Navigating Your Legal Career: What To Do When You Don’t Know What To Do
Jun 14, 2024
Brian Glass
What if you could unlock the secrets to a fulfilling legal career by embracing unconventional paths? This week on Life Beyond the Briefs, I share invaluable advice and personal anecdotes aimed at guiding young lawyers and law students through the formative years of their careers. From conversations with budding legal minds, I highlight the importance of keeping multiple career doors open and staying flexible until you discover your true passion.
Tune in as I recount a compelling discussion with a law student pondering traditional routes like prosecution and plaintiff's law. I propose an unexpected yet strategic alternative: defending cases for auto insurance companies. This often-overlooked path offers young lawyers critical trial experience without the high stakes, allowing them to hone their courtroom skills. Listen for a candid and insightful exploration of how to maximize your early legal career and navigate towards a fulfilling professional life.
____________________________________ Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
What if you could unlock the secrets to a fulfilling legal career by embracing unconventional paths? This week on Life Beyond the Briefs, I share invaluable advice and personal anecdotes aimed at guiding young lawyers and law students through the formative years of their careers. From conversations with budding legal minds, I highlight the importance of keeping multiple career doors open and staying flexible until you discover your true passion.
Tune in as I recount a compelling discussion with a law student pondering traditional routes like prosecution and plaintiff's law. I propose an unexpected yet strategic alternative: defending cases for auto insurance companies. This often-overlooked path offers young lawyers critical trial experience without the high stakes, allowing them to hone their courtroom skills. Listen for a candid and insightful exploration of how to maximize your early legal career and navigate towards a fulfilling professional life.
____________________________________ Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
Happy Friday and welcome back to Life Beyond the Briefs, the podcast for lawyers who want to avoid living life on autopilot. I'm talking about lawyers who want to exit the traditional Bill Moore hours model and greet each other with something other than I'm busy, but it's better than the alternative. If you want to live a life of your own design and take control of your own future, then join us as we explore life beyond the briefs. I'm your host, brian Glass, and every Friday I do these short solo episodes recapping the week, sometimes talking about conversations that I've had other times and sometimes just diving deep on a topic. And today I want to talk about life as a young lawyer, and I know that there are many young lawyers who listen to the show, and I had the opportunity to talk to a couple of students, one to a law student and a recent law grad this week, looking for some advice on what do I do with the first part of my career. And the challenge with this question is that there's far too many people who are willing to give you advice without ever asking what's your goal, where do you want to end up? And you can solve that problem by asking these young lawyers where's their goal and where do they want to end up? But most of us don't know. Even as old lawyers, a lot of us don't know, and the thing is that might change. It might change your destination in three years or five years, or 10 or 15, or it might never change. And so, in that environment, how do you calibrate your action and adjust your goals and navigate your life and live a life of your own design towards whatever you think the goal is in that moment? And so what I came to at the end of these conversations is it really the goal as a young lawyer and also as an old lawyer, is to keep as many doors open in your life as you can until you find the door that you go. You know what, fuck it. I want to run through that one.
Speaker 0:
So there's a there's a guy between his second and his third year of law school who I talked to, who who tells me he wants to be a plaintiff's lawyer and said what should I do? Should I go try to be a prosecutor so I can get a bunch of trial experience? Should I go just try to hang a shingle and be a plaintiff's lawyer? Should I go try to find a plaintiff's law firm to work for. Then I said, yes, those are all three reasonably good options, right, but let me suggest to you option number four which is what I wish I had done with the first three, four, five years of my career which is go defend cases for an auto insurance company and I don't think that was a thought that had crossed his mind before, and here's why I suggested it.
Speaker 0:
If the goal is to get trial experience because trial experience pays the bills right, you can do that in one of two places, as far as I can tell. You can do it as a prosecutor or as a public defender, and you can be in trial and in court all day, every day, just about. Or you can do it as an insurance defense lawyer. It's difficult to get early trial experience as a plaintiff's lawyer, right, at least in Virginia. It is difficult to get early trial experience as a plaintiff's lawyer. Now you can get prosecutorial experience, but it might not necessarily translate to civil, and so the advice that I gave this guy is listen, dude, if you want to be a great trial lawyer, go try cases for the defense for a couple years and don't go to a private firm where the partners are hogging the cases where you might just be running around scheduling trials and scheduling depositions and proofreading interrogatories and that kind of stuff. Go to work for allstate or geico or state farm or somebody like that and just bang your head against the wall for a couple of years.
Speaker 0:
Adjusters are going to make ridiculous offers that you're going to have to defend. You're going to be thrown into court on absolute losers of cases. You won't have any control over that. You will win some cases that you are supposed to lose. You will lose some cases that you're supposed to win. That just happens. But you will be in an absolutely low risk to no risk environment because at the end of the day it's an insurance company's money. If they bet wrong and they didn't offer policy limits, they're just going to pay the money. Your clients will be angry, maybe if they care, and you will learn client control. You will learn hey, dude, you got to show up for trial because the adjuster says you got to show up for trial. So you learn all of those skills and you'll do it in a way that you won't get to do it as a plaintiff's lawyer, because as a plaintiff's lawyer in the first couple of years of my career I tried maybe a case every month in what's called general district court, which is Virginia's basically a small claims, although larger now.
Speaker 0:
So when I started the jurisdictional maximum was 15,000. At some point it got bumped up to $25,000. It's now $50,000. You could now try a reasonably sized case in general district court in about two and a half hours. A handful of cases a year, maybe one a month, and it was great experience. But it was not near the experience that I would have gotten had I been trying little fender bender cases for defense firms.
Speaker 0:
And my new friend said to me well, if I go do that, they make good money. Do they make any money? I said I don't know. But honestly, in the first couple of years of your career it doesn't matter. And in fact it's probably better on the defense side, right, because you almost certainly have a more robust set of health insurance and dental coverage and 401k match and all the things that come from working for a big corporation than you do. If you're working for a small or even a good-sized plaintiff's firm right, good-sized plaintiff's firm, right Almost certainly that set of benefits is better.
Speaker 0:
And if you're making $5,000 or $10,000 or $15,000 or $20,000 less for a couple of years. Who cares? Because you are stacking the skills that, when you are now four, five, six, seven years into your career, will pay dividends. And then you can make the switch, and then you can make all the money in the world as a plaintiff's lawyer, because you will be years ahead of your plaintiff's lawyer. Only, colleagues, in terms of your trial skills, at least you should be.
Speaker 0:
But if you never want to be a trial lawyer, if you just want to learn the business of law and there are certain plaintiff's lawyers who only do the business of law then maybe the better option is to just hang a shingle. You'll figure it out. Figure out a way to have a low cost of living, set up your virtual office with your regis or we work or whatever office shared office space. All you need really is a computer, a crappy website and willingness to go and have lunch five times a week with other lawyers who might refer you cases or to whom you can refer cases that you generate. And so the thing to think about is what is the skill set that will serve me five years from now that I can start developing now and start stacking on? And if you don't know whether you want to be a great trial lawyer or you want to be a great business owner, you want to be a great marketer.
Speaker 0:
I think I probably would run a trial lawyer in the beginning, because I think that keeps the most doors open. I think if you were to get five years into your career and you had never tried a case, it would be difficult to make that shift and to go and learn it right. But if you have a place that you can go to, where you have some mentorship and some teaching from older lawyers, I think that's what I would be thinking about if I were getting out of law school now. Like, where can I go and get the most reps at the thing that I want to be good at five or 10 years from now? Because it is very hard to be good at something the first couple of times that you do it and this is for older lawyers too. If you were creating YouTube videos, your first couple of YouTube videos are going to suck. If you were going into a new practice area, your first couple of cases in that practice area you're probably not going to be very good. If you're hiring a team member for the first time, you probably are not going to be very good at delegating and training that person because you don't have any reps and you don't have this frame of reference.
Speaker 0:
For how do I do this? And I'm somebody who I've always learned not by reading, not by listening, but by touching the electric fence, and I'm very good at not touching the electric fence in the same place twice. So your mileage may vary, but for me it's like the most important skill to stack as in law, student, lawyer and early stage entrepreneur is this doing muscle, do bail, take feedback, iterate. Do bail, take feedback, iterate. And the more you can do that over and over again, beginning in a low risk environment and steadily moving your way up the risk ladder, the more successful you will be. And somewhere along that ladder you're going to go yeah, fuck it, that's the door I want to run through and you're going to start running through that door. But until that happens, the goal should be to keep as many doors open as you possibly can. That's it. That's the Friday show. I will see you guys next week.