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 do a quick check-in today because I know there are lots of you who listen to the podcast who told yourselves at some point towards the end of last year, "2025 is going to be my last year of practice. I'm going to figure something else out. I'm going to get out, et cetera, et cetera." That happens a lot for people, especially if you're at a firm and you're in a bonus cycle or you are at year-end or potentially whenever your billable year has wrapped up. Regardless, there are lots of people who, headed into 2025, are thinking, "This is my last year doing this."

This episode is going to release right at the end of August, so right before September. For those of us who are lawyers, I know many of us were those quintessential good grade academic types. So I think the "school year," even when we're not in school, still feels kind of meaningful and, at least for me, brings fond memories. Fond memories of my past dorkiness. I mean, not to suggest that I am not also presently dorky anyway.

But I wanted to check in because the other thing is we only have four months left of the year, right? September, October, November, December. If you're someone who is wanting to make a move, you are really at the point where it's like, if you haven't already started thinking about it, now is the time. What better time than at the beginning of the brand new school year-ish? Again, despite the fact that we are adults and no longer are in a school schedule.

So if you're someone who at the end of 2024 was like, "2025 needs to be my last year," and you're now like, "Crap, it's two thirds of the way into the year and I haven't thought about this or I haven't given enough time to this," or whatever, the first thing I'm going to tell you is that it is not too late to start. I know I say this on the podcast all the time, but the best time to start figuring out what you want to do next is literally now. Because even if you're someone who isn't on a short timeline, even if you're on a longer timeline and expect to still be doing what you're doing for a couple of years or more, it's still extremely helpful to give yourself the time to actually be able to reflect and think about these questions.

As we know, these questions are much more complex than many of us would like them to be or expect them to be. That is why, among other things, I am always talking about how I think lawyers should be in therapy. But anyway, one, it's not too late. You can start now. Not only that, but it's a really good time. Not just because now is a good time, as in wherever you are when you're listening to this now today, but also because there is a lot of progress that you can make in four months in terms of thinking through what it is that you might want.

A lot of people will ask me when they're thinking about joining the Collab, "How long does it take? What amount of time should I expect to invest?" And the classic lawyerly answer, of course, is, "It depends." It's true, it does depend. But for most people, if they are able to give even a couple of hours a week to this process with the framework, which has five modules, they're able to make significant progress in three to four months.

That is not to say, "You, person listening, should join the Collab today." However, based on what I've seen with people going through the framework, I can tell you that with four months left in the year, there's still a lot of progress that you can make towards your goal of getting out. Getting out of what you're doing and getting into something that works better for you, or at least figuring out what that thing is and starting to gear yourself in that direction.

It's not too late if you're someone who is like, "I want to be out in 2025." Here's one more thing that I want to say. A lot of times, I'll talk with people and they won't have made the progress that they wanted to, or they had an idea at the beginning of the year of what they wanted to do, and it hasn't come to fruition, and there's a sense of, "I failed. I'm not doing the right thing. I don't care about this enough." A lot of lawyers are like, "Oh, I must not care about this enough because I haven't made progress."

So the other thing I want you to think about as you're looking back over your year so far is, what other things have been going on? And is it really that you don't have the motivation or that you don't care? Or is it just that you're a human being with limits and there are only so many things that any one human can do here in our late-stage capitalist dystopia? Very often when I'm talking with people and they're like, "I haven't made the progress that I want to make," it's not really that they don't care or they're not trying. It's that there is a limit to how much any one person can do.

So I just wanted to put that reminder on the end here because many lawyers, of course, their inclination is to be like, "Let me think about all the ways that I've not done this correctly and should have done different things and should be doing a better job and blah, blah, blah." I just want you to remember that you're good at doing what is essential. Sometimes the only things that you can do are the things that are essential, and that is okay. But if you're someone who is like, "Actually, I would like to make some progress," then yeah, you still have four months, and there's a lot of progress that you can make in four months. As I talked about last week, the grass really is greener on the other side. So 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.