Gary J. Ross
It’s easy to complain about being a lawyer. The non-stop nature of private practice, with phones ringing day and night, high debt levels, high stress levels (possibly related to the debt), constant client demands, then later having to track down those same clients in order to get paid, the endless nature of it can get you down. Just last week I wrote about Five Things That Piss Me Off (or something like that), and I named five completely new things that can suck about being a lawyer. It’s hard out there, so it’s easy to get down on your profession.
When you get down on being lawyer, just about any other alternative can look good. You walk down the street and see people renovating a new building, and think to yourself, “Maybe I could be a construction worker!” Or you see a rat scurry across the sidewalk in front of you and think, “I could be in the mafia!” (Bad news: the mafia might not let you quit your lawyer job.) Or you’re surfing the internet for stories about false prophets, and you come across an article about Mixed Martial Arts. There! Maybe that’s the ticket. You could be a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter. Perhaps trying to decide whether to continue as a lawyer or chuck it all to be an MMA fighter doesn’t sound like a very hard decision at all.
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But before you go down the hall to give the partner that speech you’ve been dreaming of for years, stop and think. Which is the better career, lawyer or MMA fighter? Let’s compare the two.
Clothes
We all want to look good right? MMA fighters can only wear shorts. So clothes-wise, they really don’t have much to work with. On the one hand, if you’re spending five hours or more in the gym every day like these guys, then you probably look pretty good bare-chested.
Lawyer bods have to stay covered, which 95% of the time is a good thing. On the other hand, unlike MMA fighters, we can completely dominate someone and not get our suit ruffled. People on the business end of a lawyer are often left a broken, whimpering mess, just like a person who’s lost a particularly brutal MMA match. Except we don’t have to get blood out of our clothes afterwards.
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Advantage: Lawyer
Hours
Nolo contendere. MMA fights last something like 15 minutes! I would be totally fine with spending five hours in the gym every day if I only had to bill for 15 minutes a day to keep the practice going. Sign me up!
Advantage: MMA Fighter
Respect
Have you seen Say Anything? It’s an actual hour-and-a-half movie, and it doesn’t just consist of Jon Cusack holding a boombox so Ione Skye (who?) can hear her favorite Peter Gabriel song. Her dad — she has the same dad as Frasier — disapproved of Cusack’s desire to be a professional kickboxer. It’s this disapproval that drives the movie. Had Cusack wanted to be a lawyer instead, the movie would have been a lot shorter, and we could gotten right to the boombox serenade everyone wants to see. Also, her dad ends up in a federal penitentiary in the end, so maybe Cusack really should have been a lawyer instead. After all, what good is it to have a son-in-law who’s a kickboxer when you’re in prison? Maybe he could have showed the old man a few moves to help him survive on the inside. But I’m thinking what her dad really wanted is to get out, and having a son-in-law who’s a lawyer would have been much more useful for that. Assuming Cusack didn’t aspire to be something like a landlord-tenant lawyer.
Advantage: Lawyer
Hot chicks
Have you been to an MMA fight? I have. This one’s no contest.
Advantage: MMA Fighter
Eye Gouging
If you’re a lawyer and most days people are trying to gouge your eyes out and you are not a state prosecutor, you may be doing something wrong. Try to change your negotiating style into something a little less combative.
In MMA, eye gouging is part of it, no? When I googled “eye gouging” & “MMA”, all these videos came up that I didn’t have the stomach to see. So let’s just cut this short and say…
Advantage: Lawyer
Verdict: Lawyer 3, MMA Fighter 2
Lawyer wins again! It’s almost as if I’m fixing these to reach a certain outcome.
If your only career options are punk rocker, MMA fighter, and lawyer, I think you have to choose lawyer. Maybe as a lawyer you have it better than you thought, and if it doesn’t feel like it, maybe it’s just your particular situation. If you’re in Biglaw and you’re thinking about being an MMA fighter, maybe it’s time to make the move to SmallLaw and be your own man/woman/indeterminate. It can be just the kick in the pants you need. Trust me: there are times when it’s as intense as an MMA fight. But with less eye-gouging.
Gary J. Ross opened his own practice, Jackson Ross PLLC, in 2013 after several years in Biglaw and the federal government. Gary handles corporate and securities matters for startups, large and small businesses, private equity funds, and investors in each, and also has a number of non-profit clients. You can reach Gary by email at [email protected].