Part 2 of the Leaving the Law series
00:04 S1: Welcome to the Legal Learning Podcast. I’m your host, Jolene, and with the Legal Learning Center, I help pre-law students and law students with their legal journey. Today as part two of our leaving the law series, we will hear from Denise, Denise was a practicing attorney for eight years before she left the practice of law to become an event production coordinator. Stay tuned to find out why someone would spend so much time, effort and money to become an attorney, just to walk away at the end, you’ll hear my top takeaways from this chat. But first, a quick word from our sponsor, Financially Free Aspiring Attorneys is a course with over $300,000 in money saving tips, so if you want go to law school but don’t want pay for it, this course is right for you. Visit legallearningcenter.com/financially-free for more information. Let’s get into the call.
When did you first as a youngster, decided that law might be right for you?
01:09 S2: I actually decided really early on, I was somewhere in middle school, about 13 years old, give or take, and honestly, I don’t know exactly what it was, it was a little bit of TV influence and parental influence, but I thought being a lawyer sounded really cool. And my mom said I was pretty good arguing things, most likely in a joke, but starting in high school, I started to be very focused on going to law school and becoming a lawyer.
01:43 S1: And that was actually going to be my next question is, did you feel like there were outside influences. like your parents, that kind of pushed you along that path…
01:50 S2: I actually don’t think that there were a lot of outside influences pushing me, but there were influences that I took in, and I feel very much like that was the decision I made early on, and people absolutely supported me, but I didn’t have parental pressure to do it, my mom was very open to me doing anything, but I was pretty headstrong as a kid, so she was like, Okay, if this is what you’re doing, then I’ll get behind it.
S1: What was your family background as far as were you the first to go to college or… What was that like?
S2: Sure, yeah. So I was not… I have an older brother and an older sister. They both went to college. My brother majored in Business, my sister majored in fashion, yeah, we’re all a little bit all over the place, but I’m the baby, I’m the baby baby by many years, and so even though I had great influences around me, both of my siblings, they were much older than me, they’re 10 plus years later than me, so it was very much kind of like an only child situation.
02:57 S1: Did you know before you went into law school, what area of law you want to do?
03:02 S2: No, I had no idea at what area of law I wanted to pursue and didn’t even… I would say I didn’t fully appreciate the breadth of areas that you could go to, or the different ways that you could go into long… Going through high school and into college, I worked quite a bit in law firms, so I did have some experience in in small areas, but I really just… I didn’t really have a clue.
03:34 S1: So what did you do in law school to try to figure out what you wanted to do?
03:40 S2: Survive. I thought by the time I got to law school, I did think I wanted to pursue a more criminal type of defense or prosecutorial work. So I did, I worked… I tried to get internships or summer program work opportunities to work in different firms or different areas of things that I thought I might wanna do, and they were super invaluable because they showed me what I did not want very quickly.
04:10 S1: What did you do with your summers?
04:13 S2: For my first summer, I worked here in Los Angeles at the CCB with a criminal defense attorney for the state, and it was amazing and wonderful experience, I learned so much and gained a lot of insight, but it was heartbreaking and really challenging, so I decided it was very helpful in helping you to decide to not go in to criminal law. And then my second summer, I was just with a civil firm, it wasn’t really anything super memorable, and in all honesty, I kind of barely remember it, but it was the most comfortable for me at the time, and it was a good job, so I went with it,
SI: And did you do any externship while you were in school?
S2: I worked in a lot of different places in a lot of different ways, but I spent some time in Germany. I did an overseas program during the school year, and it was really, really cool, but it was mostly… It was more school than work, but they had a small internship type of program with it. It was cool.
S1: That’s really cool.
05:19 S1: So did you take any classes that you felt like helped gear you towards your future career?
S2: No.
S1: Okay, so just… Just anything and everything.
05:29 S2: Yeah, yeah, so I went to Pepperdine and they did start to have, employment law and workers compensation type of classes, which at the time weren’t super common, and so that is ultimately kind of the field I ended up going into. I took a lot of estate planning class, it’s a lot of property type of courses, that was definitely the field that I liked the most and did the best in, but I didn’t… That was another field that I didn’t end up going into because family law is really challenging and I didn’t want to… I struggled with having to navigate the family aspects of a lot of that kind of stuff.
S1: Okay, so what year did you graduate?
S2: Gosh, I don’t know… I graduated in 2008.
S1: What type of a firm did you work for first… What type of law?
S2: The first law firm that I really worked for was just civil and they did some personal injury and some property.
S1: And how long were you there?
S2: About a year. And that was because in 2008, when I graduated, it was the year of the crash, they kind of had to fall back, they didn’t really go under, but they had to pull back
06:54 S1: After your first job… Where did you end up?
06:57 S2: So after the first time, I actually was kind of a cool story. So I was having coffee with a friend, we were in a little cafe, and I was essentially complaining about law school and how it doesn’t prepare you for anything, and feeling frustrated because I kind of had already knew what I knew, and I felt like I wasn’t really being exposed to other things that I wanted to know, and this woman happened to be in the cafe and she owned her own firm, and she did workers comp, and she overheard me and we ended up talking and her firm was close, and so we ended up negotiating a part-time job with her firm, and from there, I got into comp…
07:47 S1: Well, okay. That was around what, 2009?
07:50 S2: That was in 2009.
07:51 S1: Okay, and so how long did you work for her?
07:55 S2: So I ended up working for her for about two years, and then as her firm was growing, she decided to go more into the plaintiff side work, and I liked defense work, and I got an amazing opportunity at a larger firm and took it…
S1: And how long were you at the larger firm?
S2: I was there for about two years.
S1: So about 2010-12-ish.
S2: Yeah, something like that.
08:24 S1: So All work comp defense.
S2: All work Comp defense.
S1: After that where did you end up…
08:30 S2: I ended up in-house is in-house at a large insurance company.
S1: And how long were you there?
S2: Almost four years.
S1: Alright, and was that also work comp defense…
S2: That was a work comp. defense.
S1: Then what about after that?
S2: And then after that, I went to my last firm, I transitioned out of in-house back to private practice, but I still work comp defense, but I only spent about not even a whole year there.
S1: Now, at what point in this journey did you start to realize that this doesn’t sound so good anymore, I know you had that cafe talk, but…
S2: No, so it was actually working in the in-house firm, so the in-house firm was awesome. I grew a ton, it felt like I had reached kind of a good place to grow and mature into my career, and at that point I was like four years in when I started there, and so it was just a great environment, I got to work with all of these amazing attorneys who’ve been practicing comp for years and years, like 10 and 15 and 20 years at that point. So I have this great experience around me, and what started happening over the years of being in this firm is that really noticed the type of attorneys who were flourishing, who were getting…
09:51 S2: Who had a groove in a rhythm, it was definitely a rhythm to practicing, and it highlighted that I did not have this for them for me, and so I felt like I was a good attorney, I knew how to do stuff, I’m a smart person, and all of that great stuff. But for me, practicing law was very… It felt very hamster-wheelish, frankly, it took all of my energy all of the time to be who I wanted to be for my clients and for my firm, and so… You can do that, you can push yourself, you can run, and I think any person who goes into a law knows that, right, so you just do what you gotta do and you grind it out, and so that’s what I was doing, I know. To the ground and he’s trying to get out. But it wears you out. And this large firm, the in-house firm, was the first time I’d really seen other attorneys who didn’t have to do that to be successful. I could see the distinction of people who really have found a rhythm and a flow, it wasn’t that it was easy for them by any means, but there was some flow and peace to it for them in a way I did not have a…
11:07 S1: Gotcha.
S2: So that’s what… It started to change for me.
11:10 S1: So yeah, so then there’s the mindset of, this is, I’m not like that person, I can do my job my way, but this is exhausting. Yes. What can I do besides this? Okay, so that last firm was that kind of your last chapter, I’m gonna really try and make this work one more time, is that… What was going on there?
11:31 S2: Yeah, so there was some… Just like personal, I had a loss of my family, had a death in my family that kind of started throwing me off the last year I was in this large firm, I was already feeling very burned out, and I don’t know if I can continue… And then that kind of compounded with the personal stuff, and I just was like, I think… And it’s like maybe if I change my environment and position back out of the in-house and I go back to something private, I don’t know, I did… I guess it was, it was, it was the best of trying to hold on to something that I really needed to let go, so…
S1: Okay, so when was this like?
S2: 2016, I think is when I left the firm, the in-house firm to go to the newer…
S1: Okay, have you been at your current position ever since… After you left work comp?
S2: No, I officially stopped practicing in 2017, I fell back on some contract work because I do still have my degree, so I fell back on some contract work while I explored just a completely different field, and that was event planning.
12:41 S2: And so I really started from scratch. I didn’t even know anyone in event planning, it started with reaching out to my friends to ask them if they knew people in event planning, informational interviews, and I even took an internship at one point and work a little bit for free for about a month, and then landed the job that I’m currently in.
13:03 S1: Are there aspects from law school that you use in your current job?
13:08 S2: Absolutely, ironically enough, in my core job, we deal with contracts quite a bit, and so I have become the unofficial contract reviewer for all of our vendor and hospitality contracts and that kind of thing. I work with our legal department at the studio quite a bit to negotiate this thing, so… That’s a very practical application. Yeah, I think my skill set, just being able to kind of discern and read and negotiate with people has really come into play as well. Again, for an event, all I do is deal with vendors all day and in clients, and it’s all about negotiating, it’s like, What do you want for… How much do you wanna spend? How do we make this happen? How do I get what I need to get? And give you what you need to get. It’s all about building relationship, serving your clients, negotiating to get to the end of what you need, and that’s… In all of that is what I did every day as a lawyer…
14:09 S1: What’s The difference… as Far as the flow that you were talking about, the rhythm, what’s the difference with this job…
14:16 S2: Yeah, so there is an ebb and flow with this job for me that I just didn’t have for my law career, it was like, I’m a hamster, I get up every day, I get on the wheel, I run until I pass out and then I roll off my wheel, I sleep then I do it again. And I quite literally felt like that’s what I was doing six days a week, 15 hours a day, by the time it was over, I feel like that’s all I did, you know? The money was great. But I couldn’t sleep right. I didn’t eat well, I didn’t spend time with people that I enjoyed being around. And with this job, it’s not that we get really busy, we do really big programs, I travel a lot more now than I ever did, and even with all of that said, there are ebbs and flows. Once an event is over, it’s over. And we’re always planning ahead, so there’s a something to do, but it’s like I get to go home, I get to have somewhat of a normal day, and I have my weekend to spend with my family and my friends, and I don’t feel like I have to be on 24 hours a day.
15:24 S1: I’m assuming… you have law loans.
S2: I have a mortgage.
S1: Did it make it difficult to leave law
15:30 S2: It did. When I was in college and I was doing… I worked a lot in law firms in college, and I remember they would always be… I worked for a large firm for many years, and there would always be this gap, in between four and six years, there was always the fewest attorney in the firm that were four to six-year attorneys, because after that four or five year mark, people would start to burn out really bad and drop out, and the thing that would keep them was the loans. Well, it’s like, This is a lot of money and you make good money, many times if you’re lucky. And so people get… They get trapped by it. So for me to say it was not a consideration is a lie, it would just be a flat out lie… I don’t own my own home for a reason, I think, but it was killing me, and so it really did get to a point where I need… The money definitely was a factor, it felt like, Am I gonna be able to live or what am I gonna do, what other kind of job at and stuff.
16:43 S2: But I had to get out, and I’m grateful for my law degree, even getting out, I was able to fall back on it to do contract work, which really did allow me to still have a livable wage while I kind of try to figured out something else. and it even allowed me because I was still able to make… I made almost as much money on contract as I did when I was with the firm was… Yeah, it was amazing, but I was also able to then essentially not work for an entire month and intern for this other company to career transition, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that without my money. I make quite literally half of what I used to make now, but I come home, there’s definitely a trade-off there at the turnoff.
17:29 S1: And did you have big plan when you left, or did you take six months to save up or something, or did you just say You know what? This is just that I’m out of here.
17:38 S2: I just left. It was all bad. And I left before I got… Before, got to a point where it was like, I’m just gonna be irresponsible here or I’m gonna get fired or something right before it really… But I already felt like I wasn’t being the attorney I needed to be, I was already feeling like, Okay, I’m not responding to people the way I should be, I’m not holding the standards that I would have expected any attorney to hold to. And at that point, I was getting away with it, it wasn’t so visible that there was any real problems, right, there were no real problems, and I wanted to go out before they were… Yeah. But honestly, it had gone to a point where I just couldn’t cut it anymore, I think I had gotten on that hamster wheel as much as I could until my body, my brain, everything just wouldn’t anymore. And so I would love to say like, Oh yeah, I had this really great responsible plan where I saw this early and I was able to get ahead of it and put all these pieces together, and that’s not what happened.
18:47 S2: I burned out. That’s what happened. And I saved my firm and my skin, I think probably by about six months or something, by getting out what I did, that’s a…
19:00 S1: Now, is there anything, if you look back, like high school or somewhere along the line, college that you feel like there were hints that maybe you should have stopped…
19:12 S2: I definitely think in hindsight, I’m a little older, a little… There wasn’t anything that would have stopped me from this task, but I wish there had been… If you go into law, for the most part, you’ve gotta be a type and kind of personality, you’re just like, you don’t care how you end up in this profession. Right. So there is this aspect of like, You do what you wanna do. And I was very… That’s who I was. It was really, really hard for anyone to say anything else to me, but I made… No one was trying either. I think people just took it for what it was, it was… I said I wanted to be a lawyer, and people just said, Okay, sounds good. This is how you become a lawyer, and no one ever really ever considered saying… Would you consider something else? I don’t even think anyone… You’ve approached it for me to say no to that, but I do wonder, once I got out of law and stuff, I do wonder like Had I bothered to ask anyone and I gathered as my counselors or the people around me, I didn’t have a lawyer in my family I didn’t have, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
20:23 S2: And it makes me wonder, had I bothered to do the investigative informational interviewing that I did for my… My current position or my current career, if I would have really pursued it, I wonder…
20:37 S1: Alright, well, thank you, Denise. Loved everything you said. It was so helpful. Somebody that wants to reach out to you directly. Is there a way they can do that?
20:49 S2: Yeah, no problem at all. I’m totally happy to talk to anybody about it in my experience, good and bad, because it could be an amazing experience to be an attorney, and I think that there’s plenty of people who really embrace it from it, but… I also think it’s really hard for some people to get out of it, right. And so I would love to be able to encourage anyone who’s not sure about it to talk about it, so it’s probably easiest to reach me by email… Okay, and my email address is really just my full name, so it’s Denise D Jacques. And that’s D-E-N-I-S-E-D-J-A-C-Q-U-E-S. Denisedjacques@aol.com.
21:45 S1: Okay, great, thank you so much. As an attorney, I really identified with what Denise said. Her experience was a perfect segue to discuss our sponsor Juno, if you need to take out student loans, check in with, Juno first, Juno can oftentimes save students one to 2% over their direct loans at no cost to the student, they can also avoid origination fees and oftentimes get students cash back, even if it’s just for a re-fi Juno can save you thousands, visit joinjuno.com/p/legallearningcenter to sign up today.
Alright, all tips, links and so forth are going to be in the show notes, there’s a full transcript of this podcast as well, but for now, let’s get into my top takeaways. Alright, so first of all, if you recall, she said that many attorneys reach a burnout phase around four to five years into the practice of law, but their law loans, kept them there. The lesson I take away from that is that if you want mobility, either the ability to change jobs, change area of law or just leave law, you need to avoid all loans as much as possible.
23:04 S1: Number two, Denise stated that she felt like a hamster in a wheel as she couldn’t catch a rhythm, law is a lot of deadlines, it can be fast-paced and everything is important, you can get that feeling that you are behind all the time, you feel like you just can’t ever quite do enough. And when you look at others they either have a rhythm or they look like they have one, either way, it doesn’t make you feel any better when you don’t have that rhythm. The problem is some attorneys have a rhythm and then they lose it, that’s burnout. Number three, she is using her degree so that’s reassuring, it hasn’t gone to waste, it’s nice to know that at the end of the day, she was able to do something with her education, that’s it for this episode, be sure to check in next week to hear Dan’s story, Dan left law after only three years. And while his story has a lot of twists and turns, it’s actually not uncommon, if you learn something today, please like, share and subscribe so that the show is more visible to others and can help those who need it.
For parts 1 & 3 of the Leaving the Law series visit http://legallearningcenter.com/meagan and http://legallearningcenter.com/dan.
