- People have strong beliefs, opinions and feelings about lawyers
There is probably no other profession, save medicine, that evokes immediate, strong and sometimes passionate images and opinions from the general populace. Having an aura which is simultaneously revered and resented, attorneys struggle to balance professional and personal lives under these externally driven perceptions and expectations. When one says “I’m a lawyer,” s/he immediately provides the listener an opportunity to consider from among a thousand and one additional “identities” and “expectations”. An assortment of these might include:
smart, brilliant, accomplished, wealthy, well-educated, impressive, persevering, tenacious, disciplined, goal-driven, workaholic, dogmatic, argumentative, logical, rational, persuasive, influential, political, heartless, pushy, cunning, greedy, money-grubbing, unprincipled, street saavy, heartless, untrustworthy, tricky, unethical/highly ethical, “necessary evil,” liar, hired gun, prostitute, ambulance chaser, pitbull, independent, arrogant, snobbish, elitist, disconnected, detached, cold, dominating, controlling, “better than” ….and on and on….
Then, some people may consider lawyers as being in a world all their own, because of the weigh, gravity and even mystery, that “the law” carries generally. There can be a sense of being highly impressed, in awe or unapproachability that lawyers can invoke. That can be a lot to live up to as a person who was pretty human and just studied law.
Consider that this weight and variety of social perceptions can have far-reaching effect on the lawyer maintaining a strong, distinct and healthy self-identity over time.
- Entering “the Law” Means Entering a Whole New Culture– with its own Rules and Parameters
The ability for law students and young lawyers to make important distinctions about themselves and their career opportunities is usually severely limited. Law students enter a new cultural setting, set clearly apart from the “real world” to undergo mental, attitudinal and emotional transformations within the cocoon of law school. They are often highly influenced, if not overwhelmed, by parental and other expectations, fear of failure, peer pressure and avid competition for law review status. Many, if not most, new graduates are burdened with exorbitant loan repayment schedules, job anxieties and confusion among the myriad available paths. Often more concerned about obtaining prestigious or lucrative positions, it becomes increasingly easy to overlook the importance of asking “what do I really want to do?” “Why am I pursuing this?” “What is it all leading to?” While law school career services offices have gotten better, their ability to counsel students is often overwhelmed.
Law graduates (some of whom went to law school to increase their universal job options) assume the paths presented to them at law school are the only ones, which include law firms, prosecutorial offices, public defenders, judge clerkships and prestigious civil liberties organizations. Typically, those who want intense trial experience head to the public sector (District Attorney and Public Defender offices), and those who feel compelled to earn substantial dollars and gain certain corporate client experience head to large law firms.
Those who are seeking more exposure to the legal process itself or who want to be further “credentialized” seek covetous judicial clerkships. Many of these choices are preceded by summer internships which further induce the acceptance of the resulting job offers. Sometimes non-legal employers, including consulting firms and investment banks, join the most prestigious firms to solicit students from the “Ivy League” law schools. Typically, corporations recruit lawyers from law firms or other companies, to take advantage of the training and experience generally intensive law firms provide.
Because of their specialized training and learned mode of thinking and responding, JDs and lawyers immediately become a “breed apart” from the rest of the general population. It is not an unusual discussion after the new law student returns from the initial Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays to find that family and friends have commented that they are talking or behaving differently. It is also not unusual that the other party in an intimate or familial relationship will point out to the lawyer that she or he is “talking like a lawyer” instead of from the heart. The role of “lawyer” creeps into every facet of life, and much of it may not even be conscious.
What Does All this Mean in Terms of Making Career Choices?
- Law Students and New Lawyers Usually Do Not Have an Unbiased Landscape for Formulating Career Strategies and Making Sound Tactical Decisions
With little exposure to the various kinds of legal practice or opportunities appreciating legal training, choices feel limited and set in stone. With the culture impeding the ability to consider more individual, heart-felt considerations about career, many young legal minds make an internal deal with themselves to defer the question. So many have traveled the well-worn career paths — so why question it? Even considerations about the kind of law to practice is suppressed. The excitement of trial work depicted by the media’s legal heroes effectively hide the underbelly of the legal system requiring lawyers to exercise a heartless demeanor, work grueling hours, execute strategies designed to undermine rather than reveal the truth, in addition to endless paperwork, unappreciative clients, dishonorable tactics from peers and grueling ethical questions and inner conflicts.
Those seduced by the “art of the deal”— as depicted in the Wall Street Journal including corporate public offerings, take-overs, mergers and high-tech wars — are usually not aware that the backroom processing of such deals entails endless due diligence exercises in window-less rooms, multi-document preparation, revisions and proofreading exercises, consecutive late nights and full weekends to deliver new drafts to multiple parties at one time. Then after all the comments are gathered, the process starts anew.
This is not to say that such legal orientations do not offer highly satisfying experiences (e.g., winning the case, closing the deal), but often it is not until after years of such dues-paying activities that one can have the autonomy to guide litigation and transactions strategically and enjoy a meaningful level of client contact, development and relationship-building.
Spouses, family and friends eventually arrive at a point at which they longer understand the young lawyer’s driven motivation to deprive self of family time, sleep, food or other basic pleasures. Their resignation of being an “outsider” to the world of law falls hard on them and increases the loneliness and alienation of the attorney. This in turn causes the attorney to fall in the closed fraternity of other lawyers and of course, more work.
- Lawyers Develop a New Relationship to “Time” Which Precludes Time for Self-reflection and the Desire to Take Action Steps Toward Change.
Lawyers live their lives like there is no such thing as “time” to “think” about anything outside the job. When sleep and family time fall consistently to the bottom of the time rung, the young lawyer perceives no time to consider long-term career considerations. If they are grossly dissatisfied, the quick fix is to leave — find another firm, migrate into the private sector from the public sector, or go “in-house” to the legal department of a company. Ironically, depending on the lawyer’s professional and educational “pedigree,” headhunting recruiters usually instigate change, not the lawyer. However, legal recruiters work in the best interests of their clients and give little, if any, consideration of the young lawyer’s goals past their resume’d credentials. There is no opportunity for evaluating the criteria of job transition when the recruiter needs an answer that day on a highly competitive job offer. The “golden hand-cuffs” of the law firm environment can also keep an unhappy lawyer in inertia and continuous self-recrimination.
While lawyers are adept at providing sound strategies for their clients and provide thoroughness of all considerations, they do not provide this same care to their own careers. To engage in serious, pro-active career planning, including self-assessment and career research — for the sake of satisfaction and personal fulfillment — is clearly not the norm among law students, graduating JDs or practicing attorneys.
- As a Unique Sociological Class, Lawyers can be subject to Psychological Paradigms Which Inhibit Stepping Boldly into the Adventure of Self-assessment and Career Transition.
Benjamin Sells, a noted psychotherapist for lawyers, lawyer and author of “The Soul of the Law–Understanding Lawyers and the Law,” offers the following:
“One in four lawyers experiences feelings of inadequacy and inferiority in interpersonal relationships, anxiety, social alienation and isolation, or depression, all at much higher rates than the general population.”
Sells suggests that the legal system, as we know it, operates as a form of a “Tyrant” — asserting an omnipresent, unconquerable control and domination on the rest of the community — using its lawyers as watchdogs and henchmen. No person, neither President nor Pope, is “above the law.” To support the so-called “tyranny,” the lawyer must suppress or deny his/her own thoughts and sensitivities to defend and promote the continued dictatorship of the Tyrant. In so doing, lawyers must quell the murmurings of conscience and soul when the impersonal and oftimes unjust “foot stomp” of the “Giant” overpowers the Davidian cry for humane treatment and common sense.
Sells notes that one symptom of such domination is an obsessive careerism that relegates all other aspects of the lawyer’s life to second class status. Tyrants convince their “foot soldiers” that their ultimate salvation lies in complete surrender to and reliance on the dictates of the System, and that one’s conscience or personal sentiments cannot be trusted as credible sources of guidance. A secret pledge abounds within the profession – no one is permitted to disclose that “the Emperor is wearing no clothes.” To betray the “brotherhood” of the Tyrant with another way of “being” or working, means certain professional death and ostracization.
Sells also notes that many lawyers suffer from the “imposter syndrome:”
“In the imposter syndrome, this theme is an internal, secret fear that the lawyer does not know what he or she is doing and is apt to be found out at any moment. Once his or her incompetence is discovered the game will be up. Everyone will know the lawyer has been pulling a ruse, pretending to be secure and knowledgeable when in fact he or she has been winging it all along. Failure and ridicule will follow while other people, whom the afflicted lawyer assumes are not imposters, point their fingers and snicker at the imposter’s audacity and intellectual nakedness.”
It is no wonder that significant inner conflict, confusion, helplessness and despair can instigate the feelings noted above. In considering these metaphors and paradigms which operate for many, many lawyers, it is not hard to conclude that a lawyer can feel virtually imprisoned from considering alternate “life-lihoods.” A move within the law to another distinct area of the law (i.e., litigation to corporate) evokes peer disapproval or skepticism and requires a steadfast commitment to new learning and hits to the ego — including possibly “starting over.” In addition, the transitioning lawyer must avoiding a further deepening of the “imposter syndrome.”
A transitional move out of the law altogether typically requires being in touch with one’s real desires, courage, confidence, creativity, self-initiative and the commitment to place self above the “tyranny” of the firm, the client and the legal system.
“The Emperor Is Wearing No Clothes”
For the lawyer willing to crack the egg of law’s “tyranny,” and consider career alternatives, s/he must first be willing to create the mental and emotional “space” for an alternative way of being — a new view or perspective of life and “life-lihood.” First, an attorney must make the quiet time for self-assessment, introspection and discovery. Then s/he must engage inner courage to make honest assessments and truly accept “as truth” what is uncovered or created through that process. It involves rediscovering the wonder and fascination with the things, people, concepts or causes that really interest or move you. It entails a willingness to once again to rejoin self with the rest of humanity – as a motivated, energetic co-creative partner. The “lone wolf” paradigm of feeling excluded, alienated and disconnected — can be transformed into a new integration with community in which the individual can meaningfully and personally contribute and self-express.
For the law student or new law graduate, or lawyer in the first training stage of career, cracking the egg before you are “cooked” means that you have a better shot at directing yourself into an arena, environment or area of the law that is most congruent with who you are and want to be. It provides baseline criteria for those initial career decisions – which decisions profoundly affect the course and quality of your career life.
This can be achieved by embarking upon an initial period of self-inquiry. Coaching is an opportunity to examine the blueprint of the individual that has always existed — well before s/he became a lawyer or went to law school. It is also an opportunity to honor all that is phenomenal about legal training and skills by observing how else you can serve the world while honoring your innate gifts and passions. It becomes the door to a new self-creative process that can result in cutting the ties that bind you.
IT CAN START HERE!
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