“Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder,” according to Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, in her best-selling book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. We could not agree more. While Sandberg is not an attorney, her profound yet simple words of wisdom are nonetheless apropos for young lawyers.
In recent times, career progression for attorneys in practice has changed. The old “ladder” model — beginning your career with a firm right out of law school, working your way up the ranks, making partner and retiring from your firm — still plays out for a segment of the profession, but by and large this is the exception and not the rule. Most of us — without even noticing it — find ourselves in the jungle gym model, which includes a series of movements, sometimes upward, often lateral, and sometimes even regressive, for a variety of reasons.
