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.

This week, I'm sharing my conversation with Laura Markham. Laura is a member of the Collab, and she and I have also worked together one-on-one. Content warning for this episode is that Laura and I do discuss spousal death. So if that is not a subject that you are prepared to listen to a conversation about today, I would advise that you skip this episode and catch me next week.

And with that, here is my conversation with Laura.

Sarah Cottrell: Hi, Laura. Welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast.

Laura Markham: Hi. Excited to be here.

Sarah Cottrell: I'm excited you're here, too. Why don't we start with you introducing yourself to the listeners, and we'll go from there?

Laura Markham: Okay. My name is Laura. Do we do last names? I don't really remember.

Sarah Cottrell: You can if you want to. If you don't want to, you don't have to.

Laura Markham: I don't need to be anonymous. I wasn't sure.

Sarah Cottrell: Whatever works for you is great.

Laura Markham: No, my name's Laura Markham. I am a member of the Former Lawyer Collab, and Sarah has helped me get out of the law. I currently live in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, so Northern Idaho. We're not all crazy up here, quick disclaimer.

Sarah Cottrell: I was going to say, “Ah, Coeur d'Alene, you haven't been in the news lately.”

Laura Markham: You know, if we could just make it a year of just not being in the news is what I'm hoping for. 2024 is not our year, or 2025, whatever year it is. We got it at ’23, ’24, and ’25 for something bad. So ’26 will be our year.

Sarah Cottrell: I will cross my fingers for you.

Laura Markham: I graduated law school in 2013. I attended Arizona State, more formally, the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State. So that's me.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay, well, where would you like to start? I think that probably the best place to start is where we usually do, which is: Do you want to share with the listeners what made you decide to go to law school?

Laura Markham: Sure, never an easy answer, well, I mean, there are a lot of reasons. So I am kind of a West Coaster through and through. I went to college in a little kind of beachy community called San Luis Obispo. It's north of Santa Barbara. And when I was in college, it took me four years and a semester to graduate. So I graduated in December 2008. Everybody knows what was happening in December 2008. Our whole economy was melting down.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah.

Laura Markham: So there's that. So I was having trouble finding any kind of work, and in hindsight, I probably could have hit the pavement a little harder. But I was also living in a cute little beachy town, and I had a pleasant waitress job. And then both of my parents have graduate degrees. My dad’s a doctor. My mom is a marriage and family therapist so she got her masters in that. She also got her masters in nutrition.

So there’s always a mentality in my family that the kids are going to get graduate degrees too even if it wasn’t straight out said, it was just unspoken. I always hated biology so I was like, “Well, I’m not going to be like my parents. What am I going to do?”

The economy was falling apart. I didn't quite know what to do with my life, but I knew I wanted a graduate degree. I had one professor tell me that attorneys make a lot of money. So I saw a lot of people admit like, "Well, I thought I'd make a lot of money, and I thought I could do this."

I also was very, very much the hard little worker who always got A's, worked a lot, liked working. I mean, I worked a ton in college at my waitress job. My niece looked at me like I was crazy when I said I didn't want to study abroad when I was in college because I liked working so much. So, I mean, all those kind of pieces together is what led me to law school.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, I mean, so many of the things you mentioned are so common. There have been a number of people on the podcast who graduated in 2008. I graduated law school in June 2008, so a little bit different on the timeline, but I very much remember 2008.

And there are a lot of people who had a similar experience where they were like, "Well, grad school seems like a good option, and I don't want to be a doctor, so lawyer it is."

Laura Markham: Well, I hated biology. It just was so boring to me. So I was like, "Well, I guess I'm not going to do what my parents did," you know?

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so you went to law school, and when you got there, as you were going through law school, were you like, "This was a great life choice," or were you like, "Whatever," or were you like, "This is the worst thing I've ever done. What have I done?"

Laura Markham: Well, I mean, so when I got to law school, in the beginning it seemed like, "Okay, I can do this. I just have to work really hard." I'm having a little bit of fish out of water. Most everyone will say, you go from being the golden child in your class to being thrown into a classroom full of other golden children, and then you sort of have to claw your way to the top.

Then also, why I went to law school, now in hindsight, I don't know, because I never really liked writing. And people would ask you when you were applying to law school, it's like, "Do you like writing?" And I'd say like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like it." Like sort of just convincing yourself.

Sarah Cottrell: You're like, "Well, I don't hate it."

Laura Markham: Right.

Sarah Cottrell: Not the same.

Laura Markham: So, I would say, my entire law school experience, I would say I was a solid middle-of-the-packer. Like, I got like a C. I was pretty much Bs in everything, a handful of As. I wasn't really ranked, I wasn't like an OCI sort of kid. So, yes and no. I regretted my choice in law school, but I also wasn't totally faltering.

After first year, I realized I wasn't going to be the top of the class. So I was like, "Well, there are two ways I can go. I could try to claw my way up in the rankings and kind of game the system like some law students do. Or I could just sort of focus on my social life and have this sort of weird delayed adolescence," which I went with the latter.

Sarah Cottrell: I feel like that was a wise choice, honestly. Wise choice. Okay, so how did you decide what you wanted to do after you left law school? Or did you decide during law school? Did you figure it out afterwards? Like, how did that work?

Laura Markham: Yeah, and then also when I was in law school, it wasn’t the first year of my law school, the second year is when all those horrible articles started coming out about how law school is a giant waste and everybody in law school has basically ruined their lives. I was like, “Well, I'm in my second year of law school now. I don't think I'm too far in to quit.”

Sarah Cottrell: “This would have been helpful information at a different point in my life, or now it is simply depressing.”

Laura Markham: Yeah. So my career's always been real estate-y. When I first went to law school, I thought maybe I wanted to do something environmental, which touches real estate. Then I kind of thought I wanted to be a lobbyist, but that really wasn't the fit for me either.

So I started, just worked towards real estate. There wasn't really a light-shining moment of how I sort of fell into more of a real estate path. I didn't really think I was much of a litigator. I had really no interest in criminal. You know what I mean? It was like, "Well, this makes the most sense. This is what I'm going to kind of go towards." I do like working in real estate itself.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay, so there are a lot of things that happened after you graduated law school. Do you want to talk about things chronologically, or is there some other way that works better for you?

Laura Markham: Well, I guess I can kind of go around how my career went. I think that makes the most sense. So I graduated law school, and I basically started working for a boutique kind of real estate litigation/construction dispute firm in Phoenix. Very nice people, very nice firm.

So during that experience, I felt often like the dumbest person in the building. But I was like, "You're starting out as a lawyer. Give it a chance. Don't give up," even though it was definitely not like, "Man, I love what I'm doing." You know what I mean?

Sarah Cottrell: And you're like, "I am surviving."

Laura Markham: Yeah. It's just sort of like, "I'm trying to find my footing." I kind of told myself, "Maybe you give the lawyer thing five years and then see what you want to do with your life." So that was kind of the plan.

I was there for about two years at the Phoenix firm. Then my husband and I decided to move to a town in Central Oregon called Bend, for a variety of reasons. We kind of just picked up and moved, and I left my job. I was a little naive, thinking I was just going to roll into Bend and get a brand new job just like that, which wasn’t the case.

The legal market in Bend was a bit still recovering from the recession. This was around 2016. Because it's smaller, and they weren't super friendly lawyers. Hopefully, there's not one listening right now.

I mean, like some legal markets, I think attorneys are more friendly, and some aren’t. And this just wasn’t a very friendly legal market. I think because they didn't really like outsiders there. So I kind of applied to things and I ended up applying to my current career now, the company. It does 1031 tax-deferred exchanges. Stayed there for a while, COVID happened, and real estate just hit the gas and went nuts.

Then I ended up kind of having this, I feel like I never really gave being a lawyer a fair shake, like this existential angst. I did all this work in school, and I only really plugged away at it for two years. I told myself I'd give it five.

So I ended up moving to a firm here in Coeur d'Alene. I missed that part. I actually moved to Coeur d'Alene in 2021, not because of crazy politics, just because I needed a bigger house and we found a good deal here, my husband and my two children.

So at this point, I'm like, “Okay, I'm giving this attorney thing another shake. I'm doing kind of real estate litigation, construction disputes again, back where I started, kind of in my ballpark. I'm a mom of two now, been married for about eight years.”

So I gave that firm—well, not really gave that firm—so I was working at that firm for about a year. Then, I mean, everyone's worst nightmare happened to me. My husband unexpectedly died from a catastrophic cardiac event. He had a widowmaker heart attack. I went to work one day and came home, and he was gone.

I mean, anyone who has little children or a spouse or a significant other, that's their worst nightmare. I was just left in this place with my career of like, I mean, in the beginning, I was just in so much shock. Then I was in a spot of like, "Now what am I going to do?" My whole entire life got flipped, turned upside down.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I can only imagine. I’m married and I have two kids. How old were your kids, Laura, at this point?

Laura Markham: So they're four and six now, and Jeff died almost two years ago. So he died three days before my daughter's third birthday. It was awful.

Sarah Cottrell: Oh, my gosh.

Laura Markham: My son was four at the time, so, yeah.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, which, anyone who has parented young kids knows that just that in and of itself is its own, just parenting toddlers is a thing. Did you say you'd been at the new firm for a year?

Laura Markham: Yeah, about a year.

Sarah Cottrell: So you were there because you felt like, “Well, I need to give this another try,” but it doesn't sound like you were like, "And it was great." It was more like, and you were doing it.

Laura Markham: And I was doing it, exactly. It was a little bit like the same feeling I got a little bit at my Phoenix firm. I feel like the dumbest person here. The benefit of my Phoenix firm is that there was actually a woman partner. Here at my Coeur d'Alene firm, all men. You know, very male. I mean, Coeur d'Alene is an old-fashioned place. All female assistants, all male attorneys, and then there’s me. Like, one thing is different from the others.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, oh my gosh. Obviously, Jeff dies and that's just like completely world-rocking. It's not like you're like, "Let me sit down and think a lot about my career at this moment."

Laura Markham: Exactly, yeah. I can say it now, almost two years after the fact, but we're kind of trying to frame it in my career. It was world-rocking and that's the segue. I mean, everyone at the Coeur d'Alene firm, they were very nice people. Same thing, like kind people, there was never any total horrible human/employee relations sort of thing there.

It was this world-rocking thing, and it was this question of the days would turn into months after Jeff had passed away, you start to kind of be like, "What do I do now? I've got two mouths to feed," you know?

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, I mean, listen, every single woman lawyer who's listening to this podcast knows what it is like, most likely, to work in a workplace where you are one of the few women, where most of the other lawyers often have a stay-at-home spouse who is like handling home stuff.

And being in an environment like that is already challenging. But being in an environment after going through what you went through and doing the whole single parenting thing, I mean, I can only imagine.

Laura Markham: Yes, no, exactly. Then another thing, I mean, losing your spouse is so much more complicated than just losing them. It's that your cheerleader is gone in a professional setting.

When you're a woman in a male office, and you're married to—my husband was very male. So you come home and kind of rehash your day and you get this insider opinion to what your coworkers are thinking and how to better interact with all this male stuff, for lack of a better word.

Then when that's gone, I would come home and there'd be no one to bounce my day off with or say, "I feel insecure, I feel like the dumbest person in the room." Your cheerleader's gone, and then your sounding board's gone too.

Sarah Cottrell: Right. You're also no longer splitting the mental, etc., load of running a household.

Laura Markham: Exactly, yeah. So everything, and it still is now, obviously, but every single tube of toothpaste, every single appointment, every single thing the house needs, it's all on me.

I have an incredible nanny who started the summer after Jeff passed, but I manage her, I pay her. If she runs to the store for me, I tell her what to get. There's not a spouse that just goes and does it for you anymore.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about, okay, we know that you are at this firm, and you weren’t necessarily like, "I love the work I'm doing here." Then you go through this experience, you hire the nanny, at what point did you start thinking about something beyond just surviving?

Laura Markham: So Jeff passed away in May of 2023, and I would say, it’s very strange, I would say it wasn't even till fall that I kind of wrapped my head around the fact that he wouldn't just pop around a corner and be back. It took my brain that long to process that he's not just coming back. No one's coming to save you.

So it was that fall I started thinking, the billable hours model will not work for me anymore. This is not going to work for me as a single mom. Every single other attorney in the firm is either a bachelor, no kids, very pampered dog, or they have a spouse who stays at home and manages the house and does all the kid stuff, and everything.

That's when I started to realize this isn’t going to work. There was a piece of me that so badly wanted something from my old life—when Jeff was alive—to work, which I thought maybe would be my job. I finally got to the point in the fall where I said, "This isn’t going to work. I can't keep doing this. I can't do the billable hours. My kids need me so much more than what a law firm job can give."

The nanny was amazing, but some nights I’d come home at 6:00, 6:30, and they’d just be here at the house by themselves with the nanny. And that felt wrong.

Sarah Cottrell: I think the reality is, the billable hour model is something that so many parents, even partnered parents, where you have two people in the home, ultimately say, “This isn't going to work.”

Because the amount of flexibility that you need, especially as a parent of young kids, even when partnered, the billable hour model just does not have the kind of flexibility that many people are looking for.

I’ve worked with so many lawyers who have the experience of having either their first kid or their second kid and just being like, “Whoa, the billable hour model is not going to work for me.” Even without other factors, I think just that as a young parent is enough to make many people go like, “This is not going to work for me.”

Laura Markham: Yeah. Exactly. There were a lot of people in my life after Jeff passed away who said, "Maybe you take a break from working," but in some ways, it helped me to resume life as normal, not just be at my house, staring at my backyard every day, to actually start moving and preparing myself forward. If I didn't have the kids, I probably wouldn’t have done that. I probably would have disappeared to somewhere tropical and dodged my student loans and become a bartender.

Sarah Cottrell: Being a responsible parent.

Laura Markham: Yeah.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay, so in the fall of 2023, you start thinking, “Things really have changed. I cannot keep doing this the way that I’ve been doing it.” What did you do next?

Laura Markham: I think I had found your program before, obviously after a crummy day at clawing my way through the law firm job, or trying to figure out what can you do with a law degree besides be a lawyer?

I think I'd already researched that when I was at my firm in Phoenix. I think I'd already looked at it before when I was living in Bend trying to find work. So I kind of, I looked back at your program, I reached out to you, and I was like, “I need to do this. I need to find something better for me and my family than the billable hour model. There's really no other way about it.”

I think I told you too, it's so stressful as a parent, even with a co-parent, is that there's always this mentality like, “h, well, after your kids go to bed, you can just work on your projects.” But as an attorney, it's like, “Well, no, I'm tired, and I could commit malpractice, and I could get my firm sued, you know?” Lawyer work isn't tired work.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I was just talking to someone else this week about how I think people really underestimate the sort of constant low-level stress, low to medium to maybe high level stress, of like...

Laura Markham: The attorney work is. It's so hard.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. In a sense of like, "At any moment, I could be committing malpractice." That is not a very calming thought or reality to sort of hold. Also as a parent of young kids—and granted, I am not a nighttime person, I'm much more of a morning person—but when people would be like, "Oh yeah, and then I just get on and work for hours afterwards," I'd be like, "Well, my brain is done." So that would be extremely unwise for everyone involved.

Laura Markham: Exactly. That's how I am too. I'm not great at doing particularly that just deep-level attorney work late at night. I still am so tired at the end of the day. Nanny's a huge help. But I don't ever get to skip out on a bed time or pretend I'm busy with something and make Jeff do it anymore.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Totally.

Laura Markham: Yeah. It was just always just a combination of things. I wanted to get my kids into some therapy sessions, and I found myself sitting there worrying, "How much work am I going to miss by getting the therapy sessions?" I'm like, "This is crazy. You have two little sensitive children who have lost their dad, and you're worried about missing work over taking them to therapy sessions? Something has to give. You have to change the way you're thinking. You have to change your work."

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. For people who are listening, so Laura joined the Collab. She also did Collab Plus, which includes one-on-one, so we also worked together one-on-one. So Laura, do you want to talk a little bit about what that was like and how things went for you from that point on?

Laura Markham: Well, so I mean, I started with the kind of self-discovery module. I forget what the right thing is. It was important because after law school, there was sort of that like, "Well, I don't really know what I like to do anymore."

Then particularly after Jeff passed, it's like, "Well, I'm just in survival mode. I don't really have anything that sparks joy in my life." I mean, besides my kids, but that sounds sad. But I think a lot of people who join the Collab are in that of like, "I don't really do anything for fun besides parent and work."

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. For sure. People are like, "I have no hobbies. I have no hobbies unless you count picking up dry cleaning."

Laura Markham: Yeah. Yeah. Leisurely browsing Trader Joe's one day, maybe, if I'm lucky.

Sarah Cottrell: 100%.

Laura Markham: That sort of taking a minute, and it taking a little bit of time for myself to try to figure out what I do like and what is more my personality fit, was a huge thing that pushed me to where I am now. I mean, because it went so far back, I had to go all the way back to when I was a kid of like, "What do I enjoy when I was a kid?" which I think a lot of people do.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Well, and I think for so many of us who went to law school, we started shaping ourselves into the person that we thought we needed to be to be on essentially the law school trajectory from a very young age. So it does require a certain level of excavation to actually be like, "But wait, what do I actually like?"

Laura Markham: Yeah, exactly. I had been on the trajectory of being the perfect little worker for a very long time, like just always working. So it's like time to step back. So I know, and I told you a very deep, dark secret about my childhood that I was a horse girl. My favorite thing about the horses wasn't riding them. It was just like the process and project management of caring for the horse.

Sarah Cottrell: I love it. I think that's a perfect example though, because there are so many people when I'm like, "What did you like when you were a kid?" they're like, "Oh my goodness, Sarah, I cannot believe, like what are we even doing here? This is like..." But I mean, to me, that's a perfect example of you could be like, "Well, I liked riding horses." I mean, okay, great. There actually is stuff that you can learn about yourself if you think more deeply about the details.

Laura Markham: That's what I did. I kind of sat and thought more deeply about the details of "What did I enjoy about having the horse and this and that?" The riding was like fine, but I liked brushing it and caring for it and cleaning all the stuff. Everything that people think is boring with animal care was my favorite part.

Sarah Cottrell: Love it. Okay, so tell me more about what happened next, what your process was.

Laura Markham: I started to think, "Maybe something in the lines of project management would be a good fit for me." The more I thought about it, the more I thought, "Yes, this sounds great." One of the things I told you, among many things I hate about being a lawyer, is that the work is never done.

If you're working on anything, you can just draft and draft and draft. Then you give it to a partner, and he says it’s terrible. Then you draft and draft and draft. You're never done. What started to appeal to me—and something I know about myself—is I like to have a start and finish on a project. "It's done." That's not what attorney work is.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Can you talk a little about how, because often people will be like, "Okay, I have a sense now of the things that I like, but how do I identify a role or an industry or career that will match that?" I know you have a bit of a unique story in that regard. I don’t know how you want to approach it but do you want to tell us about that?

Laura Markham: I think you have a list of different jobs people went into who did the Collab and broke free. Project management always stood out to me. You can touch real estate with it. I also thought, "I have all this background in real estate. It seems crazy not to be in it." I like real estate itself. I just don't like being a real estate attorney per se.

Then I had a friend from college who did the PMI test, the project management test. I forget what the “I” is in the acronym. Maybe Institute. I reached out to her, and she sent me some information on that. I started to think about my 1031 tax-deferred exchange job. I was like, "There are things about that that could be shifted into project management. What if I approach my old boss and say, ‘A lot's happened in my life. I think I want to come back’?”

There were other factors that weighed heavily on my decision to go back to my old job or approach my old boss. I left on good terms. It’s a very female-heavy company, which sounded helpful. My old boss reached out to me when she found out Jeff had passed on her own.

There was a sense of care there. My old boss had told me long before Jeff passed away that her dad had actually passed away when she was eight. He was a cop, and her mom was left to take care of four girls. So there were all these different pieces. The job would be 100% remote, which meant I could be home with my kids more. I’d still have to work, but at least…

There were all these different factors. I was starting to think, "Well, I have to go out and find a job, bridge jobs and this and that," but I stepped back and thought, "Maybe I already have it. Maybe it's already just right there."

Because you recommended listening to the project manager podcast you have, and I immediately got discouraged because the two folks you have on—and nothing against them—the one guy has oodles and oodles of project management experience, and then the other one is like Biglaw firm, big, powerful law firm person, like, “Well, I'm neither of these people. I'm just like a middle of a packer and like a little middle of a pack from law school and a little tiny town with no real cool experience before law school.”

That's not that I just wanted to give up on the search. It was just like, “Maybe you already have what you need right there. Why make things harder on yourself?”

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, it's so interesting, Laura, because I find that there are a decent number of lawyers who start this process of trying to figure out what they want to do next, or what would be a good next step, even if it's not what they are ultimately going to do in the long term. It is not uncommon for someone to realize, oh, this thing I did before, at some point—sometimes it was recently, sometimes it was a long time ago, before they went to law school—is actually a really good fit for me. It's actually a really good fit for my needs right now.

But it also is often very difficult for people because there is this sense of, “Well, if I'm going to stop practicing, I need to feel like I'm doing something else.” There's this sense that people can sometimes struggle with the idea of going back as though it's a move backwards. Does that make sense?

Laura Markham: Absolutely.

Sarah Cottrell: Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I'm sure there are lots of people who are practicing and listening to the podcast and are thinking of some previous job they did that they actually liked and might want to go back to, but have the sense of, "Well, I can't do that because that would be wrong in some way."

Laura Markham: A step back or something. Well, my situation is unique too, because I thought before Jeff passed away, I thought, "Wow, being partnered would be really cool. I could be the first female partner at this firm if I grind away." And when someone you love dies, you're like, "That really doesn't matter."

Sarah Cottrell: You're like, "And no one cares. Not my priority for me at this time."

Laura Markham: But so the step backwards didn't have as big of a, I don’t know what the right word is, deterrent as me after losing someone because I didn't care anymore. I kind of let go of all the ego I had from law school and not being a big firm person and all this. It was like, "I just need to figure out what's best for me and my kids. I need to figure out how I can do a life going forward." I feel like I'm not answering the question.

Sarah Cottrell: No. I feel like what you're describing is a level of perspective that it sometimes can take a long time to reach, but for people who've gone through certain types of crises, I feel like one of the terrible gifts is having this level of perspective of what matters is, is this going to work for me and the people who I love. Not all of these other, frankly, sort of fake ideas about how things need to look in my career or however else.

Laura Markham: Exactly. Yeah. I always kind of was like, "I just thought my career would be so much more kind of before Jeff passed away. I thought I'd be farther along, I'd be this, I'd be that." Now it really doesn't matter.

I mean, we're all here because we want to find something that makes us happy and gives us some form of purpose, but the little treats and the accolades with it are what don't matter. It doesn't matter if you think someone from your law school class is doing something cooler than you or their career is better, this and that. That's kind of what it took me time to realize, but I think it's also good to celebrate where you are, which is something why I was able to go back to my old job.

I was able to assess, I have a broader knowledge base now. My boss is actually someone I can easily work with, so I can go back to the company and say, “Listen, I offer these new things. I actually did learn something going back to the legal field. Why don't we try to create a different, maybe better, job for me? So I'm not tempted to leave again.” Obviously, I didn't say that, but, you know.

Sarah Cottrell: That was the vibe.

Laura Markham: I mean, on one hand, realizing the accolades and the things that we have been taught in law school to put value on, the ranking system, all of it, we've been taught to put value on a lot of things that, sadly, on our deathbed will not matter, but we still are kind of trained in our mind to think in its human nature, but then also taking stock in what you have and using that to your advantage. And maybe it's not a step backwards. You are going forward, even if you're at the same place. Does that make sense?

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that, well, there are a lot of things, but there are a lot of reasons why I recommend therapy for lawyers in general, but especially lawyers who are thinking about leaving practice. But I think one of them is sort of what you're getting at, which is the reality that a lot of this work comes on so many pieces of your life. It is ultimately about what do you value and where are your priorities. The prestige trap for lawyers, it gets us everytime.

Laura Markham: Exactly.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, yeah, prestige will get you every time. I find that for so many people, a big part of the process of being able to actually do something that is a better fit for them, that makes them genuinely happier and more fulfilled, is letting go of or at least being aware of the ways in which we are conditioned as lawyers to orient all of our decisions around what is prestigious.

Laura Markham: Exactly. When Jeff passed away, probably the year before, people I was going to law school with were starting to make partner at firms. And I was like, "There's that twinge of, well, I haven't made partner yet, and those were the people who got better grades than me," all those things. When something catastrophic happens in your life, you just realize that that's really not important.

All that really started to boil down to for me was that I really want to be here with my kids, and that's all that matters to me. I mean, obviously, I have to feed them. I can't just grow flowers in the backyard.

Sarah Cottrell: Laundry, so much laundry.

Laura Markham: But I think one thing that you do that really helps is say, “Okay, figure out what you need and what's important. So, to me, it was trying to be there for my kids and not finding the perfect job, but finding a job where I could be there for my kids and get them born and adult things like health insurance because there's a lot of people on the Collab who do the entrepreneurial track, which is great, but I can't do that. I need health insurance.

Kudos to them, or people who go back to school. It was sort of like, my kids are my priority, so then you kind of say, “Now it's important. You need to sit down and look at your finances and figure out what you can do to start moving towards your priority and what that work will entail.”

So, I realized the summer of 2023 after he had just passed, I was in so much shock. I was probably a horrible mom. I mean, I just did the best I could. Then I realized summer 2024, I really want to be able to spend time with them, whatever that may be.

So I think I told you, I said, I think April or May, if I haven't found something else, I'm going to quit my job. I'll spend the summer with my kids, I'll assess financially I can do that. I think that's really helpful for you to say, financially what can you do and maybe create an end marker for what you are doing.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Here in the real world, we all have bills to pay. So I think it's very unrealistic to just tell people, “Just figure out what you want to do and then go do it.” Because part of the plan, like yes, you should do that, and as anyone who's gone through the framework knows, I do advocate for figuring that out before you get really wrapped up in the nitty gritty of the finances, because you don't even have enough information necessarily to make that determination earlier in the process.

But the reality is that one does ultimately need to be like, “Okay, where are things for me financially? What kinds of options are available to me?” Often I think there's this sense of an all or nothing. Like, “I stay in this job forever and never change,” or “I chuck it all in the bin today and leave and never work a job again.” There are so many different degrees of options that you might have that are in between those two extreme points.

Laura Markham: Yeah, and I think just gently starting your search of maybe reaching out to someone from your past who would maybe be willing to talk to you about what they do or maybe give you some guidance of something you're working towards. And honestly, if you've lost touch with someone, I don't think anybody who's a busy adult would care that you reach out to them and be like, "Well, I haven't talked to you in five years." I think everyone's happy to help, you know?

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, and half of people are like, "It's been five years. I thought it was three months." Time has lost all meaning.

Okay, Laura, what else do you think someone needs to know? For example, if someone is thinking about joining the Collab or working with me the way that you did, what do you think they need to know?

Laura Markham: I say go for it. It's going to be a cliche, but life is really short. I lost my husband. He was 43 years old. He had so much more he wanted to do. He wasn’t a big writer. He didn’t keep a journal or anything. I've gone through notes he kept and little doodles and stuff, and what he was doing wasn't the end. This isn't where he wanted to be.

To people thinking about joining the Collab, what's stopping you? As sad as it sounds, you could have a widowmaker heart attack tomorrow too. Jeff didn't think he was going to die. It sounds like join the Collab because you may die tomorrow. But that's all I can say, life is short. You enjoy to have some form of happiness, and joining the Collab isn't going to pop over tomorrow, but why not work towards something that will make you happier?

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, and I think sort of related to that, something that can be helpful for people to know is that it is a process. It's not necessarily a question of, "Okay, I'm going to join the Collab. Immediately, I need to be ready to leave my job." Realistically, 75-80% of the people who are in the Collab are people who are not going to be, for all kinds of reasons, leaving their job tomorrow or next week or even within six months. Because a lot of people are on a longer timeline.

Laura Markham: Yeah, but it gives you a light at the end of the tunnel. It starts to take that feeling of despair away of, "This is just terrible. Why did I go to law school? Why am I doing this? I hate my job." But at least starting the Collab and even self-discovery therapy, the first steps, gave me just a little light at the end of the tunnel, however small it might have been.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, and when you said, "Helping to take the despair away," that is the goal, that is one of my many goals with the Collab. If you relate to that and that sounds like it would be helpful, yeah. Okay, so Laura, do you want to talk just briefly about what you're doing in your role now and what that kind of work is like? Because of course, so many lawyers are like, "I don't know what anything that is not practicing law is like."

Laura Markham: Well, so I'm General Counsel for a tax-deferred exchange company now. I mean, I'm supposed to write a cease and desist letter for my boss today, so I still do some legal stuff, but it's just so much less pressure. There are less billable hours. I'm not saying General Counsel's the way out because general counsel can be a terrible fit for people who aren't necessarily interested in being a lawyer anymore.

My role is unique in that I help people with their tax-deferred exchanges. So there's a little bit of a project management sense. Our company is working on some technology to develop related to our work. I kind of call myself a little bit more of a jack of all trades than a lawyer.

I'm often more just the calm voice of reason, like, when clients are freaking out. I assist people with 1031 exchanges; the timeline on those are pretty tight. It's 180 days, basically, this is a very abridged version. So there's that time management aspect. There's preparing more form documents for clients to sign. I'm not drafting things from scratch. So it's nice to be not having to think that much all the time, for lack of a better word, and it's just more collaborative.

I have meetings with people, people actually want to talk to me. Not that the lawyers I worked with were unfriendly, but there's always this feeling when you go and talk to another lawyer during the workday, they're staring at you, wondering why you're cutting into their billable hour time.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. It's interesting because I think so many, like you said, it's more collaborative. And I think we're told as lawyers, "Oh, your work is very collaborative." And then, in theory, it seems like it would be because, especially if you're at a firm and you're working on a team. But actually, the work tends to be pretty solitary, and even when you're working on a team, it's not collaborative in the way that you find in other fields. I find that sometimes lawyers are like, "But is it really different other places or is it exactly the same?" As you're describing, it is in fact different.

Laura Markham: Right, it is. I mean, the Enneagram testing, even that for my personality types, I'm kind of even more of a lone wolf worker. That's kind of where it comes from, but I still like to collaborate with people. That helps. I still get disgruntled clients, so that never goes away. Lawyers get that too. But the problems feel much more fixable.

They're not, "I'm going to lose my house," this and that. It's a much more, I mean, people do 1031 exchanges to avoid paying capital gains tax. We can't screw up the initial pieces, but things don't feel as catastrophic in my world as they do as an attorney, where somebody's losing their house, things like that.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Okay, Laura, is there anything else that you would like to share with the listeners that we haven't had a chance to touch on yet?

Laura Markham: I hope I didn't traumatize anyone with my life story. I would just say if you're listening to this and you're thinking of leaving the law, definitely, definitely take stock in the personality assessment you encourage us to do because that's really how it got me to where I was. I just realized I needed to be there for my kids and I needed to find a job where I was more available to them and I kind of just jumped from there. So, as dumb as it sounds, listen to your heart.

Sarah Cottrell: I think like truly like a huge piece of it to your point is just really knowing what your priorities are and what you really value and that really does make a huge difference, which is part of the reason why I'm constantly harping on the whole values piece of thing because I think it can, and I think your story is a great example of how being really, really clear about your values and what you value and even like where your values are today versus last year or five years ago because they can change over time is so clarifying when it comes to how do I want to think about what I'm going to be doing next. So I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your story, Laura.

Laura Markham: Oh, and I appreciate you inviting me, Sarah. I hope I can give anyone out there some hope in that anything is surmountable. You just do really have to listen to yourself.

Sarah Cottrell: I could not agree more. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate, again, everything that you've shared with us. I know that it's going to be helpful for a lot of people.

Laura Markham: Oh, I hope so. Anyone can reach out to me. I'm sure you do the contact.

Sarah Cottrell: Oh, yes, you're doing my job for me. I appreciate it because Laura, if people want to connect with you, where can they find you online?

Laura Markham: Oh, well, I'm on LinkedIn. So Laura Markham. I work for 1031 CORP. That's kind of it. If you Google 1031 CORP, Laura Markham, you can find me there. I don't know. I'm not too great at that.

Sarah Cottrell: We'll put your LinkedIn in the show notes and the blog post, so go there, people, and you'll find everything that you need. All right, okay, cool. Well, thank you, Laura, again.

Laura Markham: Thank you, 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.