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 on the podcast, I'm sharing my conversation with Strawberry Nevill. Strawberry and I were connected through a mutual friend and one of the reasons that I wanted to have them on the podcast was that Strawberry has the experience of leaving the practice of law after working in public interest, and the challenges of leaving the practice of law, many of them are common amongst all types of lawyering, but there are also specific challenges in each area and in particular in public interest because so many of the lawyers who choose to go into public interest work are so mission-driven and it can be very hard to walk away from that. I'm really excited to share this conversation with Strawberry with you let's get right to it.

If you're trying to figure out what it is that you should do that is not practicing law, you know you want out but you're not sure what's next, the Collab Plus One-on-One Program could be a great fit for you. In the Collab Plus One-on-One Program, you get access to my program for lawyers to help them figure out what it is they should do that isn't practicing law.

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A lot of people really like to know when I show up to this call, I'm going to be expected to talk about X and Y, I'm going to be expected to have done X and Y, so this is a super helpful option for those of you who want that kind of accountability.

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Hi, Strawberry. Welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast.

Strawberry Nevill: Thanks so much for having me.

Sarah Cottrell: I am really excited for you to share your story, especially because we just recently spoke a couple of days ago because we were connected via mutual connection and I think there are so many things about your story that people will relate to, especially the people who are listening who are working in public interest. Before we get to all of that, can you just briefly introduce yourself to the listeners?

Strawberry Nevill: Sure. I'm Strawberry Nevill. I spent about 15 years in and around the legal field including three years as a practicing lawyer. Today, I own a content writing business. I specialize in writing about management consulting, particularly consultants who serve lawyers and law firms and a special, special love and interest for leadership development.

Sarah Cottrell: Lawyers, they're always, I love it. Okay, where we normally start on this podcast is essentially back at the beginning, which is can you tell me what made you decide to go to law school?

Strawberry Nevill: Sure. I went to law school a bit later than a lot of folks do. I was actually working for the state doing administrative child support work, which is kind of across between a paralegal and a legal secretary. I was watching parents caught up in the system and not really knowing what to do and I represented the state so my ability to advise them was limited.

I wanted to be on the side of the person facing this giant system. That was part of it and I think I definitely had the sense that there were a lot of people who needed suing and I wanted to be the one to sue them. I think also having done a lot of therapy, it seemed hard and I wanted to prove myself and I think that was a bigger part of it than I realized when I was going in.

Sarah Cottrell: It's so interesting because that is something that comes up quite a bit. First of all, yay therapy as everyone who listens to the podcast knows. This is my weekly reminder that if you're a lawyer, you should be in therapy, really if you're a human, you should be in therapy but definitely for sure if you're a lawyer.

That is a perfect example of why I say that, to your point, about a big part of what drew you to make this decision to go to law school was to prove yourself, there are so many people who have come on the podcast or who I've worked with who have a similar realization of, “Oh, I did this because I feel like I needed to prove myself or I thought it would convey that I was a smart hardworking person or that people would be impressed with the job that I had.”

I'm always careful to say on the podcast that I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting people to admire your work or how hard you work. I would never be like, “Oh, my goodness. I can't believe that you cared about what people thought,” but for a lot of people who become lawyers, then ultimately find that it's not a great fit, I've found that it's often true that part of what brought them to the profession was something that was not fundamentally centered around, “Is this really the right thing for me?” as opposed to “Is this going to convey something about myself that I wanted to convey?”

Strawberry Nevill: Yeah. I think we all want to be seen. That sense of being seen, taken seriously, and respected is a pretty basic drive that we all have. You mentioned on our call being told you should be a lawyer because you're good at arguing growing up, which was certainly the case for me. I also think we want to challenge ourselves. We want to do hard things and show up in the world in a way that makes an impact. That was really motivating for me.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, for sure. I think there are so many of us who go to law school because we see it as a way to give back or care for the broader community. I'm curious, you went to law school for a couple of different reasons, one of which was being told at a young age that you're good at arguing so you should be lawyer, which is a classic piece of advice.

When you were in law school, was it like, “Yes, this is it. I'm on the path,” how did you feel about the experience of law school?

Strawberry Nevill: Mixed. When I literally had just started, I was still working full-time which I had the idea that I could do, but it didn't work out the way that I thought it would. I had to cut back to part-time work. But for those first two weeks, it was like being in a movie and not actually there because I was just so tired.

But one of the big things for me was that everyone was so much younger than I was. It was really young folks who weren't working, a lot of people had never had a job before, and so that definitely was a gap. I had a particular interest around public interest law and there were definitely other folks who were also interested in that but they weren't necessarily the people that I was in classes with, especially in the first year when I'm taking these core classes.

It took me a while to find my people. Some classes were really exciting and some classes were not very exciting. But I'm a curious person. I love learning. Part of it was just I get this opportunity to learn and that was great but also I wasn't that excited about contracts and I spent a lot of time in contracts. Do you know what I'm saying?

Sarah Cottrell: Totally, yes, for sure. Okay, tell me, because of course, there are many people who go to law school and think that they're going to go to the public interest route and then because of the law school conveyor belt, that isn't how it ends up working out. I'd love to know from you how did you decide what you're going to do when you graduated and what did that look like?

Strawberry Nevill: Oh, I definitely wanted to do public interest from the start. I guess my first summer clerking I did, I was a research assistant to a torts professor, toxic torts. You never eat ice at a restaurant again.

My second summer clerking, I clerked for legal aid, which in Oregon is civil legal aid and it was incredible. I had amazing supervising attorneys. They were incredibly just kind to us and I felt like we were doing something that really mattered. That was always my plan for what I would do after law school.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, which is interesting, this is just a side note, but I find that it is relatively uncommon that someone goes to law school undecided and ends up in public interest because of some of the pressures on people in law school. It seems to be the case that in general, having a very clear idea of where you ultimately want to end up is what gets people take and continues them in that direction. Tell me what you started doing when you graduated from law school.

Strawberry Nevill: Sure. By the time I graduated, I had done a couple of public interest clerkships. I had done legal aid and a group called Disability Rights Oregon. I was also really involved in the National Lawyers Guild, which has a student group on campus. Through that, I had made a ton of connections with attorneys and legal workers who were doing not necessarily legal aid in the sense of being this publicly-funded, nonprofit civil legal services but that were representing people who had, for instance, been injured by police, injured in prison, who were having problems in the workplace, or what have you, doing that kind of advocacy work.

I initially couldn't find a job that made sense to me. I don't remember if there was a legal aid opening and I didn't get it or what it was, but I couldn't find a job that I felt good about practicing immediately after law school. But through my connections at legal aid, I ended up getting a job with The Lawyer’s Campaign for Equal Justice which raises money from lawyers to fund civil legal aid in my state, and I think most states have one.

I was the assistant director there for a year and we raised a bunch of money for legal aid. That was my first place after school. But I really wanted actually practice. While I was doing that job, I connected with some folks at a really small but public interest-minded, although not a nonprofit, law firm called the Portland Law Collective.

I had met the attorneys there through my participation in the National Lawyers Guild and I started doing some contract work for them. I was like working this full-time job and then contracting for the firm, which eventually, after I had a one-year contract for the job, for the fundraising job, I got a job offer at the end of that to come and work for that firm full-time.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay. Tell me what it was like working there full-time.

Strawberry Nevill: It was definitely the dream. That firm, which was three attorneys or four attorneys I guess and two legal workers, a paralegal, and an office manager, they did union-side labor law and then they did contingency cases representing people who had been injured by police or imprisoned primarily through medical neglect. That was the dream. That was where I always wanted to work.

It was incredible in many ways. The work was so meaningful. I never doubted that the folks that I was representing really needed us and that our cause was just. The hours were pretty good for a law firm. They were really kind to me, especially in those very early days when you just feel like your brain is going to explode, giving me a little bit of extra time off, and just caring for me in that way, which I really appreciated.

I just remember in law school when you're doing the mock interviews and stuff and they're telling you that you need to wear high heels but they can only be an inch high and all this, just the shoes, the whole thing, that was just something that I personally didn't feel I could tolerate. So just having a place where I could wear clothes that felt reasonable to me, we had like a rack in the office where we all kept our suits and then we just wore normal clothes unless we had a client coming in. It was really wonderful in many ways.

Of course, there were personalities and nothing was perfect and the pay was atrocious but it felt really good to be there and I just felt a sense of purpose that I have never felt before or since because what had happened to our clients was horrific. It was usually someone who we're representing a family of someone who had been killed or someone who'd been grievously and permanently injured and didn't have any other way to answer that. In many ways, it was really a dream job.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. This is interesting and this is something that has come up a number of times in the podcast, lawyers who were practicing in essentially what they would describe, in many cases literally describe as their dream job, and then eventually having this realization that “Maybe this isn't actually the right thing for me in the long term.” Can you talk a little bit about the challenges of that role and at what point you started to think, “I'm not sure that this is what I should be doing forever”?

Strawberry Nevill: Sure. I think it was really hard for me to sort out my experience, especially at first because I would talk to people about how I was struggling and they would say, “Oh, well, you're a new lawyer. Everybody feels that way when they're new.” I think that is true to some extent.

But I think that for me personally, litigation and doing trial work is always hard. No matter how many hours you're working, it's very intense. But I think even doing legal research, my brain is definitely organized in a way that everything has to be perfect and I want to double-check, because of the way legal research works and case law is laid out, it can be hard to know if you found everything, especially when there isn't clear controlling law.

It's really hard to stop researching because maybe you should look at one more case. Maybe that will give you some perfect finding that you can use. I think especially when the stakes are so high, when you're trying to get some small measure of justice for some family who's experienced this unthinkable tragedy, it's like, “Sure, yeah, go home, do some self-care or maybe do a little bit more research.”

It felt really hard to balance my own human needs against the urgency of the work that we were doing in general, but I think especially with legal research, it was just very hard to fee likel I could stop and be done. I think that's me and I definitely have anxiety. I think that was partly me and maybe it's partly legal research.

But it was certainly crafted to make me miserable. Also, there was a lot of vicarious trauma and something that public defenders experience, I'm sure district attorneys experience, I haven't spent time with many of them so I don't know a lot of that but I'm sure that they do.

I think anybody can experience it. We're often representing people who have experienced something really terrible. For me, it wasn't just the facts of our cases that were so horrible, although they were, and when you're doing impact litigation like we are, the worse the facts are, the better it is for the case, which feels really gross to be assessing things in that way but it's the research of a reading all day, not just the deposition of the people, I don't know, he was fine, some of these folks who are really callous.

But also the other cases of other things that have happened. With the prison stuff, I cannot even tell you how many horrific things have happened and the courts are like, “Oh, seems fine to me,” and so just reading that all day and I just was so angry all the time, I would just look at people in the street and be angry at them because I was like, “I bet you're not angry about prisons.”

I think I told you that there was this one moment where I was reading this Fifth Circuit opinion, and I don't remember what it was. It was a conditions of confinement case. I don't remember what had happened but it was horrific. Any reasonable person I think would read it and be like, “This can't happen,” and the judge was just like, “Yeah, it seems fine.”

I just remember thinking, “I cannot fathom that the ground did not open and swallow this judge up.” It really changed my sense of the world and what the world is like. That really, really impacted me. It made it really hard for me to function as a lawyer and a person.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. This is something that I find to be true for many lawyers who are working in public interest and are thinking about leaving, one of the things that is so challenging about it, to your point, is just constantly confronting some of the worst elements of how some humans treat other humans.

I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about this but I think for a lot of us who went to law school thinking about wanting to make a difference, wanting to potentially work in some public interest role, I think before you get to law school and then begin practicing as a lawyer, it's easy to have an overinflated sense of the impact that lawyering can have, which is not to say, “Who cares about public interest lawyering? It's not valuable or worthwhile,” it absolutely is but I think when you're the individual engaged in it and you're seeing the whole scope of what you're up against, I think it really highlights how limited that particular tool is in the tool belt I guess. Does that resonate with you at all?

Strawberry Nevill: Definitely. I feel like there are two parts in what you said. One is the trauma that people experience and I think it's exacerbated by the fact that I think that we're starting to talk about it somewhat, particularly for folks who are doing criminal law. I feel like there's more to talk about in the civil sphere.

But there isn't this recognition within the legal community that being miserable and traumatized is bad. There's this culture of overwork and misery and I think that whether it's intentional or not, it can feel like hazing and so it feels really hard to admit that you're having these problems. It feels like it's just you and it's like you’re a personal failure and not a bigger institutional problem, and it is an institutional problem.

The other piece that you're speaking to is the fact that I certainly went to law school and honestly got my first law job thinking that I was going to change things. I do think that legal aid lawyers play a really critical role in alleviating horrible suffering for the folks that they are able to serve, which is not nearly as many people as need service, and I think impact litigation can have an impact.

It can change things but ultimately, the legal system is very limited. It's not set up to create. It's not set up for social change. What you can win is primarily money, which when your family member has died, they're still dead at the end of the day.

I think also, especially for folks who come with any kind of social services background before I worked for the state, I worked at domestic violence shelter for many years, and in that you're more of a case worker, it's more holistic, and as a lawyer, your relationship felt to me really limited.

I can help you with this one problem and I really need to keep you very, very tightly focused on this problem because that's what I can do. But people's problems were often larger than their legal issue and the results I could get for them didn't necessarily solve the problem if that makes sense.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, absolutely. I think to the point that you made just a bit ago, all of that takes a huge toll on the lawyers who are doing that work. I'm wondering for you, how long was it between the time where you started to think, “This might not be a good place for me mentally, emotionally, etc.,” and how long between that point where you started thinking about it and the point where you were like, “Okay, no, yeah, I actually need to do something else”?

Strawberry Nevill: That's a good question and I'm not sure. I think I was having doubts from day one.

Sarah Cottrell: Very common.

Strawberry Nevill: But I was trying to stick it out because I thought, “Well, maybe it's just because I'm new,” so I definitely felt like I needed to make it to at least two years. I don't remember the exact timeline but I do remember that I started doing therapy and I was like, “Hey, what's going on? I did it. I did it. I went to law school. I got the dream job. I'm doing work that is incredibly meaningful. Why am I miserable?”

I had an amazing therapist who helped me really sort through those issues and ultimately, I came to the conclusion that practicing law wasn't the right thing for me. But it was not a decision that I arrived at quickly or easily. You could say it was three years. Maybe it was a year or six months. It's a tricky question to answer.

Sarah Cottrell: How did you go about deciding what you would do next? Were you someone who had some idea of what you might do if you weren't a lawyer or were you someone who was like, “If I'm not doing this, what am I supposed to be doing?”

Strawberry Nevill: The thing that I decided to do next was to take a breath. I didn't know. I had a bunch of ideas about what I would do but I didn't really know. I felt that I wasn't really able to figure it out where I was if that makes sense. Ultimately, I decided to just step back.

I didn't have a great plan in place other than to recover from this really intense burnout and secondary trauma that I was experiencing. I know I said the pay was atrocious but really, the firm did as well as it could around compensation. There was severance and there was a real attempt to care for folks and share what was available fairly. Anyway, I knew that I had some severance and I decided to take the leap and then figure it out.

Sarah Cottrell: I'm curious because there are quite a few people who I've worked with, and I'm sure there are people who are listening who have been in a similar situation where they decided, “For various reasons, I need to not be doing what I'm doing right now in order to figure out what's next,” can you tell me what that process looked like and what you ended up doing?

Strawberry Nevill: Sure. I definitely spent the first two weeks or a month just remembering how to unclench all of my muscles again. There was just some basic physical recovery that I did. I explored. I thought, “Oh, maybe I'll do something in nonprofit.” I explored that and ultimately decided that it probably wasn't right for me.

I think there are a lot of folks doing wonderful things at nonprofits and also there tends to be a culture of overwork. The mission is urgent or you wouldn't be doing it and it can be really hard to set boundaries around your work when you have a pressing mission, which made me start to think about policy work.

So I started looking for a policy role and one opened up in health IT at the state. I liked the idea of the state as an employer because I felt like I would have better work-life balance, better compensation and benefits, and health IT sounds interesting. I didn't know anything about it but a lot of our labor clients were nurses so I had a lot of affinity for that for the health piece of it.

I just took the leap into something new knowing that I wanted to explore policy but not necessarily knowing whether health IT and this particular policy role was going to be a fit if that makes sense.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Okay, tell me how did that go, how was that, and what happened next.

Strawberry Nevill: A lot of things happened next. I will say that leaving the law and your first job out, I do remember my first day sitting around a table in a meeting and I genuinely do not know what anyone is talking about and thinking, “What did I do?” I went from this role where I was respected and I knew what was going on, as much as any three-year lawyer knows what's going on, and here I am, what did I do?

But ultimately, it was really good in a lot of ways. The work that we were doing was interesting. It was this statewide strategy around how to make sure people's health information goes where it needs to go. I had an office, it wasn't an office, it was a cube in a dark back corner and people gave me data, I analyzed it, made recommendations, and we wrote an RFP. It was great.

I left work at work. My first couple of years were really great and then because I couldn’t stop doing the most, I got promoted, and then all of a sudden, I lost my dark corner, I was sharing an office and doing the staff work for this statewide board and several of them actually, and just finding things that could be done better and doing them better, which there are a lot of things.

Sarah Cottrell: It's the classic person who chooses to become a lawyer move, which is why do a little bit when you could do the most? I speak from experience myself. This is one of the challenges of moving as a lawyer into something else because there is that internal tendency to be like, “Well, I should still be going for the things and the promotion. That's the thing I should go for.”

I think it is really challenging, especially for those of us who ended up becoming lawyers, to look at something like that and say, “Well, maybe that's not the best or the right fit for me.”

Also just to circle back to what you said, circle back, oh, it's such corporate speak here on The Former Lawyer Podcast, you were talking about sitting in the meeting on the first day, not knowing what was going on, and just being like, “What have I done? I used to be in this role where I was respected and all this stuff,” and I know you and I have talked about this before but that whole idea of “Who I was was lawyer. My identity was I am a lawyer,” that's something that has come up.

Regardless of the background of the former lawyers who I've had on the podcast, whether it was on the commercial, litigation side, or on the public defense, it doesn't matter where you practice law as a lawyer, almost everyone has that piece of being a lawyer got incorporated into their identity and detangling that is really challenging and can sometimes feel disorienting. It sounds like that was a piece of it for you as well.

Strawberry Nevill: I think so. Certainly, as a lawyer, you receive a lot of deference, and not always in a way that makes sense. Everyone in your life suddenly thinks you know more about stuff than you do and you have to caveat everything because people will literally just believe anything you say because you're a lawyer.

Also just professionally, you receive a degree of respect that you don't if you're not a lawyer. That's really compelling. I think maybe in some special ways for folks who are really driven by the public interest, motivated by public interest because if you are working in a nonprofit, anything where you're not a lawyer, you're not listened to in the same way that you are when you're a lawyer.

I think also for me, and I think this is connected to identity but a little bit distinct, is the sense of belonging that we have in public interest. Because you are the underdog, every one you go up against is better funded and better staffed than you, it feels really good when you win against them.

Also, you're fighting the good fight but you're fighting it together. There's this intense sense of belonging that is created and a sense of mutual obligation to fight for this cause that you're fighting for. It's incredibly difficult to step away from that not just because you're not going to be a lawyer anymore but because, for me, I was very conscious that I was leaving critical work to others and it needed to be done and I could no longer do it. That was really hard.

I still feel sad about it even though I'm not going to go back and practice law again. Also, just leaving that cadre of people who are wonderful people, amazing people doing amazing work feels really hard to give that up.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. From what you're describing, it's that real sense of community and belonging that can be very hard to find.

Strawberry Nevill: Exactly. I think that's a piece of identity but I also think for me, I feel like it goes almost even further deeper than identity.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Okay, so you're supervisor in the health IT situation at the state and you're like, “Ah, actually this does not seem like the thing.” Can you walk me through how you went from there to what you're doing now?

Strawberry Nevill: Sure. Again, I did the most to the point where I started having some health issues and decided to step away. I made a transition out of that role. That was in February of 2020. Then in March of 2020, there was a pandemic. I wasn't working at the time, I had decided to take a moment to catch my breath, and no one knew what was going on. There was no job hunting happening at that point.

But in I think it was April of 2020, a friend of mine who I knew from outside of the law world, she was a writer, she is a writer and a content strategist who had been doing that work for two decades, she knew I was a frustrated writer, really wanted to be a writer.

She had some overflow work and she was like, “Strawberry, would you please help? Would you please do some of this?” I was like, “No, I would hate that. I would hate owning my own business and working from home. It's just not right for me.” She was like, “But Strawberry, could you please?”

So I did and I loved it. I loved it. I love running my own business. I love working from home. I started with this and that and yeah, I've worked on more than one trash company website, it's critical service and slowly started to specialize in what I do now, which is management consulting and largely for law firms.

I never thought that I would like it but I'm so glad that I tried it because it's been wonderful for me as has been writing professional. Those projects were always my favorite and I just never thought I could do that full-time but I do and it's great.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. So many people who chose to go to law school went in pretty large part because they liked writing and wanted to be able to do it for their job and it seemed like a practical way to “write,” whatever that means. It's so interesting how often some of those kernels that were there ultimately end up coming out and what people do in the end. Is there anything else, as we're coming to the end of our conversation, that you would like to share that we haven't talked about yet?

Strawberry Nevill: I guess I would just share that I really wish that I had known about this podcast or it had existed when I was trying to figure out what to do when I was really struggling with law practice. It really took me a long time to be able to imagine what life could be like outside of the law and I'm just so much happier. It was absolutely the right decision.

It was hard, it still feels hard, and I still sometimes have big feelings about it but it was the right decision for me. I hope that folks who are feeling that way will explore and take themselves seriously. If it feels bad, take that seriously and take yourself seriously. Go to therapy. Figure it out. Just realize that just because you can't imagine something now doesn't mean there's nothing else there for you if that makes sense.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think that's so important because, like I mentioned earlier, I think so many people come to that place of, “This feels bad but I can't see what else could be out there.” I think it's really important to keep in mind. Okay, Strawberry, if people want to connect with you/hire you, where can they find you online?

Strawberry Nevill: My website is strawberrynevill.com. I definitely have some space for new clients. I really love working with consultants, surf lawyers, and law firms. I love being part of that community but in a different role.

Sarah Cottrell: Can you just talk really briefly about what it is that you do specifically or have done specifically when you're working with consultants that are working with law firms?

Strawberry Nevill: Sure. It's kind of a blend. Part of what I do is content marketing, which means writing blog posts, white papers, that kind of thing that helps the consultant communicate about the services they offer to law firms.

Then another piece of what I've done is actually working on the deliverables that some consultants will create for law firms. That could be a presentation, a report. One of the things that I've done that I have really loved and what's really sparked my interest in leadership development is leadership assessment reports.

One piece of that is doing upward reviews where associates will review partners and give feedback about their management skills. As part of a large team of writers, copywriters, and coaches, we’ll actually create individual reports that basically summarize that feedback and present it in a way that can help that manager grow because, like many fields in the law when people are promoted to a managerial position, they don't necessarily have any training in how to manage other people.

It's really exciting to be part of a process that can help people learn how to manage better and have better relationships with the people that they're supervising and just make life better for everybody.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Pretty much every law firm, especially large law firms, needs to be doing that because like you said, and we talk about this in the podcast a lot, lawyers are in general not trained to be managers and then they are promoted into positions of management without the training. Let's stop doing that because that unsurprisingly does not result in a great management situation.

Strawberry Nevill: Yeah, and it's not just lawyers. It happens across industries and it's a huge problem everywhere. But I think the workload of large law firms, the pressure, and the particular structure of that makes it even more important that partners are able to get that support around learning to become good managers because it's a skill that you have to learn like any other. You weren't born knowing how to be a good lawyer. You're not born knowing how to be a good manager.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. So important. Cosign. Okay, we'll put the links in the show notes in the blog post to your website. If anyone who's listening wants to find it, that's an easy way to find it. But otherwise, I just wanted to say thank you so much for joining me today, Strawberry, and sharing your story. I really appreciate it.

Strawberry Nevill: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. You are doing good work. It feels really exciting to be a part of it to support folks who are in the struggle zone and finding their way out.

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.