Biglaw, Career Alternatives, Job Searches, Media and Journalism

alt.legal: From Esquire To Intern -- My Life After Law

Do you wonder what it would be like to stop being a lawyer? Do you fantasize about starting out fresh in a completely new field?

By Leigh McMullan Abramson  
on

Note from Joe and Ed: Leigh M. Abramson, a classmate of ours from Penn Law (same 1L section as Ed!), has joined the elite ranks of alt.legal authorship! We look forward to Leigh, a professional writer and Biglaw alumna, joining our conversation about alternatives to being a lawyer… including leaving the legal industry completely. Welcome, Leigh!

Do you wonder what it would be like to stop being a lawyer? Do you fantasize about starting out fresh in a completely new field? Do you keep a mental list of all the careers that might have been if only you hadn’t gone to law school?

Well, I did.

My fellow Penn Law alums and alt.legal writers, Ed Sohn and Joe Borstein, do a fantastic job writing about entrepreneurial lawyers who are leveraging their law degrees to create a better practice of law in a rapidly changing, tech-powered, globalized legal marketplace.

I’m not going to talk about that. I’m going to talk about what happens when you want to scrap the whole enterprise, ditch your degree, excise your esquire, and the only thing you want to leverage is your unused vacation days.

For the many years I spent thinking about quitting my job, I wished there was a blog about people who had actually done it, lawyers who’d jumped ship and lived to tell the tale. So I decided to write this ongoing series for alt.legal about life after law.

Eighteen months ago, seven years after I graduated from law school, I left my law firm and began life over again as an aspiring writer. My goal was lofty and I knew it wouldn’t be an easy transition.

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As I stepped onto the lowest rung of a new career ladder, I was horrified to discover that the achievement markers we lawyers live and die by were simply no longer relevant. I learned that people in publishing weren’t particularly impressed by what law school I’d gone to, what journal I was on or how many stellar SJ motions I’d written. When I was interviewing for magazine internships, it became apparent that for most people the term “law clerk” sounds like a low-level filing job.

And, yes, I said, internships. Never was it quite so clear that I was starting over than when I was the sole summer intern over the age of twenty-five at a large magazine publisher. Did I mention I was also eight months pregnant at the time? Switching careers didn’t seem like enough of a challenge unless I was simultaneously gestating a human.

There were times when I was waddling over to the copy machine when a small voice in my head said, Do these people realize what my GPA in law school was? Do they know I used to get to boss around junior associates all day? Did I quit my job and give up my cushy law firm salary to be making address labels?

But the truth was, yes, in a way, I did.

I wanted to stop practicing law practically from the moment I reviewed my first document. I’d gone to law school straight out of college as a perverse act of rebellion against my liberal artist parents, who thought I was batty to enter any profession that required a suit and showing up at an office every morning.

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Ironically, once at law school, I went from rebel to another sheep and followed the flock into on-campus recruiting. I managed somehow to get a job at Cravath, but I was clueless and my diligence left something to be desired. See e.g., A few years ago I found my old 2005 Vault survey where I had tabbed and highlighted the firms I applied to. Cravath’s page was entirely blank except the “perks” section where I had circled in red ink “Discount at Tiffany’s.” It was a rude awakening when working at a law firm was not all about bedazzling myself with Elsa Peretti.

Despite wanting to leave, I spent several years as an associate at Biglaw firms. During rough weeks of late nights and weekends, I’d swear that as soon as I had time, I would update my résumé and start working my alumni networks. But when things slowed down, using my off time to sit on my couch eating fro-yo and watching The Real Housewives always seemed like a better idea than embarking on a job search. This cycle, btw, is the reason law firms are harder to get out of than the Gambino family.

I tried to think of ways I could use my law degree, having short-lived fantasies with various legal careers. Go in-house. Do public interest. Become a prosecutor. Alt.legal didn’t exist yet, so I didn’t know about more exciting options. These positions seemed better than a law firm (which, let’s be honest, nearly any job does when you’ve hit hour twenty of searching for a case that almost certainly doesn’t exist). But the bigger issue was that I really didn’t want to practice law in any setting. I really wanted to be a writer.

“Oh thank God,” said my mother when I told I was quitting the law, as if I’d been operating a roadside Peyote stand all those years.

I started taking writing seriously. I wrote in the morning before work and on weekends. I got something published. And after much hemming and hawing, I finally quit being a lawyer.

While an unhappy associate, I dreamed of a post-law utopia in which I’d prance around my living room to the Flashdance theme song screaming “I’m free! I’m free!” I’d finally have time to read Proust and adopt an adorable mixed-breed puppy.

The reality is a little different, though being a freelance writer certainly has its benefits. I do not have to dice up my day into six-minute increments or get asked if I can “swing by” for an impromptu Friday 6 p.m. meeting. I can spend all my waking hours in Lululemons. And I get to do something that for the most part I genuinely love to do.

Of course, writing isn’t the best career for anyone who cares about things like career stability, health insurance or, you know, money, but let’s not be gauche.

So far, I haven’t wished to be a lawyer again, even when I was a prego intern making copies. During that internship, I got to write and be published, I learned from people who knew how magazines worked, and after so many years of being noncommittal about my profession, it felt good to be all in, to be willing to do something hard and humbling because I thought it would make me a better writer.

Whether I’ll be successful and what that success even looks like are questions I obsess over hourly. The uncertainty was and still is the biggest hurdle in leaving a highly structured career path like law. Unfortunately there’s no partner track for being a writer.

I’ll be writing regularly about this uncertainty as well as everything else about the post-law life. Join me next time when we’ll discuss the dos and don’ts of a non-legal job search.

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 [email protected].

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