So, You No Longer Want To Be A Lawyer. Now What?

Career transitions are rarely easy. Be kind to yourself as you try to find your next career path.

onMay 14, 2018 at 12:17 PM

Ed. note: This post is by Jeena Cho, a Legal Mindfulness Strategist. She is the co-author of The Anxious Lawyer (affiliate link), a book written by lawyers for lawyers that makes mindfulness and meditation accessible and approachable. She is the creator of Mindful Pause, a self-paced online program for creating a more sustainable, peaceful, and productive law practice in just six minutes a day. Jeena offers actionable change strategies for reducing stress and anxiety while increasing productivity, joy, and satisfaction through mindfulness.

Like Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, there are predictable stages that many lawyers go through, from the initial quiet longing to do something different to when she finally takes the leap to the next career path. These stages may not be linear, and you may spend a different length of time in each.

Here’s what I know: life is short. Yes, I realize that’s a bit of a cliché to say it, but you have this one life and one opportunity to fulfill your potential. Career transitions are rarely easy and the one piece of key advice I’d like to offer is to be kind to yourself as you move through the stages.

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Stage 1: The Calling

You may have some serious questions about whether you made the right decision by becoming a lawyer.

For some, it may be a matter of moving to another lawyer job — perhaps moving to a different practice group within the same firm, moving to a different firm, going in-house, or getting a government job.

For others, there’s a voice or perhaps a knowing that being a lawyer is no longer right for you. This may be because you do not enjoy some fundamental part of being a lawyer — you do not enjoy being stuck in an office all day, you hate the billable hour, you loathe the adversarial nature of litigation, and you just don’t have a passion for the law.