Sarah Cottrell: 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.

Today I'm sharing my conversation with Liza Hanks. Liza used to practice law and now she is the director of planned giving at a nonprofit. She also is a member of the Collab, and we talk quite a bit not just about her own transition from practicing law to not practicing law and how she figured out what she wanted to do, but also the role that the Collab played in that. I'm really excited for you to hear this conversation.

If you're listening to this episode the day that it releases, which is September 9th, 2024, then I just want to remind you the framework inside of the Collab recently got a glow-up and has been significantly upgraded with additional content plus fillable workbooks and a bunch of other things.

The price to join the Collab is going up this Friday, September 13th at noon. So if you want more information about the Collab, what that looks like, and you want to try to join us before the price goes up, then go to formerlawyer.com/collab and you will see all the information there. And now, on to my conversation with Liza.

Hi, Liza. Welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast.

Liza Hanks: Hi, Sarah. It's a dream come true, really, to be honest.

Sarah Cottrell: I am so excited to have you on. I can remember, I don't remember exactly when this was, but talking about how someday you would be on the podcast and here it is. It's just so exciting. Okay, before I just go on and on, introduce yourself to the listeners and we'll go from there.

Liza Hanks: Okay. I'm Liza Hanks. I'm a recovering attorney. I spent 22 years as a trust and estates attorney. When I decided to leave for real, Former Lawyer was instrumental in making that happen.

The reason I'm so excited to be on the podcast is I want to give back to this community that gave me so much in terms of encouragement, vision, and execution. Now I'm a happy recovering attorney.

Sarah Cottrell: Oh, my goodness. It makes me so happy. I tell people—and we probably talked about this at some point, Liza—but I tell people, “My goal for people that I work with is that they could be someone who comes on the podcast.”

Liza Hanks: I'm not faking. I'll tell you how this all started. I spent close to a year probably surreptitiously listening to Former Lawyer on my way to work occasionally. Well, I couldn't believe how much a lot of what people were talking about just really resonated with me.

I don't exactly know where to start, but when the pandemic hit, like a lot of people, I went home, set up my office at home, and figured out how to do trust and estates, worked mostly on Zoom and all the signings I did in a parking lot for a year and a half outside so nobody would get sick.

But it really made me think, “Okay, now what do I want to do with my life? I've done this. I built it. It works. I'm successful at it and I'm not happy.” I started taking a lot of writing classes because I love to write. Then I just remember so clearly one day I was thinking about, “Okay, which writing class should I sign up for now?” and this voice in my head said, “You're solving the wrong problem. You hate your job.”

I was like, “Oh, okay.” That's when I actually reached out to you and thought, “Okay, maybe I'll try Former Lawyer, the program, and see if I can get out of this situation that I don't know how to get out of myself.”

That's how it started. Honestly, I had so many limiting beliefs. One of which was when I joined Former Lawyer, it would be me and a bunch of third-year associates at big law firms.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay. Yes. Let's talk about this because this comes up all the time.

Liza Hanks: Yeah. One of the really lovely and astonishing things about jumping into Former Lawyer was so many people had 15 or 20 years in like me. It was very reassuring. Being a successful and yet unhappy attorney was very confusing for me.

All my friends kind of liked what we did. I didn't. I always felt like I was writing with my left hand and I always felt like this sh*t was just about to hit the fan like something was going to blow up. I just kind of carried around this feeling of dread all the time for decades.

It was fun in Former Lawyer to meet people, all different kinds of attorneys, many of whom had similar feelings. I was like, “Oh, I’m not crazy. I'm not by myself. This is for real.” It was probably the most transformative piece of that experience, I would say.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. It's so interesting. I regularly have people who are thinking about joining the Collab who are 15, 20, 25 years in. They'll basically ask me, “Am I going to be the only one who's been doing this for 20 years and still hasn't figured out what to do next?”

I tell them, “No, actually, a significant percentage of the people in the Collab and just people who I work with in general are around that 20-year mark.” It's extremely common. I think it's also very common for someone to come into the Collab who's at that level of tenure and to be surprised by how many other people are also at that same stage.

Liza Hanks: Yeah. I put some notes together for myself because I always wanted to think about what I wanted to say here. Certainly connecting to other people was huge. But the other really great thing about the Collab was that I was so busy being unhappy that all I could think about were all the things about my job I didn't like.

I just dwelled in this maelstrom of, “I hate drafting technical documents over and over again. I hate billing. I hate arguing with people about the value of my services.” But the Collab got me thinking about, “Well, what do I like about it?” Obviously, there's something I like about this job because I've been doing it for 22 years. It wasn't all bad.

That process helped me disentangle the stuff I didn't like from the stuff that I genuinely did love to do, which was working with people, teaching, and simplifying really complicated legal structures into things that are understandable and relevant to people.

I love building my practice. I love the marketing of my practice. I love helping people build legacies. Actually, when I really sat down and went through the process, I realized, “Oh, there are a lot of things I really like about this.

Then I started looking for things like that. I made up a secret job title for myself as—I have it here on my wall. I'm looking at it right now—it's a generosity consultant. I thought that's what I wanted to be. I want to be a generosity consultant. How do I do that?

Not that that happened overnight. That took about a year and I worked with two coaches. I worked with you and I worked with Erin Conlon, who's a former lawyer and a really great coach.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, and she's been on the podcast as well.

Liza Hanks: That's how I found out about her. Both of you were really instrumental in helping me articulate what were the things about my life that I did like and how do I get more of that instead of dwelling in like, “I hate this. I hate going to law conferences. I hate being around people who are lawyers,” which isn't true, but that's how I felt right then.

There was some real value also in getting some coaching and some support because there's just a lot of inertia going the other way, like, “Don't leave. Don't change. Don't try.” Anyway, so once I got my secret job title, and then I found the job that let me do it, honestly, it was almost that easy.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. That is amazing. I definitely want to talk more about what that looks like. I'm curious, though, because so many people when they're thinking about leaving law have this, “But maybe I'd like it if I was in a different area of practice.” Trust and estates tends to be one of those areas that come up.

I'm wondering for you, when you originally decided to go to law school, did you already know that you wanted to practice in that particular area, or how did you end up there?

Liza Hanks: The opposite. It was the opposite of intentional.

Sarah Cottrell: Amazing. Tell me more.

Liza Hanks: Okay. First of all, I didn't go to law school until I was in my early 30s. I'd been a magazine editor for eight years before that. On the computer, I worked for a computer magazine.

I went to law school. Because I'm such a positive, feel-good person, I decided I hated computers, I didn't want anything to do with it, so, yeah, who started? I missed out on several fortunes by doing that.

Anyway, I wanted to be a constitutional law professor, actually. I went to Stanford and I did constitutional law. I didn't study estate planning at all. I also had a baby in my third year at law school, my daughter. That was complicated and derailed me, I was both a mom and getting through the Supreme Court clerkship at the same time.

That was crazy. Anyway, I ended up clerking on the Ninth Circuit. By then my daughter was a year and a half old and I threw myself off the ambition train a little bit. I did some job talks to teach, but I was just really exhausted by that point because I had a baby and I'd taken the bar and I clerked on the Ninth Circuit with an infant.

My husband took care of her. She was well taken care of, but I was completely exhausted. I didn't get a teaching job. I didn't get the Supreme Court clerkship, although I did interview Ruth Ginsburg, and that's a good story, which I can tell you some other time.

And so I did public law for a while. I worked at the state level. I worked at the county level. 2001 rolled around, dating myself, and I thought, “You know what? I have a three-year-old. I have law school debt. I am now making less money than I made before I went to law school. This is insane.”

I switched careers. I picked up the phone. There was the first internet boom. I went to work at Biglaw in intellectual property licensing. Hilarious. Didn't know anything about it.

But I knew about computers. I know how to write. I had a fancy degree and I had a fancy clerkship so they were like, “You've got a heartbeat, you're hired.” Because this was the [inaudible] or whatever that sock puppet was kind of boomed the first one.

I did that for a while, part-time because I have my daughter. Then I had my son in 2001, right when the market crashed, it's his fault. March 2001, [inaudible] market crashed.

I went on materially leave. My Biglaw firm canceled its part-time program for women right then. They said, “Oh, that's great. Just come back full-time.” I'm like, “No. I have a five-year-old. You don't really want me to come back. I don't really want to come back.”

I thought about all my clients who I liked. I never met one of them in a year of practicing at Biglaw because nobody wanted to pay $500 an hour to talk to an associate. It was all by email.

I was just sitting there thinking, “Is there one person I'd miss if I quit?” It was like, “I haven't even met any of these people.” I just said, “No, I'm not going to come back.” I quit Biglaw in the backyard with my five-year-old watching.

He’s like, “Oh, no, wow, what did you do?” Then I was going to start a practice. I decided I was just going to work for myself. I was tired at that point of all these law jobs telling me I couldn't be a mom and a lawyer the way I wanted to be.

It was just such a struggle to get a part-time job that people believed in. I'd gone through three or four of them and I was like, “Forget it. I was going to work for myself.”

That's why I started my practice. I'd never been an estate planner. But I figured, one of my friends, because we all had babies, said, oh, “We need a will.” I'm like, “I'm not that kind of lawyer.”

She's like, “How hard could it be?” I'm like, “Good point.” That's how I started. I just built the practice over many, many, many years. Turns out I was good at marketing. I talked to all the new mom's groups. I talked to all the preschools because that was the world I was in.

I had a baby and a five-year-old. I worked with lots and lots and lots of young families. Then over the years, my practice got more sophisticated and complicated. I worked with older people and wealthier people. That's the kind of trajectory that a lot of estate planners do.

But it was not intentional. It was really about my kids. Also, I wanted to help people. The good thing about estate planning is you're actually not doing something that's evil or destructive to people. You're helping them put their lives together in an important way. I did get a lot of satisfaction out of that.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think when people are thinking about leaving law but are wondering if there's some practice area that could fix the problems that they have with practicing, I think one of the reasons that trust and estates come up so often is that sort of sense of like, “Oh, you can be working with individual people helping them with something that they genuinely need.”

Liza Hanks: And it's completely true and it helps if you're good with people. You have to be a really good marketer because the nature of the practice is you have new clients all the time. They follow you around. They followed me around like baby ducks. People that I worked with 20 years ago would come back and say, "Oh, we forgot to fund our trust. Is that a problem?” I'm like, “Yes. [inaudible] You're still alive. Let's go for it.”

There was a lot of satisfaction in it. For me, intellectually, it was a dead-end job because In order to progress intellectually in that practice, you have to really want to do complicated financial engineering to help rich people not pay taxes.

I just wasn't interested in that as a career. So I limited myself to what people would call foundational estate planning, which is basic wills, trusts, and powers of attorney. 20 years in, I hadn't really learned anything new in a decade. That was fine when my kids were little. That was its benefit, it wasn't too taxing.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, 100%. As someone with kids who are, well, now they're five and nine, but who had just come out of the young kids phase, there is a lot to be said for a job that's challenging, but also there are so many other moving pieces in life.

Liza Hanks: Exactly. Also, you control your calendar in a way that a lot of attorneys don't. It's not court driven and there's no opposing counsel. There's nobody being paid on the other side to make you crazy or feel stupid.

The flip side of that is such a sense of responsibility because you're working with people who just don't know. It's all on you. If you get it wrong, no one's going to know. You got to get it right.

But there's no opposing counsel. There's nobody on the other side of the transaction who's really as skilled or as knowledgeable as you. It's a huge sense of moral and legal responsibility to do it right, which was wearing over time. People just dump a lot of dysfunction on you too.

Sarah Cottrell: Can you say more about how it wears over time?

Liza Hanks: Yeah, although I don't want to dissuade people, especially women with kids or guys who don't like to consider it because it is a really valuable service and people do need it. Any estate planner that's any good is too busy because it's like everybody needs to do this.

For some people, it might be a really great fit. For me, it was a good fit for a long time. It's just stopped being a good fit. I just kept soldiering on way past the time when I should have stopped.

For one thing, the way to make a practice in estate planning practice financially viable is I felt like I was running a diner where I just did breakfast and lunch. I just really did a couple of things really well over and over and over. If you wanted dinner, I'd refer you to my friends who did the fancy or harder stuff.

That makes it financially doable on a flat fee basis because you know exactly how long it's going to take pretty much to do each project because it's a fairly predictable set of clients that you're willing to work with.

But over time, like I said, if you're smart and you're curious, that gets a little wearing. Because I know exactly what today's going to be like. I know exactly what tomorrow is going to be like. I pretty much know the questions that I'm going to be asked and I definitely know the answers.

That's great for a while, but for me, that wasn't sufficient over time. The family dysfunction is tricky because when I first started, I think I felt like I wanted to save everybody and after a while, it was like, “Just grow up. Keep copies of your own documents. Talk to your son if you don't understand what he needs or should be doing. Don't look to me to solve your dysfunctional family situation.”

Also, the maturation of the profession too is that maybe you start out doing planning, but after a while, people start dying, and then you have to do the administration part. I really didn't love that part of the practice.

When I think about it now, those are really different skills. Those are accounting skills. Those are spreadsheets. That's like distribution. That's money. Those are dollars. Some people really love that part of the practice. I didn't.

Also, that's where a lot of tension and dysfunction can come up, like, “Why did Dad give you this? Why did Mom give you that?” I just got to the point where everything just felt like a burden.

I just burned out. I just gave a lot. After a while, I didn't know how much more to give in terms of—I mean, I tried to be compassionate, compassion and empathy and stuff—but after a while, I was like, “Oh, come on.”

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. What I recommend is family therapy.

Liza Hanks: Yeah. I love my clients. I don't want to make this negative but it wasn't feeding some of what I needed after a while, it was just a lot of giving and not a lot of getting in terms of anything, professional development, community, or intellectual growth.

I was fine with the mission and the purpose. That's why I did a podcast. I wrote a couple of books. I tried to engage myself in other ways than the actual day-to-day financial part of my practice to keep my brain alive and my heart happy. But it just got to be so much work.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Okay. I know you said that you listened to the podcast for about a year before you joined the Collab.

Liza Hanks: I did.

Sarah Cottrell: Oh, it's very, very common. I'm wondering what led you to the point where you discovered the podcast. Let’s start there.

Liza Hanks: I think probably like most people, I was sitting in my room going, “What am I going to do? I think I just did some research on what to do if you don't want to be a lawyer anymore. I think Former Lawyer came up.

I think I listened to Your Job Shouldn't Make You Cry, your most popular episode and I'm like, “My job makes me cry a lot.” I carry around a sense of dread all the time. The other thing about estate planning is it's very high in the malpractice department. One in three estate planners get sued.

Sarah Cottrell: Oh, yeah.

Liza Hanks: I tell people now, they say, “Why are you so happy not being a lawyer?” I'm like, “Okay, imagine if every day you went to work, every mistake that you might make would hold you personally liable forever. How would that feel to go to work every day?” They're like, “Oh, my God.”

But that's true. I am liable for the rest of my life for the work I did in 2001. I have insurance for that, and I try not to think about it very much. I have a study group of dear friends and colleagues, and a third of us have been sued. Not for doing anything wrong, just because people get angry about money and family.

Sarah Cottrell: Right.

Liza Hanks: Maybe because we did something wrong. It's impossible to do everything right all the time. But that's the standard you have to hold yourself to. That is a huge burnout. If you think about it. Friends of mine who are more successful, they just don't think about it.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I was going to say. It's so interesting because I do think that there are some people—to be clear, I'm sure there are some irresponsible lawyers.

Obviously, we all know that there are some irresponsible lawyers—but some people just don't necessarily hold that same kind of constant sense of what you're describing.

Liza Hanks: No, for sure. One of my friends, he's like, “Look, I can give you a driver's license, but I can't tell you where to drive.” She's still practicing and I'm not. I'd be like, “Don't take that left turn.”

I used to joke with my clients that I turned my biggest personality failing into a paying job, which is worrying. But the joke had a lot of truth to it. I've spent most of my life as the person who takes care of everything, who takes care of everyone. That's what I did for a living for the longest time. It's probably why I was good at it. But that didn't really help me be a more happy individual.

Sarah Cottrell: A hundred percent. I mean, this is true for so many of the people who I work with. Also, I count myself among them. Just because you're good at foreseeing all the bad things that might happen and therefore that makes you a good lawyer doesn't mean that it's good for you as a person. In fact, it might be exacerbating all of your most problematic personality traits.

Liza Hanks: A hundred percent. One of my favorite crazy memories is, okay, so my daughter's 28 now. She was 13 because we're getting ready for her bat mitzvah. I was frantically listening to some MCLE audio thing on, and in California where I practice, one of the requirements is a substance abuse hour for your MCLEs.

I'm listening to that one about lawyers, depression, and alcoholism, while listening to that, printing out the invitations for her bat mitzvah and drinking a glass of wine, frantically overworking myself while drinking and listening to this going, “Oh, my God, I'm such a lawyer.”

So for me, and I've watched several people, I mean, anytime you've practiced and you have friends, like a cohort of people that we've all kind of been moving through this at the same time, some of my friends still really love what they do, but the one person most like me who held it too tight, she also had to go. It was really psychologically taxing to worry about every-- and I'd wake up at four and I'd be worrying about these things.

Really, a lot of the worries should have been on my clients, you know. They should have stepped up and been responsible and signed things and disclosed things. But I worried about it instead.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah it's interesting because, I think often people who are having that experience while lawyering are like, “Well, I just shouldn't think this way,” or “I just shouldn't feel this way.”

Well, a huge number of those people, when they come into the Collab or when we're working together, they'll take various assessments, but one of them is the CliftonStrengths. Many, many, many, many of them have responsibility as a very highly ranked strength or consistency. Or one of these where it's like, “Hey, this is actually a positive trait. However, it's being preyed upon in this scenario in a way that is not helpful.”

Liza Hanks: A hundred percent, a hundred percent, and it depletes you from doing that in the areas of life where it might be better like in your family and kids. Yeah, that was definitely true. One thing I did want to talk about was some of the crazy limiting beliefs that I had that I was sure were true that have turned out to be not true at all.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, let's talk about it.

Liza Hanks: Okay, so one of the barriers for me, and I mean, it's really hard to figure out what to do next when everybody you know does what you do and doing it for so long and objectively on the outside, why would you want to leave?

My practice was humming along and I worked at this really great firm that was more like a cooperative and so there was none of the stupid law nonsense about billable hours. Everything was fine except for me.

I had a couple of beliefs that I really wanted to talk about today because none of them were true. One of them was that my skills wouldn't have any value outside of law.

Sarah Cottrell: Hmm, classic.

Liza Hanks: One was that I'd have to take a huge pay cut.

Sarah Cottrell: Also classic.

Liza Hanks: I know, and then I would feel miserable doing anything else too. None of those are true. So false belief one, my skills had no value. Not true. A lot of the things I've learned as a lawyer are super helpful every day in my job, like good with people. I know how to manage my time. I know how to write. I know how to research. I really get analytical thinking. I know how to explain complicated things in ways that make sense to people. All of those I use every day.

Second one, I'd have to take a huge pay cut. Didn't happen. I took a little pay cut. I took a tiny pay cut, but honestly, I get paid vacations, I get days off, I get professional development, I get colleagues I like. I get to go to work every day, and I don't dread it.

I feel like I came out so ahead of the deal. Our lifestyle didn't change a bit. Maybe what changed was I didn't save a bunch of money for the future, but I have enough money saved up. It's enough. It wasn't a big cut at all. It wasn't a 50% cut or something like I imagined it would be. That was false.

The one that really kills me is I had somehow convinced myself that I just hate working, that I would be miserable in any job. That's so not true. From the minute I started this job—I've done it for almost a year—I've really enjoyed myself.

I don't always know what I'm doing. I'm learning a lot. Sometimes I miss being an expert. I did have to have a beginner's mind again because I was a beginner in this job. But it's completely not true that my misery had to do with me and not the context within which I was working.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah.

Liza Hanks: Those all really held me back. People in the Collaboration were helpful, especially about the pay cut thing. I definitely posted something. My favorite answer was this guy who said, “You know, yeah, go outside, go to the movies, go to dinner, look around. All those people, they're not lawyers, they seem to be functioning just fine.” I'm like, “Yeah, great advice.”

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think it's really helpful to have a group of people, because all three of those things that you said, “I believe this and it was not true,” I mean, almost every lawyer who's thinking about leaving believes one or more of those things.

Liza Hanks: I know. The other thing I wanted to tell you is I'm a Director of Gift Planning at a community foundation. In a way, it's the most classic pivot. Lots of estate planners I know have gone into planned giving. I also decided that wouldn't work for me because it was insane.

The people I know who've done it have gone to work for a large university. In my positive feel-good brain, I'm like, “Well, I could never do that because why would I want to raise money for the university? They have more money than most countries. Forget it. Stupid job.”

Completely not noticing that lots of organizations do planned giving, not just big universities with buckets of money. Didn't even occur to me. Didn't even occur to me to do informational interviews with people in those positions at other places. I don't know why.

Then I went to this conference for a planned giving people this fall. Nine out of 10 of the people I met were former lawyers. All of them were completely happy. I'm like, “If I had just done an informational interview with one of them two years ago, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble.”

Lots of limiting beliefs. Then every single day now, I'll run across somebody doing something or other and thinking, “I could have done that, never occurred to me.” There was so much possibility out there that I just didn't see.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, yeah. I think especially once you've made the move and you see how it works, you do realize like, “Oh, there are so many options.” There are almost too many options.

Liza Hanks: Yeah. It's like I got myself in this dark little shoe box in the back of the closet and I refused to believe that there was any other reality. One of the best things when I worked with Erin the coach was this question which I never asked really and now I ask it almost every day. What can go right, instead of what can go wrong? That question changed everything.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. You mentioned that you came up with this secret job description, the generosity consultant. Can you talk a little bit about how you went about coming up with that and then how you went about identifying what that would look like in actual practice, like what type of job you needed to be looking for?

Liza Hanks: Yes, but I'll reveal myself as an instinctual flailer instead of a really [inaudible].

Sarah Cottrell: Hey, whatever works is what I say.

Liza Hanks: I know. It’s like I'm throwing spaghetti at the wall. Well, one of the things that I worked on with Erin was coming up with some words that described my deepest held values. Also, I had to do this survey, which I totally hated doing, Erin, but it was great, where I had to talk to 10 or 12, asked a bunch of people what do I bring when I come into a room.

I got words from other people that describe me. I actually have that list of words right next to the generosity consultant here on my wall so I don't forget. That really helped me see that there were some things that really mattered to me that I wanted to pursue.

That was a start. I talked about at the beginning where the Collab helped me identify the things in my job that I really liked, and out of that came this sense of like, “Yeah, I really like philanthropy. I really like helping people create legacies and being generous.” That's where that came from.

Then the way I found my job was pretty shortly after that, I got this email and it was from the community foundation where I live asking if I would want to be on a leadership council for them.

I swear, three months before, I would have looked at that email and went, “Oh, God, no, I don't want to do anything. I'm burned out and cranky and I hate everything.” But this time, because I was in the Collab, I was like, “Huh, well, philanthropy's on my list of things I really like to do. Maybe I should explore this with them.”

So I reached out and I had this hilarious conversation with the person who is now my boss. I said, “Why do you want me to be on this council? I don't work with rich people. I'm not going to give you guys any money. If you're trying to get money out of me, I'm not going to do it.”

All these suspicions that I had and they're like, “Yeah, no, no, we want people on the council that work with the level of clients you work with and we're interested in what you have to say.” I'm like, “Well, maybe.”

So then I went to a meeting of the council. Honestly, I was gobsmacked because I knew this foundation, because it's in the community I work in, but it's under new leadership. When I met the CEO at the meeting, I'm like, “I want to work with this person. I am so impressed with this woman.”

She's also wearing combat boots and a dress, which I thought was fantastic. I just got really excited about being on this council. Then I was looking at LinkedIn for just something to do with myself and that they were posting a job for a director of planned giving.

So I sent it in and I applied, but they already knew me a little bit because of the council because I'd been to the meeting. I was able to reach out and like, “Tell me more about this job,” in a way that I wouldn't have been if I hadn't really responded to that first email. That's how it happened. It was like the universe was calling but I was finally listening.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's so interesting because I think so often, the stories that people have of how they end up in something that's a better fit does involve what I think when you tell the story can sound like, “Oh, it's this random series of events.”

But so much of it is dependent upon having started a process where you're actively open to what alternatives might be. I think everything about that story is just such a perfect encapsulation of that.

Liza Hanks: But the other thing that was really interesting about it is I think being part of the Collaboration before this job opportunity came up was important because one of the questions that they had for me was, “Why would you want to do this?”

People on the outside think being a lawyer is lucrative and glamorous. So they're like, “Why would you want to give up your own practice?” I'm thinking, “Oh my God, you have no idea.” You can't go to a job interview and be like, “I'm burned out. I hate it.”

I mean, I tell them that now, but it was very helpful and I think important to be able to say, “Look, I've done a lot of work around this. These are the areas that I want to use my skills for the rest of my career.” I'm going to do this. Honestly, I'm going to do this whether or not you hire me. This is the work I want to be doing.

It's such a much more compelling job candidate than “I'm miserable. I need something else.” I had a different energy about it, although I did have a complete nervous breakdown because it took a while to get the job. There were four months of interviews, which in fact--

Sarah Cottrell: That's a lot.

Liza Hanks: Oh, I know. I had so many interviews. But now that I'm there, I still can't believe they took a chance on me because there's so much I don't know. When you're joining an organization, it's like interviewing for roommates. It's like they want to know, some houses are like, “This is yourself in the fridge.” Other houses are like, “What's your favorite movie? Are we going to be friends?”

It was much more of that. Now I understand why, because it's a relatively small group of people and they want to get a good fit. It was nice to be in a positive space instead of a desperate space.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, for sure. It's the whole moving towards something instead of just moving away from something. I think, among other things, it's so much easier to position yourself as a candidate for something when you are moving towards it because you know that it is the thing that you're interested in doing.

Liza Hanks: Yeah. For me, I feel like subconsciously, most of my career has been based on fear and worry. I feel like, “Okay, this is my last chance. Could I do it better? Can I make some choices just out of joy and happiness and a sense of community and wanting to give back?” I'm so glad it worked out. But I didn't really become a lawyer from that place and most of the jobs I took as an attorney were really based on like, ah!

Sarah Cottrell: Ah, yes, the time-tested and well-honed strategy of panic.

Liza Hanks: Of panic, right. You don't make the choices when you feel scared and constrained. I didn't want to do that this time. And I didn't.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Okay, can you talk just briefly about what you do in your day-to-day as a planned giving officer?

Liza Hanks: Yeah. My job has two components. The more traditional planned giving part, which you would see at most places like universities and large organizations, is working with donors to make gifts when they die, either through will or trust or sometimes through the use of what are called lifetime income gifts.

So there's a charitable gift annuity and various kinds of charitable remainder and lead trusts. planned giving officers in many organizations, that's what they do. They help structure these kinds of gifts. They help track these kinds of gifts. They help accept these kinds of gifts after people die.

The lawyery part of it is understanding how probate works, understanding how trust administration works, because that's how assets are transferred to death. Then on the front side, working with attorneys and CPAs and donors to understand how to draft these kinds of gifts and how to make them and structure them so that when the time comes, they work like they're supposed to.

That's the estate planning adjacent part of the job. My job's a little different because of where I live and the place I work. I also do work with lifetime gifts of complicated things. So like real property, private stock, partnership interests, things that wealthy people in Silicon Valley where I work often have, and because of the place I work and our sophistication and expertise, we can accept gifts like that and turn them into charitable dollars to benefit the community and help the donors do their philanthropy.

The legal part of that is explaining complicated things to people in a way that makes it relevant and understandable. There's also a project manager component because those kinds of gifts require a lot of different people, and my job is to coordinate the donor and the lawyer and the business owner and the internal legal review and the board acceptance.

So there's a lot of pieces to that that is a little bit sometimes what lawyers do, like complicated project management. Then there's the development side, which weirdly I really enjoy, which was going out to the community talking to people about, in this case, generosity, supporting your community, creating a legacy.

But that was one of my favorite part of the lawyer was building that practice, because I don't know, I'm an extrovert, and I just like doing it. Those are the three big components of my job.

Then there's strategic planning, how could we do better? What could we offer? What kind of products could meet the needs of our community in a way that is sustainable over time?

Sarah Cottrell: I think so many of the things that you talked about are things that many lawyers who are thinking about doing something else either have a skill set related to or it's something that is important to them. So that's really helpful.

Okay, Liza, as we're getting toward the end of our conversation, is there anything else that you would like to share that we haven't touched on yet?

Liza Hanks: Just my biggest regret is that I waited so long to do this. So if anybody's out there listening, I just didn't trust myself. I just spent so much time telling myself what I was feeling wasn't true, wasn't right. I regret that, because time's limited. I'm so fortunate to have this opportunity to do what I'm doing and I'm so glad I'm doing it that I really wish I'd done it a long time ago. That's one thing.

The other thing is just there are times when I drive to work. I go to work a couple of times a week and I work from home the rest of the time. But sometimes I drive to work and I'm waiting for the little door to go up in the garage and I think, “Huh, I'm actually excited to be here today. I don't know what's going to happen but maybe it'll be something fun and interesting and good. Also, I'm looking forward to seeing these people and being here today and eating lunch.”

And I'm like, “Whoa.” Some people feel like that about work. That was so different from my experience forever. I never felt that way as a lawyer. It was always the sense of, “Oh, what was going to happen today?” Some days the days would be good, and I'd forget that feeling, but it always started like that and I just felt like that was normal.

I'm like, “That's not normal.” I just decided that was normal. I'm so sad about that because it's so much better to wake up and be like, “Huh, what is going to happen today?”

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. So many lawyers come into the Collab and they're like, “Maybe I just don't like working because I just feel like there's nothing that's going to work for me.” And then, ultimately, this experience you're describing is the experience that they end up having.

I think it's so important for people, because I'm sure there are tons of people listening who are like, “I identify with how you described how you felt previously.” It is so hard in that place to even be like, “But maybe I'm the exception. This is just how it is for me.”

I can say pretty definitively at this point, having worked with many, many lawyers who felt similarly, it's not just you, it is actually your job and there's another way to feel and it's possible to get there.

Liza Hanks: Yeah. My last thing is my whole family has benefited from this. I am just so much less stressed out and I'm much happier to the point where my college-age said in a moment of exasperation, “I don't even know you anymore, Mom. I don't know you when you're happy.” I'm like, “Oh, well get used to it, buddy.”

It just was such a cost and it was such an invisible cost for so long. I'm glad that you're doing the work you're doing because I don't think I would have made this change without Former Lawyer and that surprises me but it's true.

Sarah Cottrell: Well, thank you, Liza. It makes me so happy.

Liza Hanks: Well, it should make you happy.

Sarah Cottrell: It's why I do what I do.

Liza Hanks: Just keep doing it.

Sarah Cottrell: If you're listening to this podcast and you relate, then Collab, always there.

Liza Hanks: Remember the key question: What could go right?

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. Which is a very hard question to ask sometimes when you are in that place.

Liza Hanks: I didn't have an answer for a long time and I cried a lot. But because it's hard doesn't mean it's not worth doing.

Sarah Cottrell: Could not agree more. Okay, Liza, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing all the things that you shared. Is there anything that you would like to share to wrap us up?

Liza Hanks: Nope. I think I've said everything I have to say.

Sarah Cottrell: All right. Well, thank you. Thank you again. I am so glad that we cross paths, and I'm so excited to hear all about how things will go in the future.

Liza Hanks: Same. Take care, Sarah.

Sarah Cottrell: 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.