Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Escape Plan: The Lawyer's Guide to Moving On Without Burning Bridges
At the year's midpoint, many attorneys find themselves contemplating their career path - distant enough from their last bonus but not yet focused on the next one. This critical juncture prompts the fundamental question: "Is this where I want to be?" Drawing from both personal experience and observations as a firm owner, I explore the delicate art of recognizing when it's time to move on and executing that transition with professionalism and integrity.
The markers of career dissatisfaction often appear gradually. While everyone experiences challenging days or weeks, consistent unhappiness over months signals it's time for change. I recommend implementing a simple system to track your professional satisfaction, evaluating factors like compensation alignment, work-life balance, colleague relationships, client satisfaction, intellectual stimulation, feeling valued, and organizational direction. When multiple areas consistently disappoint, it's time to explore new opportunities.
Leaving a legal position requires careful planning and execution. I advocate providing generous notice (4-6 weeks minimum) while simultaneously preparing financially for potential immediate termination. The most successful transitions involve proactive case management, clear client communication, and thorough documentation that allows seamless continuity of representation. Even when departing, maintaining professional bridges creates possibilities for future collaboration and referrals, while burned bridges permanently limit opportunities.
Have you contemplated a career change recently? What signals would indicate it's time for you to move on? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the reviews or connect directly through my website. And if you're enjoying these Friday solo episodes, or would prefer different content, please let me know - your feedback shapes the podcast experience!
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
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Hello everybody, welcome into another Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and build the kinds of law practices they actually like showing up to on Mondays. We are fast approaching the middle of the year, and this, I think, is the time of year where lawyers start thinking about whether this is the right law firm for them. Right, you're like six months five months removed from your year-end bonus, and you're looking six months down the road at next year's year-end bonus and wondering, after that hits, what happens next? Are you in the kind of place that you want to be for the next couple of years, for the rest of your life, or not, for another day? And so today's episode is a dive into an episode that I released back in 2023, back when this show had a different name and a much smaller listenership, so you probably have not heard it before, but one of the things that I'm doing recently is going back through the old episodes, trying to figure out what needs a refresh, trying to figure out what I can just put out again and trying to figure out if there's anything new that I haven't already said to this audience. So if you enjoy these Friday solo episodes, let me know. If you do without them, let me know that too, because I don't want to be producing stuff just to produce it every week. I'm getting ready in next week actually next Saturday to take off to Italy for three weeks with the family and trying to make sure that you have the content that you regularly expect coming out on Tuesdays and Fridays in the meantime, but I don't want to do it just to do it, and so if you aren't getting anything out of these Friday solo episodes, let me know that kindly. And if you love them and don't want me to stop producing the Friday solo episodes, let me know that too.
Speaker 1:And so, without further ado, here is an episode from 2023, back when the show was titled Time Freedom for Lawyers, about when and how to quit your job. Change happens and it's perfectly okay. The job that was once great for you and fulfilled all of your dreams might not be the job that's great for you anymore, or it may never have been great for you, and you're just getting around to designing the kind of life that you want to have, because you know that you deserve having a life that lights you up, kind of life that you want to have. Because you know that you deserve having a life that lights you up, and because you now realize that this is not a great place for me, it's time to move on with your life. So let's first start by acknowledging that change doesn't always have to be a bad thing, and, for you, moving on to a next job that's going to be wonderful is a good thing. How do you know when it's time to leave?
Speaker 1:So I've always thought that you can have a bad day, you can have a bad week, you can even have a bad month, but if you find yourself having a bad quarter or having a second bad quarter, then it's really time to start thinking about whether you'd be happier somewhere else, and so my first piece of advice on this would be to just start tracking. If you don't already have a consistent journaling or tracking system, for your happiness, it's a good idea to just start monitoring that, just checking in with yourself on it. It doesn't even have to be daily. Daily is great. Daily is hard to keep up with, especially if you're like me and you have kids. Weekly is just fine Checking in. What are the highlights of my week? What are the lowlights of my week and if you find yourself consistently not being able to answer the highlights or not being excited about what the highlights of your week were, then maybe it's starting to think about. Okay, it's been four or five weeks and as I sit down on a Friday or a Saturday, I can't come up with what is the highlight for this week. Because there were no highlights, because I'm truly unhappy in this job. It's time to start thinking about moving on.
Speaker 1:So the criteria that I think about in 2023, and it hasn't always been my criteria and it might not be your criteria, because life circumstances are different but the things that I think about it are am I making the kind of money that I want to make? Do I have the kind of life outside of work that I want? Am I working with people that I like? Am I working for clients that I like? Am I working on projects that are intellectually stimulating and do I wake up excited to solve those problems or do I wake up dreading the problems? Do I feel valued by the company that I'm working for and do I like the direction that the company is going in? And, if you're finding that, the answers to some or most or all of those questions are consistently no, then it's really time to start thinking about looking for opportunities outside of your current job.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you a couple of stories by way of example. So the first law firm that I was at, I was there for six months. I had no training whatsoever. I was just thrown into all kinds of different cases because it was a general practice firm and I was not somebody who was going to be good in a sink or swim environment. And so I recognized that and I moved on to the next firm that I was at. Next firm that I was at, I was in an environment where I really was growing my individual, siloed business. But I didn't feel like I was growing something larger than myself. And at the time I wanted to grow something larger than myself and so I moved on. I wanted to be in a practice where I had the opportunity to have true ownership and to have truly a business that could operate with systems where I didn't have to be the one plugged in day to day, and if I went on vacation or if I didn't show up for a couple of days, things would still get done. And I recognize that that's not for everybody. Not everybody wants the risk of being an entrepreneur, not everybody wants the risk of being a business owner.
Speaker 1:And so, from an employee's perspective, I'll just tell you the story of how my wife left her last job. So she's an HR IT professional. She'd been at essentially a startup. They had 16 employees when they hired her on, grew with that company to 80 employees and then they got acquired, and they were acquired by an 800 person behemoth and all of a sudden she went from knowing everybody in the company which she really enjoyed She'd onboarded every single person in that 80 person company to being one of the many people in the sea in this 800 person company. In addition to that, they're cleaning up three different payroll systems across three different vacation and leave policies and trying to bring all of these things together in a way that really was just pissing off all of the employees. And so her life really became a series of meeting after meeting, angry email after angry email, and we found ourselves like she was getting up at five in the morning to answer emails until seven when our kids woke up, and then was getting back on the computer after seven, 30, when our kids went to bed, to answer more emails and I'm like you were working harder than I am and I own a law firm.
Speaker 1:You're just an employee, so let's talk about how we can separate you from your current employment and go and find something better. And the whole point of that is is this you've got one life you've got. We spend a third of our life at work most of us so let's act like our lives are worth it, and when we're in an environment where we are beating our heads against the wall week after week after week and having bad month after bad month, let's pick ourselves up out of that environment, because we can, because we live in America, the land of opportunity, and because there are tons and tons. Even in a recession, even when AI is coming for people's jobs, there are tons of opportunities to go and make your life better. And so I want to encourage you if you are in a job where months are ticking by and it's not getting any better and you don't see a light at the end of the tunnel, to pick yourself up and go find something else to do.
Speaker 1:How do you leave? As a person that has left jobs, and as a person who has had employees now leave jobs, I think you want to give plenty of lead time. If you want any kind of goodwill, especially in a professional environment like you, have to give more than two weeks notice. Here's the thing, though and this is asymmetric risk for the employee you have to be personally prepared to be fired on the spot, right? So this is unfair and life's not fair and that's just too bad, but the deal is that you can't control the way that anybody else acts or what they do, but you have 100% autonomy over the way that you act, and so if you want to have the opportunity to create goodwill and referral relationships and a good business environment going forward, then you've got to give this plenty of lead time and you've got to be prepared that you might be fired on the spot, especially in the legal profession.
Speaker 1:I think you should give four to six weeks at least, but again being prepared that they might say thank you, and by the time you get back to your desk, all your stuff has been turned off, and so if I were thinking about leaving a job, I would be doing things like storing cash. I would probably turn off my 401k contribution for a little bit, and I would build up enough of a cash cushion that if I gave four or six weeks of notice and I was immediately terminated, I would have that month's cushion sitting there. I also, if I were applying for jobs, I would want to be only applying for jobs where, number one, they were giving me the amount of time to tell my former employer that I'm not going to work there anymore. But also and I just made this offer to the young lawyer that we're hiring here shortly I'll give you a late start date. If, by chance, your current firm just fires you on the spot, you can start earlier, right, because I want you to come here and I want your life to be great, and so I want to bend over backwards for somebody who's making that effort to their former firm to generate goodwill by taking them on before they're ready. Now, she gave notice. She gave, I think, two months of notice, which is fantastic. They didn't fire her. I haven't had to take her on, but we could have if we needed to.
Speaker 1:Like I said, I've left two legal jobs in my life. The first one I gave four weeks notice. I was ready to be fired on the spot. I thought I was going to be fired on the spot. I gave four weeks notice, I wasn't fired. And then the most recent one, I gave three or four months of notice, plenty of lead time. I had one big trial that was on the horizon. I wanted to do it still under the umbrella of that firm, because I had been at that firm when we generated the case and so I wanted the fee to flow through that firm and I certainly didn't want it to feel as though we were stealing that case and going somewhere else with those fees.
Speaker 1:But on the flip side, I've had critical people in both businesses leave on 11 days notice and then more recently on four days notice, and it sucks. It sucks because your employer has to scramble to cover your work, find a replacement for you and do the rest of their own work in the meantime. And as an aside, when you do that, you get no goodwill. Being entrepreneurial and talking about living your best life and talking openly about how people build businesses and sometimes helping them build side businesses, one of the things that happens is we tend to spawn entrepreneurs. It's just a side effect of preaching what we preach.
Speaker 1:And so as people go off and they start their own business, one of two things can happen If you give us plenty of lead time, we can figure out a way that our two businesses can be complimentary, especially if they're not going to compete with us. You might have a coaching program for something that's not in legal that we can refer legal people to. That would be a win-win, maybe with a referral fee coming back, maybe not, I don't know. But it can be a win-win if you set it up the right way and you leave with all kinds of goodwill. But what happens when you leave and there's no goodwill is that people ask about you and we have oh, I forgot, I don't know where they went. We certainly don't have to refer anything to anybody, but it makes us much, much, much less likely to do it if you've left kind of scorched earth behind you. And of course all the lawyers know that there are ethical rules surrounding who the client goes with or chooses.
Speaker 1:As a lawyer who's been handling a file departs a law firm and the split is either amicable or not, it actually doesn't matter if it's an amicable split or not, but as a lawyer leaves a firm, the lawyer who's been primarily responsible for the handling of that case gets to have some kind of a discussion with the client and let the client make a decision about do I stay with the firm that I've been with, do I go with a new law firm or do I select my own new lawyer and just start all over? And the way that I've handled this both as I've left firms and as I've had lawyers leave my firm is first by sitting down with the other lawyer or with the law firm and going over my case list and trying to amicably split up the cases. Yes, at the end of the day, it's always the client's decision, but it sucks when you're in that what lawyers call like the joint letter situation, which is where both the firm and the departing lawyer send a letter to their client saying here are your three choices, because nobody wants them to go out and find an entirely different lawyer. But you have to give them that choice, and so the better way to do it is to have this amicable split and then give the lawyer who's leaving, give them permission to just call the client and say hey, I'm leaving. Here are your options Do you want to stay? Do you want to go? Do you want to find somebody else? And most of the time, if you get personal reach out from the lawyer that's been handling the case, the client like nine times out of 10, they're going to go with that lawyer. And if you've had this amicable split about what are we going to do with the fees going forward, how are we going to transition the client's file If you've had all that discussion before you have to send the letter? That's a far, far better result both for the lawyers and for the law firm and for the client.
Speaker 1:And but this is why I've been preaching to young associates both on this show and everywhere else is that your security blanket is client contact. You want clients to think of you as their lawyer. This is especially the case if you're at a big law firm or if you're a young to a middle associate who has the capability and has the time and has the bandwidth to do some of the softer client development stuff that the partner might not be doing. Because if you get discharged or if you leave, you want to at least have the possibility of taking some business with you. And if you're in the background just doing all the work but you have none of the client communication, ain't no clients that are going with you when you decide that you want to leave, and this really, as a law firm owner, you could hear this and you could say, screw that, I'm not going to let my associates have that client contact. But the flip side of that is your business is never going to grow beyond your capacity if you're always the one having the client contact.
Speaker 1:Your job as the law firm owner is to provide such a great place for your associates and your junior partners to work that they don't actually want to leave that, for your associates and your junior partners to work that they don't actually want to leave, that they don't want to leave and take clients with them to a new space. And so that's the fine line that we walk. You want it to be really good and I want to build a business, so I need you talking to the clients. But I have to know that if I failed in some way to make this really really good for you, that's a risk. You can take my clients and you can go somewhere else, and so always thinking about how can we create the win-win for our current employees, but as employees leave or as we're the departing lawyer, thinking about how can we create a win-win on the way out. And after you've gotten through those steps, here's what I would do if I were the departing lawyer leaving a firm and I had maybe two or three weeks left in my runway.
Speaker 1:You're always going to leave a case summary for whoever's taking over your files. When's the last time you talked to the client? What's a case status? Please don't make them dig through 500, 1,000, 1,500 pages of medical records and correspondence to figure out where the hell you left off. Write down the conversations that you've had with the client. Write down your current thinking about the status of the case. Leave them everything that they need to do a great job for the client. Leave all your passwords and your logins in one place, because it may be the case that the old firm needs to get into some of your stuff because you said something in the departure memo that you thought was really clear but that isn't, and so they may need to look in a place that the associate or the junior partner who's taking over your file, like they, might not have immediate access to. So leave all your passwords and logins in one place and go overboard in getting this right. Like you built a reputation at the company or at the law firm over a number of years, however long you were there and it really only takes two shitty weeks at the end of your employment to ruin the rest of that reputation. I think you also have to accept that you're probably going to be the whipping boy on your way out.
Speaker 1:When I used to wait tables, if I screwed something up, I almost always blamed the kitchen, not necessarily proud of that, but it was the easiest way to explain to a table of guests waiting on their food oh, the kitchen burned something, oh, the kitchen forgot to fire something. And that's exactly what happens when lawyers leave law firms Like oh, john didn't think of that or didn't put that in the memo, I don't know, maybe he did, maybe he didn't, maybe you didn't see it the first time around, but that's just what happens as people leave places. Like they get blamed and you just got to be okay that you're getting blamed to a former client for stuff that was done or wasn't done on the file and certainly for any delays that happened in the case that you touched after you left. And then the last thing that I would say is keep in touch. Like departures are weird.
Speaker 1:It's always a weird dynamic when you've decided, for whatever reason, that this place is no longer the best place for you. Sometimes there's hurt feelings, sometimes there's hurt wallets as you take money out of your firm's pocket and put it into your own, but there's always a win-win to be found and there's always room for working together. In the future, like you, may become the subject matter expert in some hyper-specific niche that the firm would love to refer cases to you if you just hadn't burned that bridge. And so keep all the bridges standing, look for win-wins, but always, always, always, be putting your own happiness and your family's security above anything that any company is doing, because that is paramount. Okay, that's it Until next time. I'll talk to you guys later.
