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 want to talk about layoffs because if you are a lawyer, as you probably are if you’re listening to the podcast, you know that there have been quite a few layoffs happening, particularly in Biglaw in the last month/year.

There are a couple of things that I think are really important to keep in mind, especially if you're someone who is working in a job like that, and at the same time, worried about layoffs, and at the same time, kind of hating the job. Then I also wanted to say a little bit for those of you who have been caught up in the layoffs as well.

The next Guided Track is coming up and I wanted to let you know that I'm only going to be running two more Guided Tracks this year in 2023. There's going to be a Spring Guided Track and that's going to start on Tuesday, April 18th, and then there will be a Fall Guided Track that starts in the fall and runs until right before Thanksgiving.

If you're someone who's thought about joining the Guided Track, which is a 10-week small group where you come into the Collab, you join the Collab, you have access to all of the resources in the Collab including the framework, etc., and then in addition to that, you're meeting with me and a small group of lawyers once a week and working through an action plan to move you through the framework during the time that we're in the Guided Track, if you are someone who wants to be able to be on live calls or to be able to have calls with me, this is the way to do that if you are not planning to work with me one-on-one.

Quick rundown of details, again, starts on April 17th, runs for 10 weeks in addition to the weekly calls for 10 weeks, we’ll have the action plan. We'll also have a Clifton Strengths Workshop that we'll have on a Saturday, a half-day workshop that specifically focuses on your results from a Clifton Strengths Assessment, which is one of several assessments that I have people use as they're going through this process and gives you some additional analytics as well as some exercises to think through how to use the results to be able to articulate your transferable skills.

You also get a free 30-minute one-on-one call with me that you can use anytime during the Guided Track and you also get included in some of the assessments that otherwise I recommend that people use but that they purchase for themselves separately when they join just the Collab. The Guided Track this time around is going to be capped at seven people max.

If you're interested and you would like to enroll for this spring round starting on April 18th, go to formerlawyer.com/guidedtrack. If you're interested in the fall round and you want to make sure you get a spot in that round, I have that available but you'll have to contact me directly, and again, I want to reiterate that these are the only two rounds of the Guided Track that I'll be doing for the rest of 2023.

If you don't want to have to wait all the way until September and you'd like to get started before then, this is your moment and I would love to see you in the Spring Guided Track. Again, go to formerlawyer.com/guidedtrack and you can see all the information and enroll there.

Let's start there first. Here's the deal. Well, I wouldn't say I don't know what it is about Biglaw firms or law firms, but I do have some ideas of what it is that makes law firms so much more likely to do layoffs in horrible ways. There are some law firms, when they're reducing headcount because they literally don't have the work, who are open about that and give people good severance, et cetera, et cetera.

Not saying it's ever handled perfectly, but there are ways to handle something like that that are not garbage. The problem is there are still a lot of law firms out there that are doing stealth layoffs and are telling people that they're being laid off because of work issues when that's just a total lie.

Let's just talk about the fact that often, when you are subjected to a stealth layoff, one of the things that people typically cite is your hours, which, unless you're someone who's literally turning down work, which, generally speaking, is not the case, is a completely ridiculous reason to fire someone for a cause because it's like, “Hey, guess where hours come? Hours come from doing work, billing time. Where do you get work? If you are a junior associate, from people who are more senior to you, from the partners who bring in business.”

If your associates don't have enough work to do, in what world is their lack of hours some sort of failure on their part? It literally makes no sense. But here's the thing: in so many of these environments, whether the system is a narcissistic system or you have particular narcissists in positions making these decisions, or both, the problem becomes that they, the firm or the person, don't want to admit that they could have done anything wrong.

This is like a classic narcissistic move. All of the problems have to be other people's problems are caused by other people and the reason for that is that the narcissist, or the people, the narcissistic system, need to constantly feed their own egos to feel like they are the ones in the right.

You end up in a situation where people can't just do a riff in a way that is not painless and inhumane. Instead, there is this effort to lay people off stealthily and make them feel like it's their fault, when transparently, anyone in this situation can see the reasons for it have more to do with whether or not the partnership is bringing in enough business.

Why am I talking about this? Because even if you know this, even if you are looking at the situation, and on some level, you understand, “This can't be about my performance,” in so many of these cases, it really damages people's confidence because you've existed for so long in this system that tells you that everything that goes poorly is your fault.

I find it enraging, frankly, it's wrong. I have had so many conversations with people about how they're all sorts of circumstances where the way that Biglaw operates, it's like it's not enough to do something that's sh*tty, they also need to make you feel bad about yourself while doing it.

Again, there are a lot of reasons for that. But a big part of it is like there's this just constant need on the part of narcissists or narcissistic system to push any possible negative thing, any sort of negative feeling on to other people so that doesn't need to be experienced by them.

Because if it's your fault that you are getting laid off, then they don't need to feel bad about it or really take responsibility for it in any way even if on its face, it's a completely nonsense reason. Part of the reason why I'm talking about this is probably no surprise.

I talk to a lot of lawyers every week in lots of different places including the large law firms. There are plenty of people who are in this position of being subjected to b*llsh*t stealth layoffs, and it's super isolating because you're made to feel like it's your fault because you did something wrong.

That's literally not what's happening because often, what ends up happening is people are like, “There's this or that thing that I didn't do perfectly,” yeah, you didn't do things perfectly, but in 99.9% of the situations of which I'm aware, it's very apparent that even stealth layoffs where the person is being told that it's for a cause in some way, it's not.

I just wanted to talk about that piece of it because if you're someone who's listening and that's been your experience, I want you to know that you're not crazy and the nonsense narrative that you're being told is wrong and it's not okay. It's not okay that you're being treated that way.

I mean, ultimately, yeah, law firms, Biglaw, partners, they're going to do what they're going to do and a lot of what they're going to do is going to be not great, let's put it that way. In a certain sense, yeah, it's expected but that doesn't mean it's okay. It's not okay. It's just another thing about our profession that is normalized in ways that are just so damaging to people.

That's the first piece. The second thing that I wanted to talk about related to layoffs is on the flip side of people who are being psychologically traumatized by their workplace handling their layoffs in extremely uncool ways, you also have the situation where you have people who are extremely unhappy in their jobs; a lawyer who hates their job, and at the same time, is incredibly afraid of being laid off. It feels very confusing because those two things feel incompatible.

I know I talked about this once before on the podcast, but I wanted to bring it up again as I know we're in another period where a lot of layoffs have happened or people might be afraid of them happening. It's just important to remember that two things can be true.

As lawyers, we’re so geared towards thinking about things in a black-and-white way where either we hate our job and should want to leave no matter what or we are afraid of being laid off and being afraid of being laid off must mean that we don't hate it enough or whatever, whatever things we end up telling ourselves.

The reality is two things can be true: You can hate your job, and also be afraid of being laid off. You can hate your job, and also be grateful that you have the job. You can not like your job and feel relief that you haven't lost it yet. Also, it's normal to feel some guilt if you hate your job but have kept your job and no other people who've lost their jobs.

That doesn't mean you're a bad person. It doesn't mean that you don't appreciate what you have. It doesn't mean that your feelings about your job aren't valid. All of these things can exist and all be true even though they are in tension.

I think one of the most important things for us as lawyers when we're thinking about what we want to do, what we really, really want to do with our lives, with our careers, is to learn how to hold things that seem to be opposed in tension, because often, the “it's this or that,” “it's either-or” way of thinking is part of what keeps us trapped in really unhappy situations for us, that make it hard for us to figure out what it is that we really want to do, or make it hard for us to see this half steps, next steps, multiple steps along a path towards something better that we could potentially pursue because we feel like it needs to just be like one or the other.

Those are the things that I wanted to share with you today. For anyone who has experienced a layoff, I am really sorry. It sucks. There's a good chance it was handled poorly in your situation. There's a good chance that was handled extremely poorly in your situation. If you feel angry, if you feel sad, if you feel just completely irritated, all of these things are totally valid.

But regardless of your situation, I really am so glad that you're here and that you're listening, that you're moving in a direction to be able to learn more about yourself and what it is that you ultimately want out of your career, and having these conversations about some of the really problematic parts of our profession that I don't think are going to change until we talk about them openly. Thanks for listening today. 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.