, any conversation about Former Lawyer on Reddit, because I feel like that is the way to madness. I mean, that's like an author going on Goodreads and reading reviews. No one needs that. That's not good for anyone.

There are other ways to get meaningful thoughts and feedback. But the fact that this started showing up in these responses made me aware. I'm an elder millennial. Okay? So like, I don't know. Reddit, is it really a thing in my mind?

Anyway, the point is—I mean, it is—but I only had a passing familiarity with it, let's say. I now have looked around a bit and seen various subreddits that are covering things that are somewhat similar to things that might be talked about on Fishbowl.

So again, people asking questions about career stuff and advice related to whatever ridiculous things you may be experiencing as a lawyer.

Again, as I said when I was talking about Fishbowl, I love that there are these forums for people to get information that they might not otherwise get in our profession. Because it requires people to not talk in order to be seen as, “I don't know, doing what they're supposed to do,” which is problematic on any number of levels in terms of information transparency.

But anyway, all this to say, I think that because of this, I think things like Reddit and Fishbowl are fulfilling a really important need, and I'm really glad that they exist.

So the title of this episode was Reddit and Fishbowl Are Great, Except When They're Not. The “except when they're not” point that I wanted to talk about a little bit is like, except when you ask a question or you see someone else asking a question and the responses are completely embedded in that lawyer bubble type of thinking that I was talking about earlier, and that we've talked about in the podcast before.

For example, it's very common that you will see people, for example, someone in a Biglaw firm who's experiencing something highly problematic, who will ask questions about it. And there's going to be some percentage of people, possibly even a majority, that are just kind of like, “Well, you signed up for Biglaw, so suck it up.”

I think really notably, one of the places that I saw this recently was conversations related to the way that many Biglaw firms have capitulated to Trump and his executive orders. And essentially seeing people, associates, who are expressing concern about that, basically being told it shouldn't matter to you because you're working for a Biglaw firm and they're all evil anyway.

You know, I disagree. I disagree. I think that there can be this sort of defeatist attitude amongst people who participate in some of these systems, especially people who have chosen to continue to participate in something like Biglaw.

There can be this sense of like, you're not allowed to want anything different than whatever lowest common denominator this environment can offer you. That's just not true. That has real implications.

I mean, it's one thing when we're talking about whether or not you should tolerate abusive behavior from a partner. It's another thing when we're talking about whether you should just be okay with capitulating to fascism.

To be clear, I don't think either of those things are things that anyone should be told that they should just be okay with. But one is on a very different level than the other.

Even if you're not the person asking the question, if you're someone who frequents these kinds of discussions in terms of reading, you do kind of internalize, it reinforces all the prestige-focused, achievement-at-all-costs, achievement-is-all-that-matters thinking that many of us came into law school with, that many of us had reinforced in law school, that many of us are having reinforced in our experience of legal practice.

I just want to remind you that if you're someone who does frequent those discussions—again, obviously I'm not saying don't do it, because I think it is, again, really important for there to be a place for people to have these kinds of conversations—but I do want to just say: the way the general population of the Reddit Biglaw subreddit, or the Biglaw bowl, and Fishbowl, or any of the other lawyer bowls—because this is present in all sorts of different environments and sub-bowls, subreddits—first of all, that's not how all lawyers think.

But it's especially not how all people in the world think. I think it can be so easy to fall into this sense of, “Well, this is the only way to think about all of these things because everyone thinks this way.” Even these randos on the internet, who may or may not be giving decent advice, in many cases are giving decent advice, in a lot of cases, they are giving advice based on what they know to be true about the environments that people exist in, which is to say environments with extremely problematic dynamics.

But if you're going to operate within them, you kind of have to work with what you've got. So again, this is not to be like, “And therefore it's all terrible advice.” It is to say: just remember it is a bubble.

Even when it's a broader bubble than your personal work bubble, the place that you work, the people you go to law school with, whatever, it's still a bubble. It's still a lawyer bubble. It still is susceptible to all of the problems of the lawyer bubble that we have talked about on this podcast before.

So I guess thanks to whoever is shouting Former Lawyer out on Reddit. That's cool. Very happy. I've been able to help a lot of lawyers who found Former Lawyer as a result of Reddit, and that is something that makes me really happy.

But also just remember, it’s just one environment. It's just one source of information. It's just one of many ways of thinking about the world and having a perspective on that.

Whether we're talking about Reddit and Fishbowl or anything else, any other place that you get information, it's just good to have perspective. Yeah. So, I really appreciate you listening today, and 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.