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.

Okay, let's talk about something that, if you're a lawyer, is very likely a phenomenon that you have seen and that it is also real nuts. Just wild and not normal, and yet so many of us are led to believe that it is normal. And that thing is if you are someone who is working for a person who has caused multiple people to quit, multiple people to go out on mental health leave, who's just generally known as someone who runs people off from the organization, that is not normal. That is not normal.

The thing is, it's so normalized in so many law firm contexts. I cannot tell you the number of people who I've worked with who will come to me and they'll say, "Yeah, I'm working for this partner and everyone says that they're difficult or they have sharp elbows." Which, as you know, if you listen to my episode about the no-asshole rule or how I don't really believe that the no-asshole rule, the thing that exists in law firms, you'll also know that I think that when someone's described as having sharp elbows or being difficult, that generally means that they're abusive.

Anyway, I digress. The point being if you're working for this person and it is known that this person runs people off, it can be so confusing for you because logically, if you were to take the logical approach to this occurrence, you would think, "Oh, this organization is losing people based on this person's behavior, therefore this person's behavior is the problem and this person is the source of the problem and therefore this person should be dealt with."

But of course, that doesn't happen because in most cases, that person has a large book of business or it has a particular client who is very valuable to the firm, or maybe some other combination of like golfing buddies with the head of the firm, or you know, whatever.

But in most cases, it comes down to an issue of money. So you're working for this person, they're abusive in any number of ways, and you have this sense of "Everyone knows this so it must not be as bad as it feels," even though there's evidence that it is quite bad because multiple other grown adults have left the firm or gone on mental health leave or otherwise had some sort of problem working for this person that was visible that other people saw and experienced.

I mean, that's how this person got their reputation, and yet you're expected to act like it is normal to be asked to work for someone like this, and not just that, but there's kind of this sense of like it's almost like maybe you'll be the one to change them. Like no one else has been able to change them, but maybe you will be, which we've talked a lot in the podcast about how some of the dynamics in toxic workplaces are very parallel to other types of toxic relationships, and you can hear that logic. The logic of like, "Oh well, maybe if I just did the perfect combination of things and said the perfect combination of things and emailed the perfect way and showed up for..." do you know what I mean?

There's just this sense of like maybe somehow I could avoid what's happened to every other person in this circumstance, and there's a part of you that thinks that that has to be true because otherwise, why in God's name would this organization be letting this person continue in their role?

And of course, the answer to that is they're letting the person continue in the role, not because they think the person is going to get better in terms of their treatment of people. I mean, there might be some people deluding themselves about that, but for the most part, it's like they're just willing to tolerate it. And in part, they're willing to tolerate it because they're not the ones who are experiencing the direct damage.

You are as the person working for this abusive person, and they've also decided that losing some number of people is acceptable collateral damage for them. And I think it's really helpful to see what's actually happening in these situations because it can feel illogical. It can feel like, "How can this be happening?" Often what I see is lawyers who even though the evidence is that this person they're working for is abusive and problematic on so many levels as evidenced by the fact that they've run multiple people off from the firm, multiple people, before you, somehow it still feels to many lawyers like the way that they're being treated or mistreated is their fault.

And there are lots of reasons for that, many of which we've talked about on the podcast before, but I just wanted to record this specific episode to say it is not normal to have someone who is running people off from the organization, causing people to quit, multiple people to quit, causing multiple people to go out on mental health leaves, etc. It is not normal. That is nuts.

Like legitimately, just set aside the money piece of it, which I know is very hard to do in our capitalist hellscape, but like as a thought experiment, set aside the money piece, it is illogical to look at a person who has been so terrible as a boss that they have made multiple people leave or have some form of mental breakdown and be like, "Let's have more people work for this person."

So if you're a person who's being asked to work for that person, you're in an inherently illogical situation that is not going to make sense and is going to feel a little bit crazy and you're going to feel like you're the problem in almost all circumstances, in part because of how the organization runs and in part sort of what you're conditioned to as a lawyer.

And so I just want to say if this is your experience, if you are working for someone like this or if you worked for someone like this in the past and left and you have the sense of like, "I left and it was a failure," which is something that often comes up with my clients, like having the sense that they failed because they got out of an abusive situation, that is not a failure.

That is not a failure. That is not your fault. It's not like, "Well, if you were just a stronger person, then—" no. No, it was a fundamentally flawed situation. It was an egregious breach of trust from people who are supposed to be making holistically decent decisions for the organization and not purely sacrificing individuals for the sake of money.

Again, even though I know we live in a capitalist hellscape, there still should be some principles. There still should be some principles. I feel like this shouldn't be controversial, but you know, this is our profession.

So if you're listening and you are in a position like this or you have been and you have feelings about it, especially towards yourself that aren't positive, I just want you to know that, first of all, that's very normal and so many people experience that and also you don't deserve to feel bad about yourself because someone else was abusive. Because they were abusive. Because what causes people to leave and to have mental health crises when we're talking about someone else's treatment of them it's that person being abusive.

It's not normal. Let's not normalize it. It happens a lot, and that's just because our profession has some extremely deep-seated problems that still need to be rooted out. I appreciate you listening today, and I will 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.