Leaving the Law: I Can No Longer Fool Myself

December 29, 2014

Dear Anthony,

I wish you and your family a wonderful holiday filled with much love and joy!

It was truly a pleasure to work with you earlier this year. Exploring my talents with you was one of the best decisions I made this year! 

Wishing you all the best,

Annie

[Background: Annie is a 30-something lawyer who declared: “I can no longer fool myself into thinking that I will love law if I just stick with it longer.” She fell into law, which started with being groomed for it since elementary school. Her father, uncle and aunt are all successful lawyers, so it seemed like a good idea . . .  until she landed in that future to discover that she was “acutely unhappy” with almost everything about it. She wrote, “Embarrassingly, I am not quite sure that I consciously “chose” to be a lawyer… I also saw law as a way to combine many of my interests (languages, traveling, research) into one profession. Needless to say, this was incredibly naïve and not at all true of the profession.”

Annie had been baffled by her situation for over a decade, she did extremely well in pre-law studies and was a brilliant student her whole life. She learned that her extreme discontent is stemming from a significant talent mismatch with law and that her strongest abilities are sitting idle all day. Annie has the profile of a neuroscientist and is considering career paths in the behavioral life sciences.]