alt.legal: When I Grow Up I Want To Be A Lawyer

Wishing to not be a lawyer is practically part of the Biglaw job description -- but if you don't want to be a corporate lawyer, what DO you want to be?

Wishing to not be a lawyer is practically part of the Biglaw job description. Almost all the corporate lawyers I know have, at one point or another, bemoaned their professional plight. (If Biglaw is your heart’s delight — and yes, I know it is for some of you — then congratulations and more power to you.)

As discussed in my previous column, I began to regret my career selection almost immediately. For many years, I was one of those lawyers who complained incessantly about my job but did very little about it. Leaving the firm with all its safety and perks was scary. And I hated admitting to myself that I’d so badly fumbled my career.

As I approached 30, however, I began to freak out that I (a) was getting old (though as I close in on 35, I’d trade an organ to be 30 again) and (b) had spent nearly five years doing something I didn’t enjoy.

The question was: if I didn’t want to be a corporate lawyer, what did I want to be? In choosing to be an attorney, I’d avoided ever having to think about this question. I’ve heard law called the “conveyor belt” profession because one can literally step on and let it carry you along with very little personal reflection or decision-making. And I actually liked that. When many of my friends were going through the what-am-I-doing-with-my-life, exploratory early twenties, I felt smug that my career path was laid out for me like a red carpet.

Little did I know that I was just delaying my own career crisis by a decade, when those friends of mine who’d seemed so lost in their early twenties suddenly had titles that began with “Director of” or “Vice President.”

Deciding I wanted to get out of corporate law was one thing, figuring out what I wanted to get into was another. After so many years on the conveyor belt, where would non-automated steps take me? The vastness of options felt paralyzing. Was any career now on the table, including my childhood dream of being a large-animal veterinarian/fashion designer?

I’m a girl who likes boundaries and I wanted my legal experience to count for something, so I limited my search to careers where my background would be at least marginally relevant.

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Early in my job search, I got an informational interview with the head of a talent agency that represented “creatives” in the TV and movie business. Though I’d never considered being a talent agent before, I decided this was my new destiny and prepared for the meeting by spending two days in bed watching re-runs of Entourage.

I arrived at the interview wearing a vintage, cropped blue-and-red polka dot blazer, which I thought said “professional yet fun,” but really made me look deranged, like the ringleader of a patriotic circus.

The conversation went swimmingly. The head of the agency seemed appropriately impressed by my legal credentials and I thought I oozed charm from every polka dot. As we talked, I saw my new life as the next Ari Gold stretch out before me.

“Of course, you’ll have to start in the mailroom,” said the interviewer.

“Great!” I didn’t mind sharing an office with a bunch of men. And I was curious what this “male room” was all about.

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My brain literally couldn’t take in what the man said, that all my legal experience would lead me to the M-A-I-L room, like sorting the mail.

Once I figured it out, I was spooked. That law school, my firm job, even my clerkship didn’t matter, were not going to save me from having to slog through the bottom rungs of a new career, was a pill that did not go down easy.

After that interview, I scoured career sites, applying for dozens of positions in fields from journalism to human resources, trying to find some job – any job – that would not force me to go back to square one. Because my search was hard and tedious, I tricked myself into believing it was productive. But my scorched earth strategy was about as effective as throwing a bunch of résumés out the window and hoping one landed in the right hands.

There was a part of me that still believed in the conveyor belt, that I could be passive and in some grand stroke of luck the right job would present itself to me. I just wanted to be told what to do.

But after months and months of flailing around, I realized that I was going about the whole process backwards. I wanted to find a job so that it would define what I wanted to do. Instead, I needed to figure out what I wanted to do and then find job that would get me there.

The problem wasn’t starting over, the problem was that I hadn’t yet identified something I wanted badly enough to make the setbacks worth it. I didn’t want to work in a mailroom because, while it seemed preferable to a law firm, I had no burning desire to be a talent agent. I needed to find a career where I wouldn’t be afraid to be pot committed, willing to take a risk and start from scratch. Otherwise the unglamorous work of transitioning to a new field was never going to seem worth it.

I’d already made one mistake in my career choice and I knew life was not going to offer me unlimited mulligans. The question “what do I want to do with my life?” scared me sufficiently that I’d gone to law school to avoid it, but I needed an answer and it needed to be the right one.

Find out how I finally figured it out and how Melrose Place helped me do it in my next column.


Leigh McMullan Abramson is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Town & Country, Real Simple and Tablet Magazine. She attended Penn Law before working for several years in Biglaw and clerking in the Southern District of New York. Leigh is currently toiling away on a novel set in — you guessed it — a law firm. She can be reached at leigh.mcmullan@gmail.com.