The Road Not Taken: What Color Is Your Fabric Safety Device?

If you know how you want to spend your day, you can take one of the aspects of your career you control and direct it to a path that is more likely to lead to career fulfillment instead of resentment.

“I like to argue, so I’m going to be a lawyer.” It’s an adorable sentiment that is frequently expressed by high school students and young college students. It’s graduation season, and young people are embarking on the journey to find a career. These kids may have had career counselors suggest law to them because of an aptitude for debate, writing skills, or an obstinate personality. This, and a career-aptitude test, may have been all the thought put into pursuing a legal career. Once in law school, however, most of us take the job offered, if there is one.  Once practicing, most of us will stay with the reliable job even if we hate it because the job we know is better than the job we don’t have.

It’s an obvious statement that every lawyer’s job is not the same. This isn’t frequently discussed when we talk about law as a career. We talk about subject matter: environmental law, entertainment law, corporate law, medical malpractice.  But when you are six years into your career, find yourself filling out the same form every day, and yet another insurance defense file lands on your desk, if what really inspires you is to dig through everything you can find to piece together a defensible position for a client, it doesn’t matter if you have fulfilled your youthful dream of practicing environmental law.

Ultimately, only a very lucky few of us get to choose our subject matter, either at the beginning of our career or as a lateral. Most of us go where the jobs are as summer associates, and then as newly minted attorneys. After a few years entrenched in a specific practice area, we are marked with that practice area and it is very difficult to change. Subject matter specialization seems so glamorous on a law school website, but it is the immediate need of the hiring law firm rather than a young attorney’s interest that determines how we spend our careers.

If we don’t control our subject matter specialization, what can we control? Within each subject matter, there are various types of law to be practiced; the activity that makes up our actual jobs, not what we tell other people we do. If you know how you want to spend your day, you can take one of the aspects of your career you control and direct it to a path that is more likely to lead to career fulfillment instead of resentment.

I’ve noticed some distinct types of law during my career. I haven’t taken a thorough survey of every job in the legal industry and the list below is based solely on my observations during my career.

Perfect Repeater:

The Perfect Repeater is detail oriented and can mold his work to meet the standardized requirements of his milieu. Give a Perfect Repeater a template and tell him to make sure his work fits within the template and he will feel gratified turning chaos into a recognizable structure. A Perfect Repeater can excel in crafting conforming pleadings or form-heavy work.

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Nancy Drew Investigator:

Like her namesake, the Nancy Drew Investigator digs around her environment and picks up clues to solve her case. The resolution of the case can be secondary, but Nancy’s real joy is in the investigation. She can pick through depositions, trial records, and corporate documents, and find the clues that everyone else has overlooked. Give Nancy a mystery and she’ll doggedly pursue it until she unmasks the real culprit and clears her desk for the next mystery. Nancy Drew Investigators can be found reviewing a trial record to find issues for appeal, digging through discovery documents preparing for litigation, or a transactional attorney resurrecting the history of a poorly documented deal.

Puzzlemaster:

The Puzzlemaster figures out clean solutions to complex conundrums. The Puzzlemaster is a problem-solver, a solution-master. The Puzzlemaster thrives on variety and creativity. Solving conflicts that appear impossible are the Puzzlemaster’s joy.  You see Puzzlemasters putting together trial strategy, providing solutions to quarreling couples struggling through divorce and child custody issues, or creating the structure and contract documents for novel business opportunities for corporate clients.

Ringmaster:

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This is where I put people who frequently present information in front of others. Ringmasters are impressive organizers of information and compelling storytellers. A Ringmaster can take the information available to him and present it to his audience, whether it is an audience of fact-finders, clients, internal customers, or the general public, to serve the Ringmaster’s purpose. The Ringmaster can include litigators, but it can also include transactional attorneys who are called upon to regularly appear in front of their corporate customers, sales, or politicians.

Most jobs have a little bit of each of these in them and most lawyers are more than capable of playing each of these roles. The question isn’t “can you do it?” but “do you want to?” Lawyers have less and less control over their careers in this new economy. If you know how you want to spend your day, you may not be able to escape the subject matter specialization where you started your career, but you may be able to move from a Nancy Drew Investigator to a Ringmaster and make the most of your skills and talents.


Celeste Harrison Forst has practiced in small and mid-sized firms and is now in-house at a large manufacturing and technology company where she receives daily hugs from her colleagues. You can reach Celeste directly at C.harrisonforst@gmail.com.