Finding my true path.
Why did I quit a successful law career?
It all started with an innocuous phone call one day in 1991 with my best friend, Mark.
Mark: “Nothing much. But I have signed up for a law degree in September.”
Mark: “You should check it out. Imagine. Students - no more work for three years!”
And that was it. The seed was sewn.
I, naively, didn’t stop to contemplate the future or whether law was for me. If I had a reason, it was the need, prompted by the Human Resources Director of a major FMCG company (they were a client at the time), to get a degree. I still recall the conversation. She challenged me to explain why I had given up on my education, thinking I could wing it in the world of recruitment with little more than a basic education. I felt embarrassed that I didn’t have a proper answer and from that moment on I was determined to get a degree.
Mark and I go back 30 years. He remains my closest friend, and I’m quite sure that if he hadn’t made the running, I may well have decided not to do law or, even, get a degree.
I started my law degree in September 1992. Going to University was a shock. I had worked since the age of 13, and here I was, aged 25, mixing it with a group of spotty teenagers who seemed hellbent on getting drunk and doing as little work as possible. Perhaps it’s my proletariat work ethic, but I was there to get an education and I was focused as hell. Sure, I wanted to enjoy the experience, but not to the point of rocking up drunk and falling asleep in lectures. If I’m honest though, even with the number of mature students, I felt like an outlier. So many people appeared steeped in the business of law: a significant number of students were following someone from their immediate family - normally their father. In my case, my father had never progressed beyond a working class education. I wouldn’t want to make this a class point, but I still think of myself as working class - there can’t be many lawyers who have dug graves, driven a hearse, been a Bingo caller and painted houses. However, I’m not ashamed of my roots. Far from it. If anything, it has engendered in me the need to make the most of the available opportunities.
By this stage, I was married to Allison - I had proposed after three weeks of meeting her - and she was going to support me through my studies, although she had only recently qualified as a junior nurse (we survived on less than £10,000). In the early years, we lived at her parents before moving out to our own flat which Allison had bought a few years before from her sister. To say things were tight is an understatement.
I left University in 1995 having gained a 2:1 in Law. If I’m honest, I was hoping for a First, but I was still really pleased with the result. At that stage, I was one of the few non-funded candidates to have an offer of a training contract. There were a host of people who were looking down the barrel at a further year’s study with no prospect of a training contract, and were happy to take their chances. Mark was one of that group, mainly because he hadn’t bothered to apply and assumed, wrongly, that the jobs market would pick up sufficiently for him to walk into a well paid training contract. In the end he had to fight like hell for a contract, and ended up in a firm that was probably right for him but was never going to do much for his career.
In my case, long before leaving university, I decided that I wanted to be a litigator. One major reason for this was my love of advocacy; also, I had been fortunate, in my final year, to take up the option of working in the University’s Free Representation Unit (FRU), and it was during the time that I acted represented an RSPCA Inspector who had been summarily dismissed. I ended up fighting against John Beggs, Barrister (now a silk), and even though we lost the case on a two to one majority, I knew that that was what I was going to do in practice.
I toyed with being a barrister. In fact, I had done several mini-pupillages, but in the end decided that being self-employed with a fairly sizeable debt wasn’t something I was prepared to countenance.
Anyhow, having completed the Legal Practice Course, I threw myself into my training contract. I didn’t know a huge amount the firm before I joined - the work experience I had endured beforehand could have put me off completely - but, given that I had a clear view what I wanted to do, it was easy to skew my working day to do more enjoyable stuff, and ignore or do less of the stuff that made me cold from the neck downwards (residential conveyancing for one).
My principal was a great teacher. She reinforced the need to apply a commercial outlook to my work, something that a lot of lawyers fail to do - the clients’ interest always came first.
Unfortunately, the firm was too small for me and focused more on individuals (private client) and not commercial clients. In hindsight, this seems odd, given that my passion has always been working with individuals. I suspect my move was influenced by my desire to practice the sort of law I enjoyed, and being paid properly.
I moved through a succession of firms to the point where I ended up working for the best law firm in the South West of England. I went there mostly to prove to myself that I had the ability to work at the best firm with some of the brightest and best lawyers around. I’m not a snob or particularly driven by brands, but I was encouraged to think that, much like some of the better known London firms, if I could do proper time with this firm, my career would be made.
What I should have said is that long before I even dallied with the idea of being a lawyer, I had a desire to be a trouble-shooter in the mould of my hero, the late Sir John Harvey Jones, the former chairman of ICI. Yes, I was taken in by the Troubleshooter series, but it was more than that. It was the sense of making a difference, and helping people realise their dreams. In the end, despite having an offer of a training position with Coopers and Lybrand (now PWC), I decided that law would give me a better grounding and, in all honesty, I couldn’t face the possibility of going back to full-time education (having completed my degree) and working at the same time. At the back of my mind, I thought that working at this firm might give me a springboard away from law into consulting.
I busted my gut for the best part of nine years, with a view to getting a shot at partnership. These are not sour grapes, but what a bloody farce. There I was pitching my heart out before a panel of largely quizzical partners, who probably didn’t have a clue what I did only to find out later that I hadn’t been successful for no other reason than… “not now”.
However, my failed application did me a favour. If I had been successful, I would, I expect, still be there, trapped by a large pair of golden handcuffs.
Also, being rejected without a proper reason, enabled me to reignite my passion of sport, and look beyond the world of litigation (I don’t mind a fight, but I would much rather settle a case by mediation). I wanted to combine my love of sport (mainly cycling) with law.
I left the firm, and decided to move to a firm less that half its size who said they had major ambitions for the locality. That suited me. My spiritual home is Devon, England. The more time I spend there, particularly on Dartmoor or one of the amazing beaches, the happier I am.
I wasn’t sure that I was doing the right thing, but there wasn’t much else on offer. As it turned out, the firm didn’t float my boat. I won’t bore you with the detail, but it was one of those places where everyone seemed to wear a mask, and were scared to death to say what they thought. Anyone who knows me will understand how antithetical that is to who I am.
But, being the stoic that I am, I girded my loins and resigned myself to giving it my best shot, at least for 12 months. As it was, I lasted two years, but not before I had taken a trainee under my wing, started a sports law practice and won the firm’s first FTSE 100 client. You might think that I had the makings of good career, second time over. But a few things came together that convinced me that I would forever remain a frustrated, unhappy lawyer if I stayed at the firm.
Firstly, there was my awakening to social media. If my memory serves me correct, I was the first person in the firm to install Tweetdeck and consider the import of blogging and a content led approach to marketing.
Secondly, there was my run in with the local newspaper editor. I can’t say too much, but, suffice to say, I dropped a clanger sufficient to be called by the Managing Partner on the last day of my holiday and told that I would have to make a formal apology as a result of an inappropriate Tweet I had sent at the beginning of the week. As it was, the heat of the situation quickly dissipated and it really was a storm in an expresso cup, but it left an indelible mark on me.
Finally, I had the misfortune to suffer a subarachnoid haemorrhage. I’ll spare you the gory detail, particularly as I have written about it before on my blog. But for someone who has always been super fit, it was a massive shock. However, it was the aftermath that revealed more about me than any amount of counselling would ever have done. During the six weeks I was out of action, I had time to come up with concrete answers to all those difficult questions that my obsession with work had obscured:
How do I unlock and realise my potential?
I’m not saying that I came up with all the answers, but I knew I could never be happy if I continued in law. Without being too melodramatic, my zest for life would leak out one drop at a time. So, in August 2010, I stepped out of the office for the first time to move into a new role, where I would no longer have to use the title ‘solicitor’.
Since then, I have continued to carve out a new life focused on digital marketing and personal development. Like any new start up, I have had to face the usual ups and downs but I wouldn’t change things for the world. To say I’m my own man makes light of the situation. I’m not that free. I still have a mortgage and my family to support but my soul has been liberated to the point where what you see now is the real me, not some faux version.
In many ways I think my journey unremarkable, but the leap was distinctly un-lawyer like. The truth about the legal profession in the United Kingdom is that there are a lot of anxious, unhappy people who fear for the future. It’s not so much the loss of prestige or even the money. It’s not knowing if they have a future outside of law. As much as a law degree provides a strong analytical base, it’s a poor substitute for real world experience where people are used to getting on with the business or running a (real) business, even in the face of a heavy regulatory burden, rather than constantly looking for risk or ways things need to be bent out of shape to fit some convoluted legal conundrum.
As you can imagine, I have been asked many times why I left law, giving up:
- the prestige of being a professional
- all that I worked so hard for for all those years?
The truth is, law was killing me.
When I was a kid, I had a passion for the arts. I drew, painted and made a few half decent clay models. Even in my early years of work, I still saw myself an artist, albeit working as a computer aided designer. But in between going to London before going into law (I was in recruitment for five years) and thinking I was going to be some hot shot lawyer, I gave up on my muse. I didn’t so much as ignore it - I buried it. I didn’t let it surface again. But it never truly went away. Of course, I could have tried to combine my love of art with law, but that wasn’t in my psyche. I was all in – nothing else mattered, apart from my family, and cycling (my other great passion in life).
I think the period I spent at home after my ‘whack around the head’ finally brought it home to me that if I was going to amount to anything in life, I had to stop lying to myself. Or more particularly step away from that constant, internal dialogue that I was wrestling with every day. The sort of conversation that arises from time to time, where your inner critic, particularly in times of stress or depression, questions why you labour doing a job you hate. I knew that I couldn’t go back into law and do something that I no longer believed in.
If you are still left scratching you head, wondering… “so you left law because….?” Ultimately, I suppose I left law because I had to answer the call of my daemon. The pull was too strong to ignore it any longer.
In hindsight, I stayed in law too long. In fact, part of me wonders what would have happened if I had chosen a different subject area - much more creative for a start. For one thing, I know that I would have been a happier person. The thing is if you ever put on a mask at work, you know that faux persona needs an outlet of some sort. Mostly I could dissipate my frustration with sport. But there were times, and I feel horrible about it now, where I took out my frustration on those closest to me. And that hurt, and I’m quite sure I will be paying the price for a very long time.
I would just counter-balance this rather downbeat assessment by saying that leaving law was the best thing I have ever done. More than anything else, it has unblocked so many pathways in my life, chief among those being my love of learning. In the three years since leaving law, I have learned more than I did in the past 10. Also, I understand more about myself than I ever would by staying cocooned in the legal profession, which in large part is insulated from the real world.
Right now my focus is on growing as a person, being kinder and tapping into the abundant energy that I possess to create art (in the broadest sense).
I would like to think that in time more lawyers will arrive at a similar decision, but I have my doubts. I suspect that I will still be bumping into former colleagues 10 years from now who will still be lamenting the same travails that plagued me. And, of course, by then they will be so much further down the rabbit hole that their means of escape will have narrowed to the point of no return.
The point is I love what I do, and can’t ever imagine going back inside myself. If I did then I know that I would have given up on life.
This is my first piece on Medium - which I think is epic. It would be great to get your feedback on: (a) the platform; (b) the business of law; and (c) your own experience where you have had to deal with change in your life.
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