Lawyers: Learn to Listen to Your Gut — It Could Save Your Sanity (And Your Life)

The following is adapted from The New Law Business Model by Ali Katz.

Driving east on the I-10 in L.A. one morning in my Volkswagen GTI, I was enjoying the light, pre-rush-hour traffic as I watched the sun rise over the freeway.

Suddenly, the car ahead of me swerved, and a huge roll of carpet appeared in the middle of the road, right in the path of my car.

I could hit the carpet head-on or swerve around it like the car in front of me had. I swerved, and the next thing I knew, I was spinning across the highway, seemingly out of control. A voice boomed in my head, “Turn into the skid! Turn into the skid!” I did just that, and my car came to a screeching halt against the center median, facing in the wrong direction.

As I got out to assess the damage, the voice yelled at me again, “Get back in the car and move — now!”

I jumped back into my car. Within seconds, another car spun across the freeway and slammed, head-first, into the median — exactly where I had been standing seconds before.

Shaken, I realized that the voice had saved me — twice. I was alive because the voice in my head had told me exactly what to do, and I had followed its direction.

In that moment, I realized that voice had been with me my whole life, but it had never seemed very helpful before. In the past, the voice had seemed to be constantly harassing me, “You’re not good enough. You don’t fit in. What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just be happy? No one likes you. You’re so dumb — why are you such an idiot?” Up until that day.

Now, though, the tone of the voice had changed. The voice had saved my life. The voice had changed because I had changed.

I had spent a lot of time on self-improvement work, and I could see it paying off. I was taking care of myself, and my inner voice reflected that. No longer was it harassing me with put-downs and criticism. For the first time in my life, my inner voice had my back; it said, “I’ve got you, I’m here and I’m going to keep you safe. I’m going to keep you alive.”

I began to listen to my inner voice more closely after that. And I began to hear it encouraging me to consider that maybe life was too short to keep working at a job I didn’t love, even if millions of other lawyers and law students would kill for that job.

Maybe I could create a law practice that would support the life I really wanted and allow me to make a real difference in my clients’ lives and make a great living too. Maybe…

It took a near-death experience for me to realize that life is too short to hate your job and too unpredictable to put off doing something about it. I had to fix my life and career trajectory — now, not later.

I couldn’t waste anymore time doing work I didn’t believe in and living a life I didn’t love. And building my own book of business inside the BigLaw firm was not going to save me.

I thought about my options; and staying in a life and law practice that I hated for the next thirty to fifty years was not one of them. I could quit the law, but I knew that if I did, the question would gnaw at me: what if I had tried to build a law practice that I loved and that my clients loved?

I wanted to work differently. I wanted to use my law degree to make a difference and a great living and be able to have a life. And I was going to figure it out — whatever “it” was — come hell or high water.

I did figure it out, and now I’ve shared all the details with you so you can have a life and law practice you love too in my new book The New Law Business Model, now available on Amazon.

Ali Katz graduated first in her class from Georgetown University Law Center in 1999, as a John M. Olin Law and Economics Fellow, under her former name, Alexis Martin Neely. After a clerkship on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Ali became an Associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson, one of the country’s top law firms. Ali went on to start her own law practice and write the bestselling book on legal planning for families, Wear Clean Underwear. Ali has appeared on Good Morning America, the Today Show, and radio and television across the country. Over the past decade, Ali’s New Law Business Model has transformed the lives and law practices of thousands of lawyers, and the families and business owners they serve.