Before we even think of leaving the law, let’s first try to get a handle on a fundamental question: Why did I go to law school?
With the cushion of hindsight, let’s take some time and critically think about this. We need to ask ourselves, as well as our friends and family (who were around us when we made the decision to attend law school) what was our mind set, what reasons did we put forward, what pros/cons did we list? As much as it may hurt, we need some honest answers and recollections, from ourselves and our loved ones, as to what our mindset was at that time. More specifically, we need to determine whether we critically thought through this big decision or, rather, did we just go to law school because we had nothing better to do/we didn’t want to find a job/we admired lawyers/we thought we’d make a lot of money.
The goal here is not to get down on ourselves, but rather to identify whether law school itself, or the “beaten path” of OCI, the firm life, making partner, etc, is really something for us. If our reasons for going to law school were not that strong, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue, but it could point to the fact that a “traditional” legal career may not be exactly for us. This may go a long way to explain the dissatisfaction we feel. This may go a long way in motivating us to expand our scope to alternative and unorthodox (and possibly more lucrative and satisfying) ways to use our law degree.