Temporary Career Switch? Forum

[Anonymous User]

K-JD, current second-year corporate associate.

I don't hate my job, but I hate how bad I am at it. I feel like there are some basic life/workplace skills that I never learned growing up. Prioritizing tasks, attention to detail, avoiding distraction, understanding your role, etc. This is partially due to being neurodivergent, partially because I grew up extremely privileged and never had a real job at any point in my life, and partially since I was naturally good at school, I didn't have to work that hard to do well.

I feel like I have the substantive capacity to be a good lawyer, but the basic skills one learns at any job are what I'm missing. Unfortunately, lawyers, especially corporate ones, and ESPECIALLY junior ones, are in demand much more for being exceptional at the basic skills than on substantive ones. I've been running into issues at my job where my lack of these basic skills is causing issues at my work.

I've been actively working on improving, but it's still going to take time/therapy/medication for me to break a lifetime of bad habits. Part of me wants to leave the law altogether. I've spoken to people in the space and I think I'd be a pretty decent software engineer. I feel like switching would either (a) put me in a field I'm more interested in/better suited for and I'd do better generally, or (b) is sufficiently lower-pressure that I'd be able to build up my basic workplace skills with a more forgiving learning curve than as a lawyer.

If I switch, I figure the worst that happens is that I realize I want to go back to law. In my brain it's not dissimilar to people who take gap years between undergrad and law school to see if they really want to be a lawyer, something I never did. Has anyone heard of people attempting a career switch, then going back to law after a year or two?

[TigerIsBack]

I can't speak to your specific situation, but I think it can be harder to come back to a large firm than the comparison to taking a gap year: in that scenario, you're going back to presumably an institution where you're paying to be there (school) vs. here you're trying to convince a firm to pay you a pretty significant amount of money after taking some time off (which unfortunately may suggest to firms when you try to come back that maybe you couldn't handle it the first time around), and also you wouldn't add a ton of value since they'll most likely view you as a brand new first year if you take a couple years off after only a year or so in a large firm.

That said, can you not work on building the necessary skills in your current role? What are the specific issues that you're running into? The job is hard and stressful, especially when you first start out and know nothing, so it's possible these are real issues but also possible they are exaggerated by what you perceive and that they're the normal adjustments that all juniors go through to some extent.

[Anonymous User]

A lot of these issues can be resolved by implementing your own systems. It’s not so much a function of intelligence. I’d recommend reading The Checklist Manifesto as a primer and work from there.

Some of what you mention is also a function of who you work with. Some lawyers are really hands on, others are nowhere to be seen on deals, and then there is a spectrum between. There are pros and cons to both approaches. I personally prefer hands off supervisors, but I’ve learnt to work with micromanagers are well. It kinda remains true regardless of how senior you are (unless you are the rainmaking partner).

American firms do put a lot of pressure on junior lawyers to come up the curve quickly. I would keep the plugging away and, to use a software development concept, look for ways to optimize or debug your approach to handling matters. It’s a grind but most people get there in the end.

[Anonymous User]

Man there are a lot of 2020s buzzwords here.

So you're bad at your job and suck at functioning as an adult.

Also, have you been reading the headlines? There isn't much demand for poorly trained software engineers right now. Where would you learn to be one, work for a year or two, and why would you go back into law afterwards?

[nixy]

(^this isn't at all helpful.)

OP, I'm sure there are people out there who've done something similar and have managed to get back into law, but I do think you could struggle if you try coding for a year or two and decided you didn't like that and wanted to go back. It will depend somewhat on your qualifications, but taking time off to do something completely unrelated to law, especially at such an early stage in your career, will likely set you back. Legal employers will wonder what you really want to do and you won't have enough experience and skills to be particularly valuable. And I agree that it's not like taking a gap year (time off to figure out what you want to do is very different before committing to a particular career, than after).

Have you considered just trying some other area of law for a while? Lots of people struggle with being corporate associates. Or conversely, just commit to doing something other than law. If you grew up privileged, you probably have a reasonable safety net.

[Anonymous User]

K-JD, current second-year corporate associate.

I don't hate my job, but I hate how bad I am at it. I feel like there are some basic life/workplace skills that I never learned growing up. Prioritizing tasks, attention to detail, avoiding distraction, understanding your role, etc. This is partially due to being neurodivergent, partially because I grew up extremely privileged and never had a real job at any point in my life, and partially since I was naturally good at school, I didn't have to work that hard to do well.

I feel like I have the substantive capacity to be a good lawyer, but the basic skills one learns at any job are what I'm missing. Unfortunately, lawyers, especially corporate ones, and ESPECIALLY junior ones, are in demand much more for being exceptional at the basic skills than on substantive ones. I've been running into issues at my job where my lack of these basic skills is causing issues at my work.

I've been actively working on improving, but it's still going to take time/therapy/medication for me to break a lifetime of bad habits. Part of me wants to leave the law altogether. I've spoken to people in the space and I think I'd be a pretty decent software engineer. I feel like switching would either (a) put me in a field I'm more interested in/better suited for and I'd do better generally, or (b) is sufficiently lower-pressure that I'd be able to build up my basic workplace skills with a more forgiving learning curve than as a lawyer.

If I switch, I figure the worst that happens is that I realize I want to go back to law. In my brain it's not dissimilar to people who take gap years between undergrad and law school to see if they really want to be a lawyer, something I never did. Has anyone heard of people attempting a career switch, then going back to law after a year or two?

Some thoughts on some of the items you've listed above (as someone who was also K-JD, struggled on some of this as a junior, and now a senior associate):

Prioritizing Tasks: You obviously can't always tell as a junior associate which tasks you should prioritize. This is likely a combination of not understanding what is going on and/or your seniors not being aware of other projects that you are working on and the priority of those other tasks. Unfortunately, as a junior, the people above you get tunnel vision and only want their stuff done. It likely sounds too obvious, but I've found that as a junior and now as a senior, prioritizing tasks is all about communication. Without crossing the line of being annoying (e.g. listing out every single thing you are working on an hourly basis to the senior associate), they need to be aware of the other stuff you have going on and whether the deadline they are giving you is going to be achieved. One of the best things you can do is communicate your other obligations and make sure you are prioritizing things based on the responses you get.

Attention to Detail: For me this just got better with time. As a junior, probably the best thing you could focus on is not to miss typos and don't make super obvious mistakes. You're not expected to flag every substantive issue because juniors don't know what those issues are. Take your time on getting the things within your control correct. Don't send out a signature page packet without checking 6x that you have included every necessary signature page. TAKE YOUR TIME, within reason.

Re: understanding your role, again I think this just improves with time. Using judgment as to whether you should ask a question/raise something is important and you'll quickly develop a sense of whether a particular issue is something that is within your role. Are you doing work in the same corporate area over and over again, or are you in some sort of rotation system? Once you boil down your practice area more, this skill will develop more quickly. Try to anticipate ways that you can help the mid- senior associate without spending a ton of time going down a rabbit hole or sending them overwhelming amounts of emails.