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Make The Right Career Choices, Even If (Maybe Especially If) They Are Not Traditional Ones

And don't let the haters get to you.

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happy young lawyers summer associates junior associatesLawyers are notoriously risk-averse and, even within our profession, many choose safer and easier — if often more depressing — routes. If you are one of the few who choose the more interesting and exciting or simply different ones, or are just “different” by someone’s definition, then you need to know others may attack you for it. Don’t let them get to you.

When I started writing for Above the Law, an older trial lawyer sent me a pointed email asking why I did not allow comments on the blog (since at that time ATL still had comments). I told him the truth: while I was glad ATL allowed me to contribute, my time was limited, and I knew that there was no way that I could respond to comments if I received anywhere near the volume that I saw other writers received (I admit I may have been misleading myself to think that many people would be interested enough even to make comments).

The older trial lawyer’s response was fantastic. In response to my email, he sent me a color drawing of a chicken. That’s what he thought of me. It was excellent.

In response to my posts I’ve been fortunate to receive dozens of kind and generous emails (and even ones from lawyers asking to do work with our firm). I’ve also received the occasional angry email because of something I’ve written. That’s simply the way it works.

One of my colleagues recently wrote a piece where—goodness gracious—he admitted that he had made an error regarding which procedural rule applied before filing an appellate brief. We work in teams, and the error was corrected before filing, so no harm, no foul. But some high and mighty lawyers decided to spend what seemed to be a frightening amount of their free time (I suppose their work isn’t too interesting) criticizing my colleague in all kinds of ways, saying he won’t survive as a lawyer, and making other mean-spirited, inane comments, none to his face, all functionally anonymously on some other website.

My advice to my young colleague was, in short, deal with it.

He is choosing to work at our firm—where we actually try cases and not just call ourselves trial lawyers, and where he actually advises clients, goes to court, and has substantive input into matters even as a young lawyer (albeit all starting small and under supervision). He made a more daring choice than many lawyers in that he chose to work with an entrepreneurial shop less than twenty years old, with just about twenty staff and lawyers, rather than a colossus that has been around a hundred years, with hundreds of staff, where he could feel comfortable that his paycheck interests (and maybe his vanity) were better protected, but also do less substantive work—for years—than he already does as a new associate at our firm (though on the paycheck interests at an old colossus, how is Dewey Ballantine or LeBoeuf Lamb or Heller Ehrman doing these days?). And while I did give the advice, he thankfully didn’t really care at all about the comments in the first place.

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I would give the same advice to anyone else in the field who makes a non-traditional choice, or even who in some fashion others considered to be “non-traditional” (not the “traditional” gender, or ethnicity, or orientation, or graduate of a “traditional” good school for the work she or he does in the profession): deal with it. I’m not saying it’s fair, as was the case with my colleague, to be attacked by a bunch of naysayers who in that case had taken the easy way out by spending their time on a weekend complaining about a blog post where a junior lawyer had enough guts to admit he made a mistake. It is not fair. But we’re not in school anymore, where we can spend a whole lot of our time getting all worked up on how offensive everything is and then go back to our studies.

We’re in the world, and while it’s not fair, we can make the profession, and the society we serve, a bit more fair, every day, by making brave, non-traditional choices, and not letting the self-congratulatory critical idiots get us down while we do our work with colleagues we care about.

john-balestriereJohn Balestriere is an entrepreneurial trial lawyer who founded his firm after working as a prosecutor and litigator at a small firm. He is a partner at trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at john.g.balestriere@balestrierefariello.com.

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