8 Dec
Why Community Support Matters When You’re Leaving the Law [TFLP292]
When lawyers start thinking about leaving, they focus on the practical steps. What career should I pursue? How do I update my resume? What skills do I need? Those things matter, but Sarah consistently hears from lawyers that they underestimated something else. They didn’t realize how much they needed to know they weren’t alone.
The legal profession can be deeply isolating, especially for people who are unhappy. In a field focused on prestige, lawyers often feel like they have to maintain a professional persona just to be taken seriously. It becomes hard to admit that the work doesn’t fit, even to yourself. Lawyers who want out often believe they’re the only ones who feel that way. They look around at colleagues who seem fine and wonder what’s wrong with them for struggling.
You’re Not the Only One (Even Though It Feels That Way)
Sarah created The Former Lawyer Collaborative after experiencing firsthand how valuable it was to have support while navigating the decision to leave law. She had her husband, Ed Cottrell, who is also a lawyer, to talk through the questions that come up in this process. Am I crazy for wanting to leave? What about all the time and money I’ve invested? Who am I if I’m not a lawyer? How will I explain this to other people?
These questions show up for almost everyone who considers leaving. But because the profession is so isolating, it’s easy to think you’re the only person dealing with them. That sense of being alone makes everything harder. It’s one reason Sarah built the Collab. She wanted lawyers going through this process to have a place where they didn’t have to pretend everything was fine.
At this point, close to 400 lawyers have joined the Collab, and one reaction shows up over and over. People say they didn’t realize how much they needed that feeling of “I am not alone, and I am not the only one.” Just knowing other people are asking the same questions and facing the same doubts can make the whole process feel more manageable.
Learning From Other People’s Processes
There’s also a practical benefit to being around others who are trying to leave. Listening to people talk about what they’ve explored, what they’ve ruled out, and what they’ve learned gives you information you wouldn’t have access to otherwise.
The process of figuring out what you want to do after law is nothing like the process of becoming a lawyer. Going to law school is completely linear. College, LSAT, law school, bar exam, practice. There’s a clear path. Leaving law doesn’t work that way. It involves exploration, trial and error, and often a lot of uncertainty.
That’s one reason the Former Lawyer Framework exists inside the Collab. People have told Sarah how helpful it was to have some structure and clear steps within a process that can otherwise feel chaotic. But even with a framework, the work itself is not linear. Being around other people who are also navigating something nonlinear can normalize that experience in a way that makes it easier to keep going.
Lawyers don’t have much practice being around people who are doing things that don’t follow a predictable path. The Collab gives them that experience. It lets them see that other smart, capable people are also figuring things out as they go, and that it’s okay not to have everything mapped out from the start.
Community Makes the Work Easier
Sarah often hears from lawyers that they didn’t expect community to matter as much as it did. They thought the real challenge was just doing the work. Figuring out what they wanted and making a plan to get there. And yes, that work matters. But doing it in isolation is harder than it needs to be.
Having even one or two other people who understand what you’re going through can make a significant difference. It doesn’t have to be a formal program. It could be a friend, a colleague, or someone you meet online who is also thinking about leaving. You don’t have to do this completely alone.
Plenty of people leave law without being part of a formal community. Sarah has interviewed them on the podcast. So it’s not the only way. But if you feel stuck or overwhelmed, finding support can be one of the most practical things you do.If you’re looking for structure, direction, and a group of people who are on a similar path, the Collab is designed to provide exactly that.
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.
Hey, everyone. Today, I want to talk about the benefits that you can get from being in community with other people who are also trying to leave the law when you are in the process of trying to figure out what it is that you want to do. I'm sure if you listen to the podcast for any period of time, you know that I have this program for lawyers called The Former Lawyer Collaborative.
It's the first thing that I created after I had created the podcast in terms of something that people could join or buy or whatever. The reason that I created it was I had the experience of working as a lawyer and having support, and particularly from my husband, who's been on the podcast before, who is also a lawyer, in navigating some of the things that you experience when you are thinking about leaving and having thoughts like, "Am I crazy?" everything about sunk costs, everything about "Who am I if I'm not a lawyer?"
Everything about "I've spent all this time and how am I going to explain it to other people? What will other people think?"—all of these things. The questions and the issues that people run into are so often so similar, yet it can feel very isolating because our profession tends to be a very isolating profession for a lot of different reasons. A big part of it is that in any profession that has a focus on prestige, and the legal profession is definitely one of those professions, there tends to be a lot of focus on how things look or how things appear.
I'll often talk to clients who say they feel like they almost have to put on a persona in order to be a successful lawyer, to be seen as a good lawyer. As a result, even more than in some other work environments, you can end up feeling like you're the only one who really doesn't like it and actually wants out. I think for a lot of us who are lawyers, the idea of psychological support, just knowing someone else is going through the same things, can feel like, well, how much could that really help?
Ultimately, it isn't the thing that I'm trying to execute on. The thing you're trying to execute on is figuring out what it is that you want to do and leaving your job. I think there can be this sense of, well, it would be nice to have people who relate, but it's not really necessary.
To be clear, there are plenty of people who've been on the podcast who left law for something else and did not have a community of people who were doing something similar. So I'm certainly not saying it's the only way or whatever. But what I will say is consistently at this point, close to 400 lawyers have come into the Collab.
At this point, I have seen certain reactions to the experience of the Collab over and over. One of those is people saying to me or saying on a group call that they didn't realize how much they needed that sense of "I am not alone, and I am not the only one." I think also, apart from just that sense of "I am not alone, and I am not the only one," there's also the reality that listening to other people talk about their process and the experiences that they're having, and even the things that they've looked into and decided against, can be so helpful in a process that is so different from the process that we went through when we decided to go to law school.
Because inherently, going to law school is such a linear process: you go to college, you take the LSAT, you go to law school, you take the bar, you practice law. It's so regimented, and that is not how figuring out what it is that you want to do works.
Now, there are ways to make it simpler. That's what the Former Lawyer Framework, which is the curriculum inside the Collab, is intended to do. Many, many, many people at this point have told me how helpful it was specifically to have some sense of "Okay, and then I do this, and then I do this" within the broader context of a process that is often not super linear because there is so much exploration involved in figuring out what it is that is really going to be a good fit for you.
That's part of why I think being around other people who are also going through or have gone through this process is so helpful. Because, as lawyers, we just often do not have very much experience being around people who are doing something that's nonlinear. Obviously, that's not true for everyone, but it's true for many people.
A lot of times, the things that people express to me is that they really underestimated how much of an impact having those connections and having that experience meaningfully impacted their ability to do the work they needed to do to figure out what it is that they wanted to do that wasn't practicing law. So I highly recommend that if you're a lawyer thinking about doing something else, you try to find even one or two others who are on a similar path because it can be extremely helpful.
And of course, the Collab is available. So if you're someone who would really like to have some of that support and community and direction like the framework provides, then I invite you to join us in the Collab. You can always do that at formerlawyer.com/collab. 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.
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