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Leave The Law Behind: Are You Ready?

Find the courage to admit to yourself that you're unhappy.

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young lawyer associate laptop computer tech technologyIt’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

— E.L Doctorow, American novelist

One of the most frequently asked questions I get from Leave Law Behind readers is “What is my next step”?

Now, we’ve taken some steps to get to this point:

We have found the courage to admit to ourselves that we’re unhappy.

We have found the time to google search “unhappy attorney” or “JD alternatives” or any of the other terms that led you to this blog and others.

We have found the time to read and sometimes we’ll muster the honesty to email in and tell me your story or inquire about coaching or just to vent (I read every email).

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And what we’re after is the next step. “Where do we go? What should we focus on? Where should we turn?”

A guiding light

Many of you have asked me to create an online course to help us all leave the law behind, and I’m very excited to say that I’m putting the finishing touches on the course now and plan to launch the course to you all next week (contact me directly if you’d like to learn more).

And this course, and the work we’re doing together in our community, is mainly about shedding some light on our path.

Because you see, we don’t need to light up the whole path. We can’t light up the whole path. We’re on the right path, right now we are, tomorrow we will be, the next day we will be. We are on the right path, believe it or not.

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It’s just up to us to believe it, to disregard our limiting beliefs, and to shift our mindset to one that focuses on what we intend to do in our lives, not what we see as our current experience in our lives.

Focus on what we want to believe, not on what we actually see

For a long time, I was guided by what I saw in my life, and not what I wanted my life to be. I didn’t see confidence as an attorney, I didn’t see fulfillment as an attorney, I didn’t see fun as an attorney.

Instead I saw struggle in my life, I saw myself remaining miserable, I saw not much fun.

And for a long time, I believed that this was how life is. It was up to me to just roll with the punches and accept a life with recurring anxiety and that I would be a middle-of-the-pack attorney who didn’t really like his job.

And I thought hard about this, and it was programmed into my mind, so deep in my psyche, but there was this kernel, this force, this light inside of me that just couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it.

I didn’t believe it.

And this kept me going and this is what drove me to leave. I jumped in 2004 because I had some light, just a little light, but just enough to see the next baby step I needed to take.

And miraculously, when we take one step, the light then pushes forward just a bit stronger and shows us where to take our next step. And our next. And our next.

And the light gets stronger and stronger.

And then we not only stop believing that we’re a fraud or a loss-of-potential or a tragic case, but we begin to believe that we can create.

We begin to believe that we can add value.

We begin to believe that we can change the world for the better.

Oh yeah, doubts persist. The darkness creeps in. The fears are still there.

But so too is the light.

Join me. Let’s do this together. We’re thousands strong here in the Leave Law Behind community, and only growing more and more. We’re a group of like-minded people who want to make our lives better.

We are not alone. There are steps we can take. We will be home so soon.

Casey Berman (University of California, Hastings ’99), a tech executive, and former investment banker and in-house counsel based in San Francisco, is also the founder of Leave Law Behind, a blog and community that focuses on helping unhappy attorneys leave the law. 

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