Taking Charge of Your Career—30 Signs to Monitor
by Pete Meyers

You’re coming up on the first anniversary at your firm. Anniversaries are good times to take stock of your career and make sure you are on track with what you want. You’ve been there nearly a year and maybe you’re getting the “right” opportunities and maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re getting paid what you’re worth and maybe you’re not. Maybe you love your work or maybe you’re bored. You invested a lot of time and money in law school so this is an appropriate time to take stock of what you’ve accomplished this first year to propel yourself in the direction you’ve chosen.

I talk to a lot of lawyers every day and they often tell me that that their first year was not what they expected. Here are just 30 of the stories I’ve heard that indicate reality is not matching up to expectations. Consider your own first year and see if any of these sound familiar. If they do, you might want to review your objectives or talk to your supervising partner about ways you can change your situation.

1. You’re not happy. Most often this is a result of unreal expectations. You were told in your interviews that you would get trial experience and now you’re not. Or that you would be handling clients early on and you haven’t. Or that control over your own cases was important and now it isn’t. Whatever the reason, some trust has been eroded and happiness cannot take root in barren soil.
2. You want a smaller firm. You thought the big firm experience was the place to start, where you would get good training and work on a wide variety of cases for high-profile clients. Instead, you got to work on the interesting cases, but you worked on such thin slices of them that you weren’t sure how you contributed, if at all. One day the file was thrown over the wall to you and a few days later you threw a memo back over the wall. But that’s been it. You long to be more intimately involved in a case, working side-by-side with the partner in your 26-attorney firm.
3. You want a larger firm. You thought the boutique or small firm experience was the standard by which all other legal job experiences are measured. Or at least the place where you thought you’d wind up, with a nice group of lawyers working together. Well, it hasn’t turned out that way. What traits you thought would be endearing in a boutique setting have turned out to be annoying personality quirks instead. You long to get an assignment where you don’t have to get personally involved with the person who gave it to you.
4. The lawyers you work with are mean to each other. They don’t even pretend to be nice, which is hard to comprehend, because most lawyers learned manners along the way and learned how effective niceness can be, at least professional niceness. You’re willing to take a cut in pay in order to be around people who can at least fake congeniality.
5. You want to work for the other side. You’re sick and tired of plaintiff’s work, putting hundreds of hours into a case only to lose at trial and not being compensated for your hard work. Or you belong to DRI but have had a change of heart and would like to begin representing disabled individuals against the insurance companies that are denying them benefits.
6. You are working too many hours. You thought you could do 2300 hours per year and you’re finding it to be a struggle. Maybe not a struggle to actually bill the hours, but a struggle to do anything but bill the hours. Your personal and social life is suffering. You feel willing to trade down your salary for hours.
7. You entertain the myth of the Lifestyle of a General Counsel. This is probably the most common response I get from associates. Don’t create a false hope that you can “always go in house.” In house jobs are few and far between and generally pay a lot less than you’re accustomed to if you are now working at a firm. Associates think that by finding a corporate counsel position, the most hated things of firm practice fade away. Billable hours will go away (and with it your salary), but responsibility increases, if anything. Sure, you get the “lifestyle benefit,” but you’ll go through several months of missing those fat paychecks before you realize what your “lifestyle” is really worth.
8. Your work dries up. Nothing says something is wrong like this. Either you’re just not clicking with this firm or your work is truly bad. If you want work, go ask for it. Don’t assume it will just come to you. Develop your clients—the other attorneys in your firm.
9. When you search for work, other attorneys say “I don’t have anything, but I’ll keep you in mind.” What they are actually saying is that they’ll keep you in mind long enough to remember that you are not the associate they want to give work to.
10. After you’ve turned in a work product, assigning attorneys who once commented positively on your work in passing (“Good job on that memo, Skip”) no longer do so. The subject of your work tends to be avoided (unless you raise the issue, something you have become increasingly hesitant to do).
11. When you started working at the firm, the older associates took you out to lunch and said, “Before you ask a partner for work, ask us first because we will be able to slice something off more easily.” But when you go to them for work, they never seem able to slice anything off. With associates like these, who needs partners?
12. Your non-billable hours go up. You can’t be trusted to do much for which the firm could actually charge a client.
13. You aren’t invited on client meetings any longer.
14. You get assigned to document review instead of briefs, or you work on claims outlines instead of motions.
15. You leave by 5 too many days.
16. You go to pro bono fairs.
17. You look at the recruiting sections of other firms’ web sites.
18. You take recruiters’ calls. When the recruiter asks you if you are happy at your firm, you can’t restrain a nervous chuckle and say, “That depends what you mean by ‘happiness’. . . .”
19. You check your personal e-mail at work to see if you’ve heard from your recruiter. You don’t bother opening e-mail from your spouse or parents or even your kids, but you’ll open, read, and elaborately answer a recruiter’s email.
20. You are happy when construction of a building—taller than your own—begins in a block adjacent to a hated partner’s office.
21. You don’t feel that you are part of the in crowd at the firm.
22. The partner designated as the “Associate Liaison” has not liaised with you in more than a year. You inquire and are told that the Hiring Committee needed his services and the office of “Associate Liaison” has been temporarily suspended and didn’t you get the memo?
23. A partner enters your office, hands you a hard copy of this article, and says, “Did you leave this in the men’s room?”
24. You occasionally get yelled at by partners.
25. You find yourself looking for grants, scholarships, graduate programs, anything to give your life meaning.
26. You find yourself going to lunch more and more with people outside the firm. This underscores how pathetic your social life inside the firm has become: You spend enough time with coworkers you dislike.
27. You’re considering working for a firm that defends Big Tobacco. You’ve already sacrificed your principles, so you may as well be compensated for it.
28. You can’t imagine being partner.
29. Your boss is reading your email.
30. You are thinking about a career that does not involve the practice of law.

If you have experienced any of these feelings, don’t worry; they’re not uncommon for associates. After all, you graduated from law school with good grades, maybe some law review experience, and you’ve done good work at your firm. You’re interested in advancing your career and ensuring you’re happy with the firm and they’re happy with you. Even though many of the items listed above are intended to be humorous, they can still provide you some measure of your happiness with your current situation. If you find yourself agreeing with too many of these statements, you might want to take a serious look at the direction in which your career is going.

Pete Meyers is an attorney and an independent legal recruiter who matches lawyers with law firms and corporations. You can reach him at meyers.pete@gmail.com.