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A recent International Bar Association survey reveals a striking reality: 54% of lawyers under 40 think they might leave their jobs within the next five years, and 20% are even pondering a departure from law altogether. The inescapable conclusion: there’s a persistent sense of dissatisfaction in the legal profession, especially among its more junior members—and that’s despite recent spikes in compensation and, according to Wells Fargo’s Legal Specialty Group data, reduced billable hours expectations.
There’s much that’s been said, and much more to say, about the root causes of attorney dissatisfaction generally, and what law firms need to do from a cultural, training, and mentorship perspective (among other things) to arrest the worrying trends. But, given current circumstances, junior lawyers should focus on what does lie within their control, and that is how they react to the modern challenges of being a lawyer in private practice.
As a junior associate, you stand at a junction in your early years, and face three distinct options. One is to make an immediate exit from your current position in search of greener pastures. Another is to go through the motions for a paycheck at your current firm, while biding time until a better offer from another firm or an alternative career path emerges. The third option, while more challenging, is also much more potentially rewarding. This option challenges you to harness discontent as a catalyst for positive change. By doing so, you can propel yourself forward towards a legal career defined by greater enthusiasm, purpose, and the satisfaction that comes from operating at your highest potential.
The Danger of Disillusionment
It's important to recognize up front that if you're feeling disillusioned as a junior lawyer, you're far from alone. Across the legal community, countless young professionals grapple with similar doubts and frustrations. The demands of a legal career are significant. By understanding that the experience is shared, associates can start addressing their challenges more openly and constructively.
I understand what it’s like to stand in your shoes. I spent many late nights at the office as a junior associate at a law firm, awaiting feedback from a partner on a brief that was due the next day, while jotting down ideas for career alternatives in a brainstorming exercise I’d dubbed “Operation Outlaw” (with an emphasis on “out”).
What turned things around was a candid conversation with a trusted mentor who indulged my disillusionment, but also gave me a bit of tough love. He told me, in essence, that while I might find what I was looking for elsewhere, there was also much to lose from making a premature departure based on faulty assumptions (which we’ll explore below).
I ended up sticking it out until I was a mid-level associate, and my outlook became much more positive as I gained skills and experience. I parlayed this experience into an opportunity at a firm in my hometown, right around the time my wife and I decided we were ready to make a change and start a family. I then went on to found and build a successful small law firm, before embarking on a career in coaching and consulting in the legal industry.
I can confidently say that my decision to stick it out with my first firm for a few extra years after flirting with jumping ship not only helped me gain more satisfaction with my legal career, but also acted as a springboard to subsequent success.
Go All in or Mail it in?
Now, back to the junction you face in your career.
Choosing the right path isn’t just about weighing the pros and cons between different jobs or firms. It represents a deeper, more fundamental decision about how you approach your legal career. When standing at this junction you have three primary options:
1. Immediate Exit: This option involves making an immediate jump to another firm or a complete departure from the legal profession to search for a more fulfilling or less challenging experience.
2. Holding Pattern: Here, you decide to leave your firm or the legal profession but choose to remain in your current role for the time being. The popular term for this option is “quiet quitting,” where the focus shifts to doing enough to maintain employment while looking ahead to a career transition.
3. All In (at Least for Now): This option is about committing to your current firm with an aim to excel—putting aside the idea of an inevitable departure. It involves embracing challenges, actively seeking growth and development opportunities, and building a sustainable and satisfying career within your existing professional environment, at least for the time being. As an added benefit, even if you ultimately decide to leave, by staying focused, honing your skills, and gaining meaningful experience, you’ll be a more attractive lateral candidate down the road.
I have no idea which option is best for you. The choice depends on your personal career goals, values, and circumstances. But I do want to share a few thoughts on the potential downsides of options one and two, which I don’t think are discussed enough.
Options one and two seem tantalizing when the realities of legal work start to weigh heavily on your initial enthusiasm for your career. It’s when cynicism can subtly take hold, tempting you to settle into a routine of mediocrity, and your potential can stagnate. When you go down this path, it may seem like no one will notice. But even if no one else does, you will, and the risk is that you become even more disillusioned because you know, deep down, that you’re not reaching your full potential. The result will be feeling even more unfulfilled and disconnected. In this sense, this path goes around in a loop—a vicious cycle.
Now, there may be completely valid reasons, such as working in a truly toxic environment or being presented with an amazing opportunity, why wanting to make a move at an early stage in your career makes perfect sense. However, it's crucial to recognize when the desire to move is driven by a misconception: a belief that the grass will be greener elsewhere.
The reality is that the pervasive challenges that junior lawyers grapple with span the entire legal industry, which means that switching firms is likely to present a familiar set of obstacles. It often becomes clear, shortly after making a move, that the issue isn’t necessarily with a specific firm, but rather with the inherent trials of early legal careers. Opting for a change in hopes of finding a more conducive environment might simply lead to a repeat of the same challenges, underscoring the notion that it's more the nature of the role, not necessarily the setting, that is the root cause of discontent.
Therefore, before making the leap in pursuit of a seemingly better opportunity, it's worth reflecting on whether committing to personal and professional development might offer a more rewarding path than the hunt for greener pastures. This approach not only fosters resilience but, as we’ll now discuss, also enhances your capabilities within the challenging landscape of the legal profession.
Stay the Course and Build “Career Capital”
This brings us to another big risk of leaving or checking out too soon, which is failing to build “career capital,” which Cal Newport, author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, describes as “rare and valuable” skills. Newport argues that when you acquire such skills, you gain tremendous leverage.
In legal practice, this career capital takes various forms. It includes tangible legal skills, but it’s also about developing a reputation for reliability and good judgment. Additionally, career leverage covers the relationships you build both within and outside your firm—mentors who can guide you, colleagues who trust and respect you, and clients who rely on your counsel. Each skill honed and relationship nurtured adds to your career capital.
Another key point is that there’s a compounding effect to your career. The more you invest in developing rare and valuable skills, and building strong relationships, the more they compound in a positive way. But every time you move to a new employer or embark on a new career, you will, at best, temporarily hit pause on building career capital, and, at worst, have to start rebuilding it from scratch. This violates Charlie Munger’s first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it.
It’s like moving houses frequently or day-trading in the stock market. Your capital gains (not to mention your time) get eaten up by transaction costs. The potential transaction costs of moving too early and too often in your legal career include: (1) losing relationships with colleagues and clients, (2) giving up hard-earned reputation goodwill, and (3) foregoing the institutional knowledge you gain from working in the same organization with the same group of people on a consistent basis. It’s not easy to build these things back.
So here’s a proposed alternative: embrace excellence at your current firm even if you know it is likely not your forever job. Don’t check out, bide your time, and settle for doing the bare minimum. Don’t keep entertaining the idea that things will be easier elsewhere. Double down on building career capital at your current firm. Keep compounding. Yes, this will obviously benefit your firm. But hear me out: it will also benefit yourself and your career.
What it Means to Embrace Excellence
What do I mean by embracing excellence? More than anything, it means taking ownership. Complete each assignment to the best of your ability. Sweat the details. Be the go-to person to get the job done. Do what you say you’ll do, by when you say you’ll do it. Think beyond the task and anticipate future needs as well. Get involved in the firm (serve on a committee, interview candidates, etc.). Keep learning and investing in professional development. Seek out assignments that allow you to stretch beyond your current capabilities. This is the way to build career capital.
It doesn’t mean being perfect, never making mistakes, or working ridiculously hard. In fact, you don’t necessarily have to work longer hours when you embrace excellence. What is required is bringing greater focus, care, and determination to the time you do spend working. And when you do that, you get rewarded with career momentum, autonomy, and more options.
Excellence Equals Options
Here are a few of the most important compounding gains you can expect as the return on investment when making the choice to go for your highest potential.
Positive Career Momentum: Momentum is a powerful force that builds on itself, but keep in mind that it can take you in a negative direction just as easily as a positive one. To create the positive kind, you simply need to create and sustain consistent progress. Research by Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile shows that one of the most important indicators of job satisfaction is feeling that you’re making progress toward a meaningful goal, which she calls the “progress principle.” Every time you rack up small wins and make progress at work, you get intrinsic rewards—and extrinsic ones, too, including promotions and raises from your firm, as well as positive feedback from your colleagues.
Greater Autonomy: Research cited by the The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology shows that autonomy, defined as "the feeling that your life—its activities and habits—are self-chosen and self-endorsed," is the number one predictor of happiness in people across the general population. More important for our purposes is that autonomy is critical for lawyers’ job satisfaction as well. That’s a key finding of a study conducted by Florida State University College of Law professor Lawrence Krieger and University of Missouri (Columbia) psychology professor Kennon Sheldon. They found that while factors typically associated with success, such as money and status, “showed nil to small associations with lawyer well-being,” having autonomy was integral to lawyer satisfaction.
By doing excellent work, you earn greater autonomy. When you consistently follow through on your commitments, you get micromanaged less. You get more freedom in your work, including who you work with, when you work, and where you work from.
More Long-Term Options: Let’s say you heed my advice, put aside the idea of leaving your firm in the short term, buckle down, and spend the next few years doing excellent work, but then you still decide to evaluate alternative options. Was the time spent at your current firm a waste? Far from it. Developing valuable skills and experience at your current firm will make you more attractive to other firms. And, as any recruiter will tell you, you’ll be more marketable as a fifth-year associate with meaningful experience under your belt than you will be as a second-year associate. You’ll also have more options outside the legal profession, as the skills, habits, and mindset you develop through a commitment to excellence all provide a solid foundation for success in any endeavor.
Beyond that, by embracing excellence over the next several years, you may find yourself firmly on the partnership track at your current firm. And that may be a much more attractive option to you then, as opposed to now, because the more competent you become, the more likely it is that you’ll be more satisfied. Most people tend to enjoy their jobs more the better they become at them—which helps explain why in the first few years of legal practice, lawyers are so prone to becoming disillusioned. Accordingly, it’s hard to pre-judge how you’ll feel about advancing at your current firm until you get past the hard grind of the first few years.
In short, you win if you stay. You also win if you eventually leave.
What all this boils down to is that when you take ownership of your work, you also take ownership of your career. Changing your work environment won’t magically change how you feel. Changing how you work, on the other hand, can have a huge positive impact. As Cal Newport puts it, “If your goal is to love what you do, you must first build up ‘career capital’ by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the traits that define great work.”
Which Option Will You Choose?
This is the pivotal question facing many junior lawyers today. It's not just a choice about your next job or case, but about the kind of professional you aspire to be. The path of excellence is undeniably challenging, but so is the alternative. And the path of excellence—too often the path less taken—offers something unique and therefore extremely valuable: the potential for a legal career rich in the satisfaction that you are excelling to your greatest potential and creating options for greater impact in the future.
Jay Harrington is president of our agency, a published author, and nationally-recognized expert in thought-leadership marketing.
From strategic planning to writing, podcasting, video marketing, and design, Jay and his team help lawyers and law firms turn expertise into thought leadership, and thought leadership into new business. Get in touch to learn more about the consulting and coaching services we provide. You can reach Jay at jay@hcommunications.biz.