How to Stop Hating the Law: A path to hope for miserable lawyers

By Stuart Teicher

Many lawyers find the practice of law intolerable. It simply stinks. "So why don't you leave it?" they say. "Why not find another job? Your law degree is valuable!" They don't know what they're talking about. For most lawyers, switching careers simply isn't an option. We have bills to pay and mouths to feed. The only answer is to find some way to make it tolerable. This book is designed to do just that — help lawyers who hate the law find some way to get though the misery of the practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350937114

Stuart Teicher

Stuart I. Teicher, is a professional legal educator who focuses on ethics law and writing instruction. A practicing lawyer for over 30 years, Stuart's career is now dedicated to helping fellow lawyers survive the practice of law and thrive in the profession. Mr. Teicher teaches seminars, provides in-house training to law firms and legal departments, provides CLE instruction at law firm client events, and gives keynote speeches at conventions and association meetings. Mr. Teicher is a Supreme Court appointee to the New Jersey District Ethics Committee where he investigates and prosecutes grievances filed against attorneys. Mr. Teicher also served on the New Jersey Office of Attorney Ethics Fee Arbitration Committee. He is an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown Law Center, and is also an adjunct professor at Rutgers University. He also taught legal writing at St. John's University School of Law in New York City. www.stuartteicher.com

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About the Author:

Stuart I. Teicher, Esq. is a professional legal educator who focuses on ethics law and writing instruction. A practicing lawyer for over 30 years, Stuart’s career is now dedicated to helping fellow lawyers survive the practice of law and thrive in the profession. Mr. Teicher teaches seminars, provides in-house training to law firms and legal departments, provides CLE instruction at law firm client events, and also gives keynote speeches at conventions and association meetings.

Stuart helps lawyers get better at what they do (and enjoy the process) through his entertaining and educational CLE performances. He speaks, teaches, and writes— Thomson Reuters published his book entitled, Navigating the Legal Ethics of Social Media and Technology.

Mr. Teicher is a Supreme Court appointee to the New Jersey District Ethics Committee where he investigates and prosecutes grievances filed against attorneys. Mr. Teicher also served on the New Jersey Office of Attorney Ethics Fee Arbitration Committee. Mr. Teicher is an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown Law where he teaches Professional Responsibility, and he is an adjunct professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick where he teaches undergraduate writing courses. He also taught legal writing at St. John’s University School of Law in New York City.

PART ONE:

The Hate is Real

First off, let’s talk about who should be reading this book…and who should not.

If you’re a happy lawyer, this book is not for you. This is a book for a very specific type of lawyer—the miserable ones. It’s for the lawyers who have lost (or are in the process of losing) all hope. So if you’re pleased with being a lawyer, I’m happy for you, but you’re not going to relate to the contents of this book.

This is also not a book for lawyers who want to find a way to get out of the practice. If you’re looking for a way to use your law degree in some non-law way and transition from being a lawyer to something else, I wish you luck, but I don’t have any advice. This is a book for lawyers who don’t have the option of starting from scratch in a new career. This is a book for lawyers who are stuck in the practice and can’t get out.

These lawyers are probably stuck—actually, let me rephrase that—you are probably stuck because of money. You have a family, debt, most likely both. You’re a seasoned lawyer with a family to support, or a new-ish lawyer with debt to pay. Or some combination of both. Maybe you can’t afford to start a new career from the bottom. Or maybe it’s not so much about money. Maybe you don’t know how to do anything else. Truthfully, it doesn’t matter. The reason you’re stuck is irrelevant. The bottom line is you’re stuck, you can’t get out, and you are miserable.

If you’re still here after reading those opening lines then I’m sorry. I mean that, truly. I know what you’re going through because I’ve been there myself. Being a lawyer and hating your job can feel like a fate worse than death. That’s not hyperbole to those of us who are stuck in the profession.

Why are we miserable? Because for many of us, being a lawyer sucks. It sucks big time. None of us knew how lonely the practice would be. Few of us understood how cutthroat it would be. The profit margins aren’t what we’d hoped. And there are a ton more explanations for why our career sucks. Of course, that’s not true for everyone. There are a ton of lawyers who are happy in the practice. I have a name for those people:

Psychos.

If you’re one of those psychos then I’m reminding you that this book isn’t for you. This book is for the miserable lawyers who hate their career and see nothing but unhappiness on the horizon.

No one understands the misery. I was once discussing how miserable it is to be a lawyer to a civilian. I tried to explain that lawyer misery is different from regular-person misery.

Being a lawyer feels like waking up every day and going to a jail cell. That chair…behind that desk…in that office…in front of that computer. Whether it’s in an office building or you work from home, it doesn’t matter. Every day you wake up and go to jail. You rarely move, and when you do, it’s to another chair in a different location. And the parallels to prison aren’t just because of the feeling of confinement. There’s also the isolation.

The practice of law is a lonely endeavor. Non-lawyers don’t understand how uniquely lonely it feels to be a lawyer. Every day you wake up and you go to a job where you spend most of the time by yourself.

Oh, but you get to meet some nice people, right? Wrong. These days so much of the practice has gone remote. And even when you get out of the cell and get permission to roam in general population, it doesn’t make the day any better. The practice of law is littered with belligerent, angry people. Whether it’s our clients, the judges, our adversaries, or pretty much anyone else, most of them are assholes.

And then there’s the fighting. Getting screwed by an opponent in the legal practice is like getting shanked in the prison yard. And everywhere you go, there’s someone trying to stick a shiv into your gut. A perfect explanation was in an article titled The Lawyer, the Addict by Eilene Zimmerman in the New York Times:

‘Yes, there are other stressful professions,’ said Wil Miller, who practices family law in the offices of Molly B. Kenny in Bellevue, Wash. He spent 10 years as a sex crimes prosecutor, the last six months of which he was addicted to methamphetamines. Being a surgeon is stressful, for instance—but not in the same way. It would be like having another surgeon across the table from you trying to undo your operation. In law, you are financially rewarded for being hostile."¹

No one understands the depth of the despair.² Your family doesn’t understand, your friends can’t get it. No one can understand the misery unless they are forced to live it. Worse yet, many people think that you’re a fool for feeling this way. You have a great job, they say. You’re a lawyer…a respected member of society, they say. They can’t possibly understand what it’s really like from the outside. And it feels never-ending. Every. Single. Day. For the rest of your life. And there is no way out. It’s like a life sentence with no hope of probation.

So what do I hope to achieve in this book? First let me tell you what will not happen. This book is not going to show you how to be a happy lawyer. None of us are naive enough to think that somehow we can transform this misery-of-a-profession into something that’s all puppies and daisies. That’s why all those books that purport to teach us how to be happy lawyers never live up to their billing. It’s because they’re selling a pipe dream. You can’t be a happy lawyer because being a lawyer sucks.

The people telling us that we can be happy lawyers remind me of the people who try to get you to believe that you need to love your job. Love your job and you’ll never work another day in your life.

That. Sounds. Awesome.

And unrealistic.

Loving your job is a mostly unattainable approach that was probably invented by a motivational speaker. I mean, it’s great if you can do it. If you could find a way to love your job, you’d obviously be golden. You’d also be one of the select few. The uber-lucky. This is how I look at the crowd who love their jobs: they are like lottery winners. Sure, there are a bunch of people who’ve won a nice chunk of change in the lottery. Technically, it’s possible for all of us to win. But it’s not going to happen for most. Those lottery winners are the exception, not the rule. Heck, most of us never even meet a lottery winner in our lifetime, no less actually become one.

The idea of equating our job with happiness might be one of the biggest mistakes made in modern professional life. And it’s a relatively new concept. You have never heard of the company man in the mid-1950s calling their mid-level management position in IBM a calling. No, it’s only the last few generations that have been taught to conflate our identity and happiness with our profession. That was a mistake.

Who said we need to be happy at work? It’s called work for a reason—because it’s something you have to do to, not something you want to do. You work so you can earn money to do fun things. You work so you can provide for the people you care about. Work was never supposed to provide nirvana. Prior generations never talked about loving their job. They woke up in the morning, punched their clock (regardless of the color of their collar), went through the grind, and went home.

Somewhere along the way, that changed. Someone got us thinking that happiness in the office means happiness in life. It’s ridiculous because I doubt it’s even possible. Well, maybe it’s possible for the aforementioned psychos. Or the lottery winners. But for the rest of us? No way.

The people who moved the goalposts were wrong. Happiness doesn’t come from your job. Happiness shouldn’t come from your job. And that’s a good thing, because most lawyers will never love our job. Truth is, we can’t love our job, because (as I’ve already pointed out) our job sucks. The fact is, the practice of law has been horrible since the beginning of time, and it’s going to be horrible after we all leave. I consider it a win if we could get ourselves to a place where going to work every day doesn’t feel like a jail sentence. And therein lies the goal of this book.

You don’t need to love being a lawyer to have a happy life. Heck you don’t even have to like being a lawyer to have a happy life. What you need to do is tolerate your job, and divorce it from the rest of your life.

That’s why the goal is not to make the profession a happy endeavor. The goal is not to find a way to love your job. There is one, far more realistic goal. It’s to make the practice of law tolerable. That’s it. We need to find a way to make the profession not suck. You need to like your job just enough that going to work doesn’t feel like torture.

But here’s the upside—if you can make your practice tolerable, if you can get to a place where your practice simply does not suck the life out of you, then you create a clean slate for you to build happiness elsewhere in your life. Once you remove your job as an impediment to happiness, then you can create a life outside the office that provides that happiness.

So what’s the secret? I’m not going to make you wait until the end to tell you my idea; I’m going to give you a small reveal right now. But I’m only going to do that if you promise me something. You need to promise that you’ll keep reading and give me a chance to explain further a little later.

The secret missing ingredient is…brainwashing. You need to brainwash yourself to tolerate the practice.

Stop rolling your eyes. I know you’re doing it because if I were in your shoes, I’d be doing it too. That’s because the idea sounds ridiculous. But it’s not.

Let me dispel a particular notion from the outset. I am not going to tell you that the secret to everything is meditating. That’s not where I’m going. In fact, I don’t think many