In-House Counsel

The Road Not Taken: It's A Trap!

As lawyers, we're all trapped, but we don't have to be prisoners.

By  
on

You started your quest with the best intentions. You wanted to be a lawyer. You went to law school. You graduated. You passed the bar. You got a job.  And now, a few years later, you’re here. Twenty pounds heavier, you haven’t spent any real time with your friends in months, your relationship with your significant other is on cruise control. You feel out of control, powerless, and unappreciated at work. Your brain is unstimulated with the umpteenth variation of the same thing coming across your desk. Really? This is what you wanted? If you knowingly walk into a trap and the trap snaps shut, is it still a trap?

For most people, becoming a grown-up feels like a trap. We move from having no obligations, no ties, no responsibility, to being responsible not just for ourselves, but for others. We buy expensive things, and our material possessions become more valuable to us than the non-tangible gifts life gives to everyone. Inch-by-inch, we walk into the trap with our eyes wide open. Why are we surprised when the trap snaps?

Lawyers are especially susceptible to becoming voluntary prey. Our jobs are demanding and the education expensive. We are trapped from the day we enroll in our 1L year. Every day that passes, from the day we looked to our left and to our right and were told that only one of us would be there in three years, traps us even more. Some days it feels like the other two people were the lucky ones. We deal with clients who are seldom in a good place. When a client retains a lawyer, he doesn’t get a shiny new toy after paying the legal fees. When a person retains a lawyer, what that customer wants is, generally, an agent to handle hassles. Those hassles could be conflict, like a lawsuit or divorce, or transactional, like buying something large or negotiating business contracts. This means you, the lawyer, may not receive significant job satisfaction from a job well done because your customer, although perhaps satisfied, has nothing tangible to show for what he paid for your services.

Add to this superiors who manage like dictators.  Lawyers are not given management training in law school. Lawyers are usually managed by other lawyers, who learned management “on the job” and may not be effective, inspiring leaders. Our colleagues, like us, are ambitious and competitive. In an ecosystem without a strong alpha at the helm, the less dominant players fight among each other to establish primacy. We are stressed at work within an unreliable support system, then we go home, exhausted, to loved ones who resent the second-place status they hold to our career. All we want at this point is some freedom (and a lot of sleep). Freedom from the obligation to go into an office to a job that has consumed all our joy and freedom from the personal obligations that make leaving the job impossible.

You are trapped. Being trapped feels inherently violative, but at its core, it is part of our existence as social creatures. We are all trapped by something in some way. What matters is whether we make the most of our chosen trap.

Now that you realize you are trapped, what can you do? Does a trapped animal ever escape the trap? More importantly, now that you realize you are trapped, do you really want to escape?

Feeling trapped and recognizing it can be helpful if you truly want to change your life. If your subconscious is telling you that you want something different, but the practical you finds comfort in the security of the status quo, the sense of growing and brewing desperation can be the trigger that makes you take action.

Sponsored

Feeling trapped can also be a symptom of the luxury of entitlement, but of a sort unlike what you were entitled to in college. You now feel entitled to the benefits of a secure job, a family you can support, and a career that on its better days provides some level of intellectual stimulation. But missing the old entitlement doesn’t make the newer one less valid.

You can do something for each trap. For the former, you can identify what changes you need to make and put together a plan to make those changes. For the latter, you can reframe how you think of your life. You can be present in the things that bring you joy today and release the desires of the past.

We’re all trapped, but we don’t have to be prisoners.

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 atC.harrisonforst@gmail.com.

Sponsored

Topics

, , ,