I've got a little space to fill

Some personal reflections on life in the legal profession, and encouragement for young lawyers who haven't yet found their place in it.

In his 1988 novel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, the pretty-good sequel to his brilliant Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams’s protagonist — a shambolic genius and mediocre private eye who believes in the quantum-level connectedness of all things — accidentally rear-ends a car on the highway, one he was following only because he was utterly lost and the other vehicle seemed to know where it was going.

By a quantum-level coincidence, the driver of that car turned out to be the key to the mystery he was struggling to solve. The protagonist, Dirk Gently, makes an observation that has stayed with me ever since: “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

Whenever I finish a presentation to a group of young lawyers or law students and it’s time for questions, invariably someone puts up their hand and asks something like: “How did you wind up doing this?” I assume they’re not asking to be polite. I think they’re asking because my work appears interesting and I seem to like it, and they can’t say the same about their own lives as lawyers, and they’re really hoping there’s a roadmap somewhere that could somehow take them to a better place than this.

And I get that, because I’ve been there. Painfully vivid in my memory is the morning, 30 years ago this spring, when the BigLaw partner told me, not unsympathetically, that the firm would not require my services once my articling term ended. I did not see it coming, even though I absolutely should have — I was obviously a poor fit for the firm’s work culture and business model, and I hadn’t so much as tried to build relationships with partners or practice groups. I didn’t much like it there, and I would have been a lousy associate. The firm was right to cut me loose.

But it hurt. And it left me bereft. I wasn’t used to failure, and here I had just bombed out on the biggest stage in the country for the profession I’d joined. I didn’t know what I was going to do next; I had hardly any skills to market and no clear idea of what sort of lawyer I wanted to be or even could be. I felt like an outsider who didn’t belong in the legal profession. What was I even doing here? (If you’ve ever wondered why I’m on a crusade to tear down and rebuild the lawyer formation system, this is my villain origin story.)

I sent stacks of job applications to more than 80 law firms across Toronto. Four of them sent back standard-form acknowledgements, and the rest was silence. With my unemployment benefits running out, I finally accepted that I wasn’t going to be a lawyer in a law firm, and I switched tracks. I applied to work at a host of legal industry companies, including legal publishers, one of which finally hired me as an entry-level writer for a lawyers’ newspaper.

That was the start of my journey here — within a year I was a junior editor, within two I was the managing editor, and within four I had moved to Ottawa to begin a 10-year run as editor-in-chief of the largest lawyer magazine in the country. Seven years into that tenure I began blogging about a legal market that I could see was badly underperforming, and three years after that I launched a business called Law21 where I could write and speak full-time about how we could change all that.

But I made multiple false starts and ran into numerous dead ends along the way. I thought I could be a legal academic and I tried to teach law school classes: Nope. I thought I was cut out to be a professional coach and help lawyers achieve their goals: Nuh-uh. I thought I could turn my blog into a paid subscription newsletter and start a legal analysis platform: Hell no. I didn’t stop failing; I became a serial failer. But I eventually learned to swim with the current, not against it. I learned to let go of what wasn’t working and pay more attention to what seemed to work better.

But that entire journey was only possible because, after that bad year of knocking fruitlessly on law firm doors, I admitted to myself that working as a lawyer wasn’t going to happen for me. And it was only at that point — only when I recognized and accepted that I wouldn’t achieve a goal that I’d set — that I finally asked myself: Why did I ever think that was a worthwhile goal for me in the first place?

I’d never dreamed as a kid of becoming a lawyer. There were no other lawyers in my family. I applied to law school because I didn’t know what else to do with myself, and it seemed like a place where I could solve problems and help people, two things at least that I knew I liked doing.

But law school, then as now, assumes that you’re there to become a practicing lawyer (not that they’re going to help you much with that). I absorbed this assumption, accepting uncritically that the only legal job worth having was “practicing lawyer” and giving no thought to any other possibility. Having no real goals for myself, and unable to perceive any particular purpose, I adopted the legal profession’s default mode.

The turning point of my career wasn’t being cut loose by the law firm, and it wasn’t getting a job as a legal reporter. It was waking up one day and realizing that I had never really tried to figure out what I was meant to do. It was when I decided to switch off the autopilot, rip out the factory settings of my life, and start determining who I was here to be and what I was here to do.

You might not believe that any of us is “meant” to be or to do anything. You might regard the universe as a random collection of events, and your own life as just one offshoot of infinite happenstance. I respect that view, but I don’t share it. In my case, my Catholicism inspires me to see meaningful order in chaos and loving purpose in existence. But you don’t need to be any kind of religious believer to notice that an individual’s use of their gifts and circumstances lines up incredibly well with their personal fulfillment, and to think there might be a reason for that. (Though it took me too long to see that clearly for myself.)

I worry that a lot of young lawyers today — a lot of young people, really — doubt that their lives have much particular meaning, or even worth. They think purpose and fulfillment, if they exist at all, belong to other people with better luck or who made better choices. So when they find themselves in the wrong place and they’re struggling, they can’t see a way out — mostly because they don’t even see how or why there could be a right place for them.

I believe there are no extraneous people and no purposeless lives in this world. I believe that everyone is here for a reason — several reasons actually, probably hundreds over the course of a lifetime. You’re not here by accident, like an extra Lego piece inadvertently tossed into the box. And you’re not in the legal profession by accident either, not with your talent and creativity and desire to make things better. There is a path somewhere, just for you, and it leads to a place, just for you.

I thought that I was a good writer, and that proved to be true. It turned out I could also see systemic problems in the law and suggest solutions. It even turned out, to my great surprise, that I could stand up in front of a thousand lawyers and tell them about the legal world as it is and the legal world as it could be, and how we could close the gap in between.

But I didn’t know any of this for sure until I tried doing it. And I didn’t try doing it until I accepted that I was meant to do something — that I was in this specific time and place, with these specific abilities and opportunities, for reasons that I was obliged to discover. So I leaned into what I could do well and did more of what seemed to work well, and there was really not much more to it than that.

I never really knew where I intended to go. But I think I’ve wound up where I needed to be. You can, too.