Liz Brown thought she was mapping out the perfect legal career. After graduating from Harvard Law School, she spent a total of 12 years at two big firms and eventually became a partner. But it wasn’t what she expected. “Making partner didn’t make anything better, it made it worse—like winning a pie-eating contest where the prize was more pie,” she says. So Brown considered a move that many law firm attorneys do at some point: going in-house. But before she made that transition, Brown abandoned the legal profession altogether.
What happened? “I was increasingly unhappy,” she says. “It was only after I left my firm and started looking at going in-house that I discovered the grass isn’t greener—it’s not so much better in terms of schedule, and there are all these additional downsides.” Brown, 45, now a business law professor and author of “Life After Law: Finding Work You Love with the J.D. You Have” (Bibliomotion, 2013) also serves as a career coach for dissatisfied lawyers. And many of those lawyers have told her how miserable they’ve been after making the transition to in-house counsel.
This content has been archived. It is available through our partners, LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law.
To view this content, please continue to their sites.
Not a Lexis Subscriber?
Subscribe Now
Not a Bloomberg Law Subscriber?
Subscribe Now
LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law are third party online distributors of the broad collection of current and archived versions of ALM's legal news publications. LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law customers are able to access and use ALM's content, including content from the National Law Journal, The American Lawyer, Legaltech News, The New York Law Journal, and Corporate Counsel, as well as other sources of legal information.
For questions call 1-877-256-2472 or contact us at [email protected]