Part 3 of the Leaving the Law series
00:06 S1: Welcome to the Legal Learning Podcast. I’m your host, Jolene, with the Legal Learning Center. I help pre-law students and law students with their legal journey. Today, we will hear from Dan… Dan was a practicing attorney for 3 years. Find out what led him to law and led him out of law. But first, a quick word from our sponsor, Financially Free Aspiring Attorneys is a course with over $300,000 in money saving tips, these tips apply to you whether you are in high school, college or law school, check out www.legallearningcenter.com/financially-free for more money saving tips.
00:49 S2: I’m currently an executive work comp claims consultant for a broker here in Los Angeles.
S1: You went to law school, right?
S2: Right.
00:57 S1: Okay, when did you first decide as a child or at whatever age that you thought law school was right for you…
01:04 S2: In my memory, there’s only two things I wanted to be when I grew up, I wanted to be a professional baseball player or a lawyer, so once I realized that I wasn’t good enough to be a baseball player, I think the law was something that I always sort of aspired to whether correctly or incorrectly, the visions that we all get on television growing up, I think that’s probably what influenced me the most, I thought it looked pretty cool.
01:29 S1: So what did you do to prepare for law?
01:32 S2: I don’t know if it was anything consciously preparing for it, more than it was just sort of always the plan. I should mention, I did an internship in undergrad in Washington DC, I did a semester out there, and I worked for the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, so that was sort of the first big push towards the law.
01:54 S1: Wow, that had to have been exciting.
01:55 S2: It was quite eye-opening and kind of scary, to be completely honest with you, I was 21 years old, and I was living in DC, the other side of the country, and I was working at the US Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which operated very similarly to the district attorney’s office, so I was placed in the Homicide Division, I don’t recall if that was my choice or if they selected me there, I think it was probably my choice because of the description seemed very trial-oriented, and I was basically selected to be the right-hand person for this prosecuting attorney, and so he was working on a murder case the entire time I was there, and so I saw a lot of things that I never imagined I would see especially at 21 years old, just kind of green and not knowing what I was doing, I was both exciting and really scary at the same time.
02:50 S1: Yeah, that sounds a little intense. Now, did you feel like there was any pressure from your family or your surroundings to pursue law…
03:01 S2: No, other than what I had placed on myself, because I told everybody that that’s what I was doing. I don’t have any lawyers in my family. I had some distant relatives that went to law school, and weren’t practicing they were doing higher education and that type of thing later on in my life in my career is felt like I cornered myself because I ultimately figured out what I wanted to do early, so I just went down that track and didn’t really explore other things, especially in undergrad, I think was probably… I had one focus, and so I took poli sci, history, that type of stuff. Looking back, I probably should have taken a few more business courses, that type of thing, just sort of broadened my options
03:43 S1: Did you know before going into law school, type of law you wanted to do
03:47 S2: Growing up, I said I always wanted to be either a baseball player or a lawyer, I had no real preference or leaning towards any type of law, and I’ll be completely honest with you… When I came back from my internship, I came back, I still had a year and a half left in undergrad, and I was sort of scared off of them a lot at that point, I was thinking, Oh my God, I can’t do that, I wouldn’t want that life I couldn’t do that, and so I sort of freaked out there for a little bit and sort of took a pause and I was thinking, You know what, I don’t think that’s really for me, maybe I wanna do something else. To get back to your question, I think I entered law school with the thought of going the big corporate route.
04:29 S1: Now, what state did you go to law school in
04:31 S2: I went to Notre Dame, so I went… Went to the law school in Indiana.
04:35 S1: Okay, and did you take the bar there?
04:37 S2: So by the time I graduated, while I was in law school, I actually had a great opportunity. In my second summer, I was able to get an internship at a sports agency back here in Southern California, and I loved it, and I thought, Oh my gosh, this is the perfect marriage of my interests, sports and I now have been educated in law and what a great opportunity that was. So I came back here, the second summer intern here, and then went out back for my third year, I thought, Okay, I’ll transition to support agency work, that just didn’t work out for a number of reasons, the firm that I was working with, they were actually going through a multi, multi-million dollar lawsuit and they had to file for bankruptcy. So I actually moved back to Chicago, back to the Midwest, lived there for a while. This was 2006, I wanna say. And you know what’s coming, in 2008, it was a media and marketing company, they produced live made for television sporting events, and I was working there, and the company that I worked for, I think when I got hired was about 50 people in the year and a half, before everything got bad it had shot up to about 130, they were doing a lot of growth and it was great, and then shortly after I was let go with a lot of other people, I think it shrunk back down to 35, so I returned to California, kinda reassessed, but having been trained as an attorney, educated as an attorney, it almost hurt me to have the J.D. on my resume at that point, because everybody just assumed, Oh well, he’s an attorney, he doesn’t want this job, and I just wanted a job.
06:23 S1: So what year did you graduate law school.
S2: 2005
S1: you started at this agency in 2006?
S2: Yes.
S1: Okay, and did you take the Illinois bar?
06:35 S2: No, that was another thing too. So I remember asking about four different people -everybody that I’m coming into contact with is an ex-lawyer, do I need to go be a lawyer so that I can ultimately be this… And I got really good advice for that industry, and at that moment, a question that came back to me was, Do you wanna be a lawyer or do you wanna do this? And I said, Well, no, I wanna do this.They said, You don’t need to go be that lawyer… but when I came back to California and it was ‘08 and it was like, no jobs anywhere, that’s when I think… It almost hurt me.
07:10 S1: Now, was there a point in law school when you felt like, maybe I should drop out or this just really isn’t working…
07:17 S2: Absolutely, to be honest with you, about three weeks into law school, and I looked around and I thought, Wow, these people are taking this way more seriously than I am, and I never really had to work very hard in school. I remember in junior high, I got really good grades, and the teachers would always say, Well, you know, that’s not gonna fly in high school, and then I got to high school and kind of the same thing, I just kind of floated through and I got pretty good grades, but they knew I wasn’t working very hard. And they said, Well, that’s not gonna fly in college, and then I got to college and I was still doing really well. And I remember they were telling me in college, they’re like, Well, you know, you’re gonna have to learn to study and do a lot of work in law school, it’s gonna catch up with you, and then finally they right… It was completely different, and I was probably a little unprepared for the amount of real work that it took to be overly successful academically, to your point, it was really early that I thought, Oh, maybe this really isn’t for me, but I’ve never been one to quit anything at that point, and the pressure that I had put on myself to finish and I couldn’t imagine going that far and telling everybody that this is what I was doing for my life and then putting it just…I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
08:32 S1: Yeah, I completely understand that. So was there other stuff that you did during law school that either made you think this might be okay, like you said that second summer was great, but your first summer or other externship that kinda led you into a yes or no boat…
08:48 S2: Not really. My first summer I worked for a judge. The judge that I got selected for, she was fantastic, she was just… She let me observe her courtroom a lot, and she was actually… She got me on this rotation where I would go to all the different courts, the different judges. And it was amazing. Yeah.
09:08 S1: It sounds like a good opportunity. Okay so, you lost your job in Chicago and so you came back to LA…
S2: Yes.
S1: Okay, and so then what did you do?
09:19 S2: Like a lot of people in ’08, moved back in with family, trying to figure out the next move. My brother had his own business ’cause I worked him for a while doing marketing type stuff, and then… So I remember I networked with an estate planning attorney, I sat down with her and similarly to all the other people, she asked me point-blank, she said, Your personality, the type of things that you like to do. She’s like, have you ever thought of fundraising, I had never thought about it at all, and then shortly thereafter, I got involved with a place to doing fundraising, it was sort of exactly what she thought I would be good at, and then about six months in, my boss was fired for some embezzlement from the organization, they hired a new boss and he let everybody go and started from scratch, and here I was again in less than two years having lost my second potential career, and then ultimately a friend of a friend said their company was hiring, and it was a training position for a work comp claims adjuster.
10:21 S1: And what year did you get hired? Might be 2010, 2011. Okay, and how long did you stay as an adjuster?
10:28 S2: Well, I was there not too long, and then the managing attorney of the in-house legal department met me, he knew I had a law degree, and he sort of questioned what the heck I was doing on that desk, why don’t you take this and come work for me. And so I thought, sounds great. I said, Okay, so then I studied for the bar while I was doing the adjusting, he couldn’t actually bring me over to the other side of the company for another year, which drove me crazy, so I ultimately worked for as an adjuster for just under two years, I wanna say, and then ultimately, they were able to transition me over to be the attorney, which was great ’cause I was working for the same company, it was just really funny because on a Friday, I was an adjuster on a Monday… of the very next week, I was an attorney. And so working with a lot of the same people, but on the different side of the fence, it was kind of a surreal experience to change lives over the weekend like that.
11:29 S1: Now, was it hard to study for the bar while you were working full-time?
11:34 S2: Everything’s relative, I’m married now and I’ve got two kids under five, I had so much more time to get stuff done and life was so much more simple. I didn’t realize that then and I had no clue, but retrospectively, yes, it was difficult, but it was so much easier than it would be in a situation where you got kids, you got responsibilities, that type of thing. So it was hard. I’m not gonna lie ’cause again, I was not the type of person to ever really be good at studying, I didn’t have study habits, I didn’t know how to… So it took a while to figure all that out. If you go to law school, my advice. If you take that time during that summer after you graduated, when everybody else that you know is going through the same thing, buckling down and just going for it, because you don’t know what your life is gonna ultimately turn out to be… I was lucky that when I did do it, when I wanted to take it, I didn’t have the responsibilities that I do now. I couldn’t imagine doing it now, with two children and being married and all those types of things, it’s just…
12:38 S2: I was lucky at that one, I would say,
S1: How long did you stay as an attorney?
S2: Plus or minus a couple of months, I was… Three years as an attorney.
12:46 S1: Okay, and why did you leave? Or what do you next?
12:50 S2: Well, to be honest with you, I really enjoyed it. When I first transitioned the people that I worked with were really, really great, there was a lot of camaraderie, the vibe that was there when I started, definitely wasn’t there anymore as I was getting… As I was progressing and then honestly, the work also started to get a little more tedious, and I remember… My breaking point, I knew for sure was when I was out in Van Nuys, the board and it was about 110 degrees. I was wearing a suit and it’s hot, and it was about 3:30, 4 o’clock in the afternoon of the session, the afternoon session is winding down, and this guy is screaming at me, and I’m thinking, I don’t care anymore, it sort of clicked… I just didn’t care anymore enough to fight, to argue to be as combative as it requires. that this job requires a lot of competitive… Not competitive, combativeness. And so I just didn’t have it in me anymore. And at that point, it clicked, and so I figured it was time to figure out the next move.
13:59 S1: So what year did you leave?
14:02 S2: It was 2015 or 16 when I had that moment. And then developing that next move takes a while, you can’t just… You can… You can quit because you can get upset and quit without that next move. I did leave in April of 2016. Basically, what I do now, I see a wide variety of clients, and I help navigate them through their workers competition situation, and so it builds definitely off of my role as an adjuster and as an attorney.
14:30 S1: And it sounds like it’s also missing that combative side of the business.
14:34 S2: Yeah. It’s been a good role for me.
14:36 S1: And you’ve been doing that four years… Four years?
S2: Yep, yep.
S1: Okay, and do you have to be a lawyer for that?
14:42 S2: You don’t… In fact, I’m the only one on my team who is…
14:47 S1: So if you had some advice for a pre-law student about how to kind of just, I guess, make sure they’re on the right path or anything like that, what would you tell them…
15:00 S2: I Would say a question, why are you doing it? Because when we started this conversation, I admittedly didn’t have a good why, but I think that because I didn’t have any real experience with it growing up, any knowledge of what the day-to-day was like, I was ill-prepared for getting into it when I did, also I think that you need to… I just didn’t want to admit that maybe I was wrong even back then, and so I had those blinders on and I said, No, I’m gonna go for it no matter what, it’s not something that you absolutely have to go out and decide when you’re 18, I’m going there, and that’s the only road for me, just be open, I guess, most importantly, be open to what you’re gonna be doing, what you wanna be doing and treating yourself and figure out, Am I doing this for the right reasons, or is there even a reason… I don’t think I had a real genuine… Concrete reason why I was doing it.
16:08 S1: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, okay, so if the students wanted to reach out to you directly, if they had some specific questions for you, is there a way we can reach you…
16:20 S2: LinkedIn probably be the best way. If anything that I have said resonates at all, you feel free to reach out because I had a few people that I asked what I thought was the right question at the right time, and they were good people and they were good answers for me at the time, I might not have been asking the right questions, to be completely honest with you. Absolutely feel free to reach out online and I’m happy to… Happy to help, that’s why I did this. Because it’s a big undertaking. We didn’t even get into debt and all of that pressure after the fact, after you feel that you have spent a fortune obtaining this degree of this piece of paper, and then you don’t even wanna do it anymore. There’s that element to it, so we feel tied to… Keep going. And so I know a lot of people are afraid to leave and ultimately they think, Well, I’ve done this for so long, but one thing I will also add is that people who are not lawyers, they always say, Oh, well, the JD is a great degree to have you can do anything with it.
17:28 S2: You hear that all the time, and that was also one thing that probably kept me going… I didn’t know what that meant, but I thought, Well, I might as well just have it. Because everybody says it’s a great thing to have… There are certain circumstances that I experienced where it hindered me because when the economy collapsed and I just needed a job, no one would hire me because of that, I couldn’t convince these people that I didn’t wanna do law… I actually wanted to do something else. I would never discourage anybody from doing it, but I also encourage with a giant bag of salt Because you really need to know what you’re getting yourself into, and if you don’t know what you’re getting yourself tryto figure it out first, find that out.
18:15 S1: That’s excellent advice, and it’s so true that no one wants to hire you, if you have a JD, they just assume the minute, maybe you just haven’t passed the bar yet, and the minute you pass, you’re gonna run away. And it’s next to impossible to convince them otherwise, but I think I read a similar article in Newsweek saying how great a JD is for any purpose in place of an business degree or whatever, and it’s not a business degree, you don’t… learn anything practical.
18:44 S2: No, you don’t.
18:45 S1: So thank you, Dan, you gave us so much information. It was really, really helpful.
18:50 S2: My pleasure.
18:51 S1: I’ll definitely link you up in the comments and have them reach out to you if you have any questions or anything like that, before we get to my top takeaways, let’s hear from our sponsor. Juno can offer law students 1-2% less in interest rates on their loans below government loans with no origination fees and usually cash back all this at no cost to the student. Even if it’s just for a re-fi, Juno can save you thousands. Visit joinjuno.com/p/legallearningcenter to sign up. Alright, here’s my top takeaways from the chat with Dan. First, Dan mentioned that in law school, he didn’t feel right, but he had never quit anything before. This is actually a very common feeling, we’re so used to success, that if we have a change of our mind, we feel like it’s a failure, but it’s not… Is our life and we need to do what’s right for us. So please be sure that you evaluate how you’re feeling each step of your legal journey, it is never too late to leave, and it’s not a failure. Now, second, he mentioned that having a Juris-Doctor Degree hurt him, many people go to law school because they think it’s similar to an MBA, it’s just another route to get there, and they don’t wanna go to med school, so they just don’t know what else to do.
20:21 S1: Having a Juris Doctor can actually hurt you in getting a job, because really it is meant that you become an attorney after that, so just keep that in mind. Number three, the economy really hurt his ability to work, especially in his chosen career field, now, this isn’t just something that happened to Dan, this is something that continually happens about every 10 years, there was a recession in the 90s, that severely harmed attorneys, after September 11th and in 2008 when it affected Dan. And in 2020, during the pandemic, and all of these have years worth of repercussions… So this will happen again. Someone with a four-year degree is a little bit more marketable than someone with a higher education because when you are looking for a different type of position, they assume that as soon as the economy gets better, you’re just gonna leave and take that better job. Also, Attorneys can only practice in their home state for the most part, versus somebody like a secretary or somebody with a four-year degree can travel pretty much anywhere in the United States to work, so you really are more limited in some ways, so it’s just something to keep in mind now, all the tips and so forth, the links will be in the show notes, a full transcript is available as well, and if you learned something today, please be sure to like, share, subscribe, so that others can see this podcast and it can help more people, next week we’ll be chatting with Christine Teh of The Financial Coaching regarding money mindset and some other stuff too, and it will also be the first in a three-part series on finances.
22:08 S1: Thanks.
To hear parts 1 & 2 of the Leaving the Law series visit http://legallearningcenter.com/meagan and http://legallearningcenter.com/denise
