Sarah Cottrell: Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. I've 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 the idea of staying in a toxic environment, like a law firm, in order to change it. I think I've been fairly clear on the podcast that I'm not here to, like, tell people who don't like being lawyers to not be lawyers, right? Like, I'm here for the people who, when they hear me talk about my experience of the legal profession, are like, yes, that. But there are people who have a different experience. And there also are people who have a similar experience but still decide to stay in some of these environments for various reasons, but a big one being that they want to try to bring change. And I think that is a very admirable goal. And I think that it is something that if you are undertaking that, more power to you. As always. I suggest you have a therapist, because especially if you are continuing to stay in an environment that is toxic or unhealthy, it is going to be really important for you to make sure that you have support.

And there's just one thing that I want to talk about, because of the fact that lawyers often think about the costs to leaving the law, or leaving their law firm and they don't often consider the cost to staying, or they discount the costs to staying heavily. And so I just want to talk a little bit about the cost to staying. If you're someone who feels like, oh, I should stay, I should, I'm using air quotes, stay because I should try to fix this environment. If you're someone who feels that way, again, that is incredibly admirable. And also, I think it's important to be aware that playing the game that you have to play in order to remain in these kinds of environments and advance, can change you. So in other words, it's not costless. I think there is sometimes this sense of like, oh, well, I'll just stay and I'll have this awareness that this is all really problematic and I'll get into a position where I have more influence and then I'll be able to change it.

The challenge is that you need to be realistic about how much you're playing the game to make change, versus playing the game, because you become a part of the machine. If you want to be able to make change, the process of staying to the point where you have influence, is going to be very uncomfortable. Because you are operating in a system that you know is problematic and you are doing what you need to do to remain in that system and trying to avoid becoming problematic yourself. To be clear, I'm not saying that's not possible, but I do think I have observed situations where someone stays. This is not with clients, to be clear. This is with just people who I know. I have observed situations where people stay, ostensibly because they want to make change. They want to get to a point where they have influence and can shift the way the environment functions. But in staying, they become comfortable with a lot of the ways that the environment functions.

And so when they reach the point where they have influence, they aren't necessarily as driven to deploy that influence for the purpose of making change, especially because if you basically go from, how do I satisfy the needs of the machine, so that the machine rewards me. And then you expect yourself to be able to turn and like, in many ways, squander your political capital that you have built, in order to advance. As I said at the beginning, if you're someone who's staying in order to create change, I think that that is extremely admirable. I think that you should be working with a therapist who can help you keep track of like, is this healthy for me, is this allowing me to be the person who I need to be. And I also think you have to actively push back against being formed. Like your conscience can be formed by your environment. And so your conscience about what you think is and is not okay, within the working environment, will be affected by what you experience in that environment. And if you are not aware of it, you will find that your conscience becomes malformed and that you accept things that you previously would not have accepted. That is just the reality. And that's not just in a law firm. That's any corrupting environment, any corrupt environment, any environment that is toxic or unhealthy, over time, if you are trying to fit yourself into that environment, has a corrupting influence. And so I think it's important to be super mindful about your role, who you are, what your goal is and how you want to get there and the things that you do and don't want to do, in order to get to that goal.

Because, as I said, so often lawyers think about the costs to leaving an environment like that, but so rarely do we think about the costs to staying. And the costs of staying in a corrupting environment can be extremely high. You can go from being someone who is incensed by the way, by the like problematic things in a toxic environment, to someone who thinks that they're mostly okay. And it's not because they became okay, it's because you became comfortable with those things, because of the environment that you were in. Get a therapist. Get a therapist and be really clear about what you are doing, if you are in an environment like this, with a goal like this, because there are amazing opportunities to make a huge difference. Huge. But you also need to be super mindful if you're someone who's allowing yourself to be in an environment like this. And I wish you so much luck. If this is the path that you're on, I wish you so much luck. And if this is the path that you're on and you recognize like, oh, actually, this is not, I don't like the effect this is having on me, then that I think is a really good flag to stop and reassess and consider, is this still the best path for me, or do I want to do something else? 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.