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.

So this week, I want to talk about something that is actually relevant to you as a lawyer, despite the fact that the title may not make it seem like that. The topic of the podcast is, should you go to law school?

Okay, so here’s why I’m recording this episode. I hear from many people that they send episodes of the podcast to friends that are considering law school. On more than one occasion, listening to episodes of the podcast has convinced people that they, in fact, do not want to be a lawyer, which makes me so happy, to be honest.

But I was thinking that it might be helpful to have a singular episode that you could send to someone when they’re thinking about going to law school that talks about the questions you should be asking yourself, like the real questions you should be asking yourself. The thing is, those questions are very similar to the things that ultimately I suggest that lawyers think about when lawyers are thinking about leaving the law and don’t know what they want to do next.

As I talk about the criteria that someone who’s thinking about going to law school should consider, you who are listening, who might be someone thinking about going to law school, in which case, hello, don’t do it, I mean, I’m not going to tell you what to do, but maybe listen to some episodes. But also, those of you who are listening who are, in fact, lawyers, these same questions are questions that will be helpful for you.

If you are thinking about going to law school, one of the first things that I think is super important for you to ask yourself is, what are my values? And listen, I have worked with a lot of people who decided to go to law school for reasons that were related to their values, like wanting to help people, like caring about justice, like caring about the greater good.

For some people, really wanting financial security because they grew up in a situation that was not financially secure, and they saw how much stress it created and the problems it created. There are lots of different values that might be driving your decision to think about law school.

The number one reason that people that I work with ultimately realize was a significant driver for their decision to go to law school is that they thought it would impress other people, or they thought it would make other people see them as more legitimate, or they thought that it was an easy way to convey to whoever that they were making good life choices, that they were smart and competent.

And one of the things that I tell my clients, and we talk about on the podcast, is I don’t think it’s bad to care what other people think. If you don’t care what people think about you at all, that makes you a sociopath, and we don’t need any more of those.

However, often when people are thinking about law school, they’ll say, “I’m going because I care about justice. I’m going because I care about the greater good. I want to help people.” But then the ultimate underlying reason is something like, “I feel like this is something I need to do to prove myself to someone, or someones, or the faceless mess.”

Here’s why that can be really problematic. If ultimately you’re deciding to go to law school because it is basically designed to make you feel good about your life choices, which, to be clear, I am not criticizing, because that is 100% a huge part of why I went to law school back in the day, it makes it very difficult to actually know whether it’s a good fit for you.

It makes it very difficult to identify something that you actually want to do, that you actually enjoy, as opposed to something that you tell yourself you should enjoy, or that you’re good at, what you equate to enjoying it, despite not really enjoying it.

All of this to say is that you need to think and reflect quite a bit on what values actually drive your behavior. Not just what values would you like to drive your behavior, or do you think should drive your behavior, but what are the things that actually make you do or not do something?

Because those are the values that are driving your decision to go to law school, most likely, and things in life in general. So it is really important that you are honest with yourself about the reasons.

Because being honest with yourself about the reasons that you’re thinking about law school is the only way to know whether the decision that you’re making is a good one for you, like a truly good one for you as a human person.

So that’s the first thing. What are your values? How does the decision to go to law school align? What is the real underlying motivation? And does it align with the values that you want to be informing your career choices?

The other thing that I think is really important to ask yourself if you’re thinking about going to law school is whether or not the thing that you think you will be able to achieve as a law school graduate actually achieve the things that you want.

So what do I mean by that? It’s a joke, for example, amongst people who graduate from law school, things like, “Oh yeah, I went because I just loved constitutional law,” which is also part of my story, again. So this is not me being like, “Oh, so ridiculous.”

Often people have this generic sense of being a lawyer means that I’m somehow involved in the justice system and I can do things to make a difference. It’s true, right? It is true.

However, I think it’s really important if you’re someone who’s thinking about becoming a lawyer to have a really good sense of what exactly do you want to do? Is that how being a lawyer works? And what are the costs to doing that kind of work?

So for example, a lot of people go to law school because they imagine being involved in impact litigation. If that’s something that you want to do, that is fantastic. A very small number of people who graduate from law school actually end up doing that kind of work.

Litigation, even litigation related to a topic that you care a lot about, many people, and I’m one of them, find litigation to be very difficult. I don’t mean it’s difficult like oh, you have to work hard. It has nothing to do with that really at all, because everyone who goes to law school works hard. Anyone who’s remotely conscientious as a lawyer works hard, regardless of the work that they’re doing.

But just because you’re working in, even if you, for example, want to do impact litigation, and you ultimately get to do it and you’re working in the area that you want to be working in, the way that litigation functions and the inexorable grind of it is not something that works for everyone’s nervous system.

I say that because I think a lot of us who went to law school heard that being a lawyer was rough or whatever. We assumed that it was like other things in our life where people were like, “Oh, this is difficult.” We’re like, “Well, I just put my mind to it and did it.”

It’s not purely a put-my-mind-to-it-and-get-it-done thing. It actually really isn’t that very much at all. It’s whether your nervous system is able to tolerate a high degree of inconsistency, unexpected things, emergencies that are manufactured and aren’t real always, but still need to be dealt with.

There is a degree of misery that is involved in many lawyer jobs, even jobs that are doing things that are really good in the world. I think that it is important to be honest with yourself when you’re thinking about becoming a lawyer about whether your nervous system has the capacity to sustain some of those things.

Honestly, that’s a really hard question to answer when you’re 21 or 20 or 18 or however old you are. It’s even a hard question to answer when you’re 42, like I am currently.

But many people who think about going to law school do not believe that their emotional, physical, or nervous system capacity should have any impact on decisions they make about what they’re doing with their life. That does not end well in the sense of, I think many of us, 5, 10, 15, 20-plus years down the road, because I work with lawyers who are literally just out of law school all the way to have been practicing for 25-plus years, often people are waking up for the first time to the reality that they are not a limitless being.

I think that’s particularly hard to accept and wrap your mind around when you’re young, like a young, spry whippersnapper. But it’s definitely something that I think is worth thinking about.

Here’s the third thing that I think you should be thinking about if you’re thinking about going to law school. You want to get information about what the day-to-day work is like as a lawyer.

There are so many of us who went to law school who are like, "Lawyers do law and they deal with contracts or go to trial." Those things are true. But that’s not meaningful in terms of, “What is my day going to look like on a random Tuesday at 3 p.m. or on a random Friday at 9 p.m., or etc.?”

I think it’s really important, when you’re thinking about becoming a lawyer, that you have a realistic view of what your life will look like in the particulars. That requires you to talk with people who are doing the kind of work that you’re thinking about doing.

I don’t recommend that you say, “Oh, do you like your job?” Because maybe they do, maybe they don’t, whatever. But ultimately, if someone likes their job as a lawyer, which there are people who do like being a lawyer, to be clear—I’m not one of them, but there are people out there—the thing is, the question is not whether someone else likes the job. The question is whether you would like the job.

That is more a question of whether the things that that person is doing every day, like the things that they’re spending their six-minute increments on, are things that sound interesting to you or at least tolerable. That just requires you to talk to people who are doing the kinds of work that you want to do.

If you don’t know at all who to talk to because you don’t know what work you want to do, I’ve worked with a lot of people who went to law school in that position. Most of them would say, “Yeah, I went to law school because I thought that it would give me a lot of options. But ultimately, I didn’t actually know that I wanted to be a lawyer. I just wanted to have options.”

Most of those people would say there are lots of other ways to create options other than going to law school. That’s just something to consider.

The final thing that I want to talk about, and I know I touched on this already, but I think for a lot of us, when we think about going to law school and we hear how miserable lawyers are and how much people hate the profession, it’s really easy to think, “Oh, well, again, I am just a high achiever and I work really hard. Of course lots of people don’t like doing that, but I do that, and it’s fine. So it’s fine.”

It is hard to convey to someone who is not part of the profession the specific variety, brand, flavor of misery that many lawyers experience in the profession. It’s for a bunch of different reasons. Part of it is the fact that, as a lawyer, every single thing that you do could potentially be a malpractice claim. So it creates an inordinate amount of pressure on every individual moment of your job.

Some of it is the fact that the profession attracts a disproportionate percentage of narcissists who are extremely unpleasant to work for, who will gaslight and make you feel like you’re crazy and lots of other things. In addition to individual narcissists, many of the organizations that people are working in, primarily law firms, are essentially narcissistic systems. There are other episodes of the podcast where I talk about that. So if you’re interested in learning more about that, check those out.

But the point that I just want to make is, I think that it is really easy to think that it’s just people don’t like the grind. Yes, people don’t like the grind, right? But the kind of misery that many lawyers experience in the profession is less exhaustion just from the grind and more like if you were experiencing targeted abuse.

There are a lot of reasons for that, which we talk about on many, many episodes of the podcast. But the reality is that the misery that many lawyers experience goes beyond just, “I don’t like my job.” It is not just like, “Well, it’s a job and every job kind of sucks.”

Because listen, we’re all adults. I think that the idea that “if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life” is a completely unhelpful way of thinking about things. Because even if you love what you do, the reality is that a job—every job—has moments where you’re like, “Meh.”

That is not what people are talking about when they talk about the kind of misery that they’re experiencing as lawyers. If I could help people who are thinking about law school understand anything, I wish I could help them understand it is pervasive in our profession that people are experiencing a misery that goes far beyond just, “I’m an adult with a job.”

It goes far beyond just, “It’s a lot of work,” or “It’s a lot of time.” It’s hard to convey to people who haven’t experienced it, but hopefully what I’ve shared in this episode gives you some sense.

Finally, I just want to say that I actually have no interest in talking people out of law school who are genuinely interested in going, in the same way that I have no interest in trying to talk a lawyer out of liking practicing law if they like practicing law. I think it’s great.

I mean, again, it’s not my experience. It’s not the experience of my clients. But if people like practicing law, that’s amazing, right? Some number of those people are sociopaths who don’t actually like practicing law and make it terrible for lots of other people. But apart from that, if you like legal practice or you genuinely want to go to law school and become a lawyer, that is great.

I am not here to convince you not to go. I just want to know that someone who’s thinking about going to law school has actually thought about and been told about some of the realities of the profession so that they are making an informed decision. Because there are a lot, a lot, a lot of people who I’ve had on the podcast or who I’ve worked with who would tell you that they did not feel like they were making an informed decision.

So hopefully this episode helps you do that. All right. 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.