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.

Hello. Today I want to talk specifically to those of you who are senior associates at law firms in Biglaw or otherwise, because I very often hear from lawyers who are in a very specific spot, qnd I think it might be helpful for you, if you are a senior associate, or may one day be a senior associate, or once were a senior associate and relate to this, to hear a little bit about this particular phenomenon that I have observed.

This is what happens. So you're a senior associate at a law firm. You aren't particularly happy. You're anywhere from, "Man, this is not that great," to straight-up miserable. Yet you're continuing there for various reasons.

Often what happens is people have this sense of, "Maybe it will get better." "I really hate it, but maybe once I make partner, it will be better." In some cases, that is accurate, it depends a lot on what it is that you hate about the job, right?

But I have worked with a lot of lawyers who were senior associates, went through the process of becoming partner, became partner, and within somewhere between a day to a year are like, "Oh no, I've made a terrible mistake."

And I'm laughing not because I think it's funny, or because if this is something that you've done that it should be laughed at. I'm laughing because it is just one example of many different types of examples of how we as lawyers are often conditioned to gaslight ourselves, or to convince ourselves that something that is just fundamentally not true is true, especially when it comes to our feelings. Like having to access our feelings, having to sort of account for them, trusting them, etc.

So yeah, I find that for a lot of people who really do not like lawyering but who have hung on at a firm into the senior associate ranks, they will sometimes have this sense of, "Well, I might as well." And I think that's a perfectly valid way to feel, right?

This is not me being like, "If you're a senior associate and you don't like your job, you should quit today." That is not what I'm saying. I think there are lots of different reasons that people decide to stay and go for partner, even though it's not necessarily the thing that they want. Those decisions, I think, are super personal and based on so many different factors.

But there definitely is a segment of people who have this sense of, "Well, when I make partner it will be better," except that they actually don't like anything about what it would be to be a partner. And in fact, in a lot of cases, they actually like it less.

So what do I mean by that? Once you become a partner, you not only are doing the regular day-to-day lawyer work, there are also these expectations around community engagement and building a book of business. That is a completely different skill set that most law firms—not all, but most—do not equip you for, nor do they really provide the infrastructure and support to allow you to learn on the job, which is basically what you're supposed to be doing.

There is this weird expectation that people will just flip a switch and have this completely new skill set that takes up a significant amount of time, and also not really change what they're doing substantively in terms of substantive legal work.

And no surprise, if you're someone who's already like, "I feel super overwhelmed. I feel like this work is not interesting. I feel like juggling all of this and the difficult personalities is really taking a toll on me," adding additional stuff does not make it feel better, even when there is that title change, right?

So the thing that I think is helpful to think about if you are a senior associate in this kind of position is: "What is it that I don't like about what I'm doing now, and is it actually going to appreciably change if I make partner?"

And if the changes that are going to happen if I make partner are not going to make this better for me, then what do I want to do with that information? I don't think it necessarily means you shouldn't go for making partner, because again, there are lots of different reasons why someone might do that.

But I do think that it is really worthwhile to have that conversation with yourself. Like, have a real conversation with yourself. Think about it. Have conversations with your therapist if you have one, I hope you do. Because as you know, on The Former Lawyer Podcast, we are very pro lawyers going to therapy. Talk with your partner if you have one, and really, on the front end, get a sense of: "Do I want to go through this whole ridiculous—"

I was going to say this ridiculous charade, which is not exactly fair. Let's say rigmarole. "Do I want to go through this whole ridiculous rigmarole that will potentially ultimately end up with me being a partner? Is that what I want to do with my time? Is that where I want to go?" And if not, if not, what does that mean, right? What does that mean?

Again, I don't think that means, for the vast majority of people, that you should just be like, "And I'm done, goodbye, I quit tomorrow." But I do think it means, "Okay, if the carrot that has been held out to you for your whole career is not actually a carrot for you—if it's just another stick—then it's worth thinking about: Okay, what do I actually want to be doing with my time if it's not this and it's not that? And how do I get there? And do I need to go through this whole process before that happens?"

This whole process, I mean the partnership process, which, depending on the firm, can be more or less demoralizing and soul-crushing, often on the more side.

Because side note, okay, here's a quick detour, because side note, of course, in every case, whether or not you make partner is presented as a merit-based decision, right? It's presented as, "If you don't make it, it's because you have somehow fallen short." In 99.9% of cases, that is not the case.

Let’s be real, if you're not making partner, there's typically some combination of the current partners not wanting to add another partner or however many number of partners to their ranks that will dilute profits per partner. Or there's some weird whatever with this department versus that department and who gets to make what. Or there's some weird internal politicking. Or who even knows? Maybe there's some handshake deal that's happened because of some other misbehavior and someone, blah blah blah. Do you know what I mean?

It's presented as, "Oh, this is a merit-based process," but the reality is that in most cases, it's random. In most cases, there is not a lot of logic to it. If there is logic to it, it's often not the logic that you would think would be applied to this type of decision.

Yeah, so anyway, that was just a little detour to say—if you're in the partnership process or you've gone through the partnership process and you weren't made partner, I'm guessing there's a very high likelihood that you were basically told, "It's not us, it's you." And this is me just saying: it's almost certainly not you. It's almost certainly them.

I mean, I realize it seems ridiculous that I could say that not knowing your specific situation. But there are only so many times you can see the same pattern and reasons and shadow reasons before you're like, "Okay. Yeah, this is how things go."

So anyway, back to the topic at hand, which is: if you're in a position where you're going to be going up for partner in the next year, two, three, and you already have this sense of, "I don't know if I want to be doing this," it's really worth it to spend some time thinking about, "Okay, do I want to put in that time? If not, what do I want to put my time towards?"

And if you're like, "I just have no idea. It's just easier to keep going," that is valid, right? That is a valid choice. But I think it's also helpful to know, "Oh, that is the choice I'm making." "I am not on this trajectory because I think it's going to magically fix the problems. I'm making a choice to be on this trajectory knowing that it's imperfect."

Yeah. So if you're someone who's like, "Yeah, I actually would like to try to figure out what I actually should be doing," then I don't know if you've heard, but I have this program. It's called The Former Lawyer Collab, and it's for lawyers who don't want to be doing what they're doing and have no idea what it is that they could or should do instead.

You can join at any time. There are people who are in all stages of practice there, from basically just out of law school to 25, 30 years out of law school to everything in between. There's a framework that you follow that basically takes you from "I have no idea what I even want to do, other than this doesn’t really seem to work for me," and that you can follow and ultimately figure out what it is that is the right fit for you.

So formerlawyer.com/collab. Again, you can join at any time. But I do recommend that if you're in a position where you're like, "Yeah, there's a looming deadline of me either needing to get out or not wanting to go through this process"—and by this process, I mean the process of going up for partner—the sooner you can start the process of figuring out what it is that you actually want to do, the better.

Because it is something that takes time. For some people, it's going to be fast. But for most people, it takes some time. So it's almost never too soon to start.

And of course, in the Collab, there are lots of lawyers who are just like you, who have been in very similar situations, and can relate to being like, "Well, I've been doing this, and I actually don't want to be doing this anymore. And making partner sounds terrible."

So that's it for me today. Good luck and godspeed to all of you out there, senior associates and all other types of lawyers. 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.