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In this thoughtful episode, former law firm partner Murray Gottheil shares his candid perspective on the legal profession’s challenging structure and culture. With 39 years of experience practicing business law, Murray discusses why he views big law as a “pyramid scheme” and explores its impact on lawyers’ wellbeing, client service, and the profession’s future. He offers valuable insights for lawyers considering their career paths and shares his definition of success that evolved from managing a law firm to finding fulfillment in retirement. Through authentic conversation and occasional humor, Murray challenges conventional wisdom about success in law while offering hope for positive change through alternative practice models.
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Episode Transcript
MURRAY: [00:00:00] People graduate law school, they go to firms, if you ask them for a definition of success, I don’t think the words, you know, success means being personally satisfied mentally and physically healthy and living balanced environment and having great relationships with my spouse and children, that isn’t the first thing people are going to talk about.
LAUREN: Welcome to a different practice. I’m your host, Lauren Lester, and I’m passionate about helping solo attorneys build thriving practices. After starting my own solo firm straight out of law school and building it to a successful practice that earns well over six figures while working part time, I’m here to share the tools and strategies that made it possible.
Think bestie while learning everything they didn’t teach you about running a business in law school. Pull up a seat and get ready to build a different practice.
Welcome back, everyone. If you caught the last episode, you know that I celebrated 50 episodes by sharing some of my favorite things, including moments and [00:01:00] people that made me stop and think differently about our profession and how we approach it. Today’s episode follows in that same vein, and it is one that I believe will genuinely shift your perspective on the business of the practice of law.
Let me tell you a little bit about Murray Gottheil. I first encountered Murray when he presented at the Georgia Bar Association’s Wellness Institute, and within two minutes, I literally mean two minutes, I was completely captivated. Here was someone speaking with raw honesty about our profession in a way that I had rarely encountered before.
You know, it’s interesting, Murray describes the legal profession as a pyramid scheme. Yes, a pyramid scheme. And when I heard him say this, I thought, It immediately reminded me of something my dear friend Ryan Payton previously wrote in a Colorado lawyer article. They said the legal profession often revered for its pillars of justice and advocacy can also resemble a pyramid scheme.
At its apex stand the established firms and the high profile attorneys basking in the [00:02:00] limelight of success and influence while the base, a burgeoning multitude of aspiring lawyers. Clamors to ascend, often encountering hurdles of debt, fierce competition, and elusive opportunities. Like Ryan, Murray knows the system intimately.
For 39 years, he practiced business law, primarily as partner in a medium sized firm near Toronto. He was the practice head for the corporate department for much of that time and the managing partner of the firm for five years. But here’s what makes his perspective so valuable. He is brutally honest about both sides of the coin.
While he loved working with clients and mentoring younger lawyers, he’s equally forthright about hating the relentless pressure of the profession and its impact on family life, physical health, and mental well being. In 2020, Murray did what many of us dream about doing, but few of us, unfortunately, actually do.
He retired to a small town hours away from Toronto and bought a pickup truck. Everyone’s dream, right? But he didn’t just ride off [00:03:00] into the sunset. Instead, he’s dedicated himself to helping law students and lawyers plan their careers with their eyes wide open, publishing his insights on Law360, LinkedIn, and at his website, lawanddisorderinc.com.
In our conversation today, we dive into this pyramid scheme analogy and explore how the structure has evolved over time. Murray shares his insights on the devastating consequences this culture has had on individual lawyers, clients, and the profession as a whole. Many of you, like myself, have probably experienced this firsthand.
But what I really love about this discussion is that it’s not just about identifying the problems. We all know those. Murray also talks about potential solutions, particularly about how solo and small firm practices are uniquely positioned to challenge this entrenched culture. For anyone who has ever felt trapped in the traditional law firm model, this episode will be especially relevant.
And to anyone who took the leap and started your own firm, I hope that you feel as inspired as I [00:04:00] did, that in fact, change starts with us. I have to tell you, this conversation was as refreshing as it was eye opening, and Murray’s D and humor make even the heaviest topics digestible. I found myself laughing out loud one minute and then deeply thinking the next.
I hope that you find it as enlightening and entertaining as I did, ready to challenge what you think you know about the legal profession. Alright, let’s dive in. Here’s my conversation with Murray Gothy. Welcome, Murray, to A Different Practice.
MURRAY: Well, thank you so much for having me.
LAUREN: So I recently saw you at a CLE, and I think you were five minutes into your presentation when I turned to the person I had come with and said, I gotta get this guy on the podcast and chat with him more.
And I was most intrigued because you are one of the few people, I can count on, on one hand that have described the legal profession in a way that seems very obvious. But nobody talks about it in this way. So can [00:05:00] you start us off by why you described the legal profession as a pyramid scheme, how you came to that analogy and what your feeling is about how we’ve got to this place?
MURRAY: Okay, well that’s that’s a lot of questions in there, so let me sort them out. And by the way, I’ll just mention that I ran into some people from Georgia, and they refer to it as a plantation system. Similar. So, either, either analogy probably works. Well, why is it a pyramid scheme? Because at the top of the, of the, of the pyramid, we have some people who want to make an incredible amount of money.
You know, depending on the size of the firm, I mean, you know, it can be in the millions and millions. At the bottom of the pyramid, we have this whole bunch of people who are working to the point of exhaustion and mental breakdown. They’re falling like flies. In the middle, we have all the people who are trying to get to the top.
The wannabes. So in my mind when we talk about mental [00:06:00] health in the profession, which I sort of talk about a lot, let me do a little quick aside, you may have to bring me back, to say that my wife says I’m the picture of mental health. the before picture. So, I don’t think there’s a lot of mental health in the profession.
So, when we talk about, about the way people are working, you know, and, and of course, you know, we look at the advertisements that firms put out about their mental health initiatives and their deep concern for their people on mental health awareness day or week or year, whatever comes up. I think that’s all nonsense, by the way.
But when we, But when we talk about all this concern about mental health, it just keeps striking me that the problem is really simple. The problem is that we’re working people ridiculously hard. And how can you be mentally healthy when you’re working six and a half days a week and, and you’re under all this pressure?
And then I think, well, why do people have to work like this? And the answer that comes to me is very simple. Well, if the people at the top want to earn a few [00:07:00] million bucks a year, somebody’s got to be working really, really hard. So I think that’s where we’ve got the profession to. Now, how did we get there?
Well, I’m an old timer. You know, I am 69 and three quarters years old right now. I don’t know why I’ve started counting the fractions again like you do when you’re a kid. And I remember when you came into the profession and there was a real thought that you join a firm, you spend your lifetime at that firm, and after about seven years they make you a partner or not.
We used to have, we used to call the system up or out. After seven years you’re either moving up or you’re getting out of the firm. They’re, you know, this would be too shockingly horrifying and humiliating to stay at a firm that wouldn’t make you a partner. And everybody wanted to be a partner. But I guess the good thing about that system is that when somebody joined the firm, you knew they were staying with you.
It made sense to give, spend your time on them, to mentor them, to teach them, to to give them opportunities to meet clients. These were your future [00:08:00] partners and they were the people who eventually were going to generate the funds needed to pay out your capital account when you wanted to retire. So, I think it was very symbiotic, people, you know, knew where they were going.
You took the young people under your arm, and you, and you helped them grow. Well, then we get to the, then we get to the early 90s, and again in 2008. And we have our financial crisis, and the people at the top of the pyramid want to keep earning that type of money. Well, They better start firing people at the bottom when there isn’t a lot of work.
Partners start reaching out and doing the work they had their associates do because it’s better than doing nothing. So now the associates learn a lesson and they learn that there is no longer any loyalty in the profession. So when things get better, And now, you know, they need to hire people. There’s competitive competition for young talent.
People are like, yeah, why should I stay where I am? They didn’t show me any loyalty, you know? So now they’re jumping from firm to firm for the best deal. So we’ve destroyed [00:09:00] loyalty in the profession. And once you’ve destroyed loyalty, it’s all about money. And once it’s all about money, then the, oh God, I know I’m a Canadian socialist, all of us are socialists in Canada, right?
So, so I’m good at what the hell. And, and, and I was a business law lawyer. I was as capitalist as we get, right? But but I’ve got to say it, our capitalist overlords at the top who want to keep earning six million dollars a year, the only way to do it is to, is to keep, you know, increasingly increasing the, the billable hours requirements that the people at the bottom.
So how did we get here? I think we got here by Moving the profession. Okay, I’m gonna divert again. When I started the profession we talked about it as being a profession. And then over the years it became a real sticky point, a real discussion point, that no, it’s not just a profession, it’s a business too.
And we had to teach lawyers it was a business also. I think we went too far. We got to the [00:10:00] point where now I think it is a business which unfortunately and inconveniently is regulated. I think that’s how we look at it now. The profession, or how too many people look at it, the profession part is sort of gone.
We did a lot of smart things. We started hiring business people to manage law firms. That was smart. But then we went all the way the other end, and it’s all about the money. Well, when it’s all about the money, unfortunately, and short term money at that, you’re no longer thinking, How’s the strong firm strong is the firm going to be 15, 20 years from now, when you’re thinking, you know, what are this year’s profits going to be?
Then you grind your people. So long convoluted answer, but I’ve I think all these themes come together. The, it’s a business, not a profession to the same extent loyalty was killed by the firms and then reciprocated by the associates. I think it, it, all these themes come together and that’s where you end up.
LAUREN: You talked about [00:11:00] the mental health the toll on mental health that this type of structure takes because the weight of the work is at the bottom for the most part and we’re sort of working our associates to death. From your perspective, having been a partner at a firm from a little bit more of a business standpoint too, what are some of the other negative consequences that, you The this type of structure has has afforded us and I’m thinking in particular, in terms of the turnover that you’re talking about that we’re sort of wearing folks out, we’re not keeping them for the long term, the loyalty is gone.
Like that’s terrible for us as individuals as attorneys, but the law firm itself in that type of structure doesn’t seem to be Well suited to have a long term or even a, a good yearly what’s the, what’s the term I’m looking for like to have a good year when you have all this turnover because that costs a ton, a firm a ton of [00:12:00] money.
Did you find that?
MURRAY: There’s a funny thing. I don’t think there are very many law firms that look at it the way you’ve just described it. I think the focus is always on short term profit. There are things law firms. measure and things they don’t. If you hang around with accountants long enough, you’ll hear an expression accountants always say you can’t manage what you can’t or don’t measure.
Right? Sort of a thing I learned from my accountant friends. Well, law firms are good at measuring certain things. They measure billable hours. They measure non billable hours to some extent. They measure write offs. They measure client origination credits. They measure work in process, a bunch of stuff that they measure.
They, there are other things they don’t seem to pay any attention to. They don’t pay attention to the cost of bad morale unless it shows up directly and reduced hourly billings. They don’t pay attention [00:13:00] to to the cost of absences. They have a budget line somewhere for recruiting fees, but I don’t think they pay much attention to how they’re affected by mental health and by how hard we work our lawyers.
I, I’m sure I mean, they must have a budget for training when when lawyers are joining the firm, but I don’t think that they tie that to to the mental health issues and physical health issues caused by overwork. So there’s some things they measure. And when it go, when you walk into the compensation committee, As the fellow who brought in 10 million in business this year, and who themselves billed a million dollars, and you apply whatever the formulas are in that firm, well, 10 percent of the 10 million for business brought in, that earns me a million.
And I billed a million, I get, let’s say, 40 percent of that, so there’s 400. So now I’m at 140, and now I’ll, and let’s talk about what percentage of override I get for the associates. That’s the type of [00:14:00] discussion you have. But does anyone turn to that lawyer and say, well, you turned through three juniors this year, and we paid the recruiters X amount of dollars there was, you know, low billings on, you know, on the new people as they came up to speed, etc, etc.
We’re, we’re not as good as measuring that. And frankly, we don’t have the guts to apply it to our higher earners. There’s one Canadian firm very impressed with this year. They seem to be really going somewhere. They’ve jumped from about 30, 40 lawyers a few years ago. They’re up over a hundred. They’ve now opened several offices, including a few in the States, and they seem to be going somewhere.
And when they were describing their system, what I found so interesting is they said, we assign associates to a partner. And when we judge partner compensation, there’s a big element of the employee profitability in that group. So you partner delivered a ton of work, et cetera, et cetera. But your particular associates weren’t weren’t [00:15:00] very profitable and that’s part of your calculation and those turnover fees and everything else that’s part of you.
But I don’t think enough firms do that. So yes, a rational person would sit here and say, well, obviously there’s all these costs of bad morale and turnover and inefficiency and training obviously. But. In terms of actually applying that in your compensation system hey, if, if the lawyer from hell who has high personal billings and, you know, and big client origination credits is going to make more money in the short term, By creating these problems for somebody else to address, then that’s what they’re going to do in a lot of law firms.
LAUREN: Do you think, or have you ever had the experience that this trickles out to the clients? Like, do the clients feel the negative effects of this [00:16:00] structure, or is this really just sort of an internal Brewing that is pretty solidified.
MURRAY: I think the clients do feel it, do see it. And I’ve had a few interesting examples.
I had one client who came to me and said the reason he was leaving his firm was he loved the associate at the firm he was working with. Absolutely loved him, adored him, thought he was, had been doing a fantastic job, would have liked to stay with him. But! The partner, who had originally been introduced two years before, did everything in the world to be sure that he was maintaining the client relationship.
He says, whenever the, I call the associate, I haven’t talked to the partner in years, but I call the associate, we talk about getting a document done, and then I call him back and say, where’s the draft? And he says, well, John needs to look at it still. I know John doesn’t need to look at it. But it sits on John’s desk another week, and then John adds his docket entry for looking at it.
I am so tired of the delays and the extra [00:17:00] expense caused by this fellow pretending to be in charge so that he can maintain his client contacts. So pretty smart client. So he left him just for that reason. I have a story I like to tell about. out negotiating. I only tell the stories where I did well, of course, I never tell the stories where I got out negotiated, right?
But I’m busy out negotiating this Bay Street lawyer, and she’s a very young lawyer, seems smart, seems capable. But every time I ask her something, she says yes. So I get bold and I keep asking for more and more things. And she keeps saying yes, over and over and over. Now she’s in a Bay street firm. I’m in my smaller, a midsize suburban firm, and she’s acting for a huge client.
I’m acting for a little guy who’s in a dispute with them. And at the end, I’m so curious as to why, why suddenly I’ve become this brilliant negotiator. That we’re at, you know, these are the days of physical closing. So we’re at the closing meeting and I sort of say to her, no, nice to [00:18:00] meet you in person finally.
And and you know, you seem to be relatively young to or junior to be handling something with. You know, this many, you know, pieces to it. It was IP in it and there was, it was a share purchase and IP and the settlement of shareholders dispute and all sorts of stuff going up. And she said, Oh yes, it’s been very difficult, but this is a file that doesn’t merit partner time.
And I said, I don’t understand. What does that mean? She says, well, I’m not allowed to ask a partner any questions on this file because the dollar value is not high enough, so I have to do it all myself. So talk about the compensation affecting the client service. She’s acting for this huge company, which presumably is using this big downtown firm because they think they’re better, but what they’re getting from that firm is a junior who’s out on her own with no supervision.
So yes, everything I think trickles down to the client experience or the cost to the client. But hey, clients have their [00:19:00] reasons for wanting to deal with certain firms and then, you know, If they see the value in it that’s great.
LAUREN: I’m most struck by this system doesn’t seem to be great. There’s so much in it that is bad for our mental health is bad for the clients is sort of that very greedy, capitalistic moved very far from what our profession started as.
So it feels like there’s bright flashing lights and yet that is. Is in tension with, there doesn’t seem to be a push for change. Are you feeling like there’s a push for change or is this something because of the way we’re regulated and that we self regulate that this system will go on forever unless there is some catastrophic
MURRAY: Well, I, I see a push for change from individual lawyers, not from clients.
Interestingly enough, the clients seem to be, [00:20:00] to be stuck in it. I don’t know what, what to, what to think about that. I mean, individual clients push for change. They, they hire more lawyers in house and they say enough. Some clients will some, sorry, losing my train of thought here. , lucky you’re editing later.
So yes, some clients will, will hire their own counsel. Some clients will switch levels of firms. Some clients will take the philosophy of, yeah, we’re, we don’t care about the firm, we care about the individual lawyer and they will cherry pick their lawyers from various firms and some clients will move their work to boutique firms that they perceive as having the same expertise and a lot less cost, but there certainly seems to be.
Huge numbers of clients who are happy with, to go along with the existing system. I was speaking to a lawyer yesterday, not even a partner at his firm in the States, who was billing 1, 500 an hour. And to me that, you know, these numbers are, are getting crazy, but you know, and his isn’t even the higher, higher, one of the higher rates in, in [00:21:00] his firm.
Where I see some push for change are individual lawyers, really good, capable lawyers who flamed out, burned out, stopped short of burning out and have said enough and they’re going off and setting up their own firms and they are doing it professing that we want to operate in a healthy environment and we’re going to create it for ourself.
But interestingly enough, it’s a lot more women doing that than men. And I think it’s because women get, you know, knocked over the head in the profession much earlier, especially, you know, when they start families, they tend to take the brunt of it much earlier of coming back. And yes, I was a top performer and all of a sudden they’re not treating me the same way.
Or all of a sudden the pressures of trying to manage new family responsibilities plus, plus you know, perform in the office at that level have just become too great. So I’m seeing more women doing it and some pretty senior and impressive women doing it. But you know, as [00:22:00] soon as they do that, the big firm marketing machine starts and every, you know, they have their perception on it, you know, oh yeah, these people couldn’t hack it, they had to go off and do something softer, right?
LAUREN: Yeah, they create their own narrative.
MURRAY: Do
LAUREN: you think there will be a tipping point at some point where enough women, I also see, I feel like the younger generation of new lawyers coming up to they just sort of have it in their DNA. It feels that they have different values and they don’t want to work for a company where they have to build 2500 hours a year like that.
Just that just doesn’t work for them. And as much as we We call them entitled, and that’s probably warranted at some point. Like, do you think that there will be a tipping point where there will be enough individual lawyers who say this doesn’t work for us anymore, that the big firms now can’t find people to run their, their schemes?
MURRAY: No, you know what? I don’t see that happening. It seems there are always More and more people [00:23:00] willing to line up and do that. And you know, it’s strange, but you get into it and then it becomes normal to you. This fellow I was speaking to who’s, who’s billing about 1500 hours and, and is you know, not particularly happy in the environment.
But when I talked to him. You know, his first impulse is to, well, maybe you should find another firm. But what type of firms are you talking about? All the firms he’s talking about are in that same league and, and go that way. And there are things that trap people in it. If you want to work in a big law firm and, and be so specialized, get specialized to a certain point, it may be a specialty you can’t then do in a, in a much smaller firm.
environment. And of course you get trapped because you live the, you know, you live the way you’re being paid. So now you’ve got commitments, et cetera. And you get trapped because they don’t encourage you to develop your own client base. And after a certain number of years it might be very difficult to, to move to a smaller firm without a client base.
And [00:24:00] I think there are just always people, you know of the elk who just want to earn as much money as possible and have what they perceive to be as much prestige as possible. So as a society you know, there are a few things going on. One is we don’t understand the concept of enough. It’s just like, you know, how much do you have to earn?
You know, you don’t look at what the corporate people earn, what the athletes earn, look at what the big partners and big law firms are. At some point as a society, we don’t turn to people and say, yeah, your focus on earning more and more and more is actually shameful. And you don’t fit in. No, we glorify them.
All of a sudden we start listening to their opinions on political matters because they happen to have made a lot of money. And that, that makes them somehow. Smarter, you know? So, there’s that. We also don’t define success. You know, people, people graduate law school, they go to firms, if you ask them for a definition of [00:25:00] success, I don’t think the words you know, success means being personally satisfied, mentally and physically healthy, and living in a balanced environment, and having great relationships with my spouse and children, that isn’t the first thing people are going to talk about.
So my own view is, yeah, there are lots of people willing to continue. To to be attracted toward the money there are also the law firms are complicit in terms of pushing those people that way. And I don’t know that a tipping point is coming very soon. Now, as for the younger generations, I have such mixed feelings on this.
On the one hand, I talk to the young people and I say, You don’t necessarily have to take the job that pays the most. Get the job with the best mentoring and the best training. And be mentally healthy and don’t get the job where you’re going to work day and night. Then my wife, who’s a practicing lawyer, turns to me and she says, You know, Murray, back when you were the managing partner of your law firm, if these same young associates had come [00:26:00] in and told you that their priorities were their physical and mental health, their relationships, they really didn’t want to work too much into the evenings and into the weekends, you would not have hired them.
Yeah, that’s probably true. So I had some mixed feelings because then you talk, look at some of the young people and I see they are so obsessed with their, you know, with work life balance and mental health, which, which is great. But how do they learn their trade? They, you know, if I still sort of believe in the first few years, you’ve got to work pretty hard to learn your trade.
So I find myself very conflicted. I tell this story about a lawyer and she came to my firm and like most young, and she worked for me and like most young lawyers, she was not all that useful for the first year. The second year, she became quite a bit more useful by the third year. You know, we were cooking on gas, as they used to say.
Things were going well. I was really delighted. All the time and effort and training I’d put into it was paying off, and that’s when [00:27:00] she gave her notice. So, she gave her notice, and she said, and she said, look, here’s the thing. She said, when she grew up, both of her parents worked very hard. They didn’t have enough time to spend with their kids, and she wants to spend more time with her family.
And I thought she was insane, but, Here’s the reason I thought she was insane. I thought she was crazy because as far as I knew, she wasn’t in a, in a committed relationship with anyone. And she certainly had no kids. And I, I thought, no, you’re young, you’re in your first five, at this point she was about three years of practice, you should be working ridiculously hard and, and gaining, you know, learning your craft.
And yes, I agree with everything you’ve said, but not in your first few years. But as the years have gone by, it’s occurred to me, she’s a lot smarter than I gave her credit for. Somebody famous, was it Murray Angelo? Somebody famous said, begin as you mean to continue. And she could see that this life wasn’t going to be the life that she wanted.
It was interfering with her [00:28:00] running. That was one of the problems because she liked to run every day at five o’clock and, you know, we were working her until seven 30 or eight and it was eventually going to interfere with their kids. And rather than start a career that was then not going to work, she decided to go do something that would work.
So, so over time I’ve I’ve, I’ve decided she’s a lot smarter than I gave her credit for, but that is a problem. Because I see some young people who, yeah, they’re really worried about their work life balance in their first two years of practice, but they’re not, they’re not as worried about, you know, learning absolutely everything they can and becoming good at what they’re doing.
So I don’t have the answers the answer for that.
LAUREN: I just always appreciate your honesty about it. I feel like we’re not honest enough, even if we don’t have the answers or there are conflicting pieces that are pulling, like you said, you’ve got to learn and you’ve got to be in the trenches and that takes time. But we also need time to do what we want.
And there’s only so much time. I don’t think any of us have [00:29:00] the, the silver bullet, but it is helpful to have the conversations because I don’t think that’s happening enough. And some folks are feeling stuck yeah. But I, I wanted to go back to your point about defining success and what is enough and what does that look like if you’re talking to maybe a young lawyer or maybe an attorney who is trying to get out of the big law space, they do want to maybe open up their own firm where would you tell them to start or what are some things that they should consider so that they don’t get on that hamster wheel and can maybe set themselves up for a little bit more success?
MURRAY: Well, if their long term intention is not to be in Big Law, then if they’re going to start at Big Law, they need a strategy. And the strategy is to, first of all, be certain that they’re going to be working for somebody who’s going to mentor and teach them, as opposed to working for somebody who’s just going to use them to, to push out repetitive [00:30:00] hours.
They also have to look at their area of practice and be certain it’s an area that they can leave with. So I know of one young lawyer who started in pension law at one of the big firms and after a few years joined a boutique pension firm. That’s a perfectly good strategy. But if you’re going to start in doing something very obscure that can only, where the only clients are major institutions and they may not be willing to work with much smaller firms, then that’s something else.
Or if you’re going to be doing very, very. You know, high end technical work that’s relatively narrow. You need to, again, maybe the same point, you need to be thinking about how that’s going to translate. The next thing is, if you’re going to start, again, in big law, then you’ve got to think about client base, and you have to think about timing.
You can leave big law after one or two or three years if you’ve got the right experience and you know, and there are [00:31:00] places who are going to want you. But when you get to a certain level, if you’re leaving and you don’t have client base to bring with you, it’s going to be hard to get to land anywhere other than at another big firm.
It’s very hard to move without clients, especially hard to move down market without clients. So I think you have to have a strategy. Now, the other thing I say to young people is, you know, big law isn’t the beginning and the end, you know, think about, you know, take a piece of paper, write down pros and cons, you know, pros money, pro prestige, pro looks good on my resume.
Now next pro training, maybe depending who you’re working for mentoring. Maybe, et cetera, et cetera. And, and then, you know, and then the cons, the work style, you know, the, the amount of demands that are going to be on you. The risk of getting over specialized too quickly any resistance that’s going to be there to building a a client base.
So you have to decide [00:32:00] whether it’s actually the place. I spoke to an interesting fellow recently. He articled with a big law firm and he’s one of the. Few people I speak to, because I speak to a lot of young lawyers who are having trouble getting jobs after they’re articling or whatever. Otherwise, you know, they wouldn’t be calling me, I suppose.
But this fellow is just so interesting because he articled at one of the biggest firms in the country, and then he got offered a job by them and by two much smaller firms. And he chose one of the smaller firms. You know, and not too many people walk away from, you know, from that type of offer and the type of money that the, that the bigger firms are offering.
So you know, the advice to young people is have a plan. Don’t do what I did. Don’t just let go because somebody, somebody, you know makes you feel good about yourself by giving you an offer. And you know, it feeds your ego. You know, ask a lot of questions about the people you’re going to work for and the type of work you’re going to be doing, the training you’re going to be [00:33:00] doing.
Whether they will support you to build a client base. Think about where you want to be some number of years later. So, on the flip side of all that, I worry about some of the young people who are starting off working for one or two or three person firms or or even on their own and where are they going to get this training you know and are they you know and then they tell me things like well to get the cash flow started we’ll start doing residential real estate deals which lawyers here do i think in the states your your systems are somewhat different but this is low end or they’re going to do low end wills in the states but it’s just to get the cash flow going And 10 years later, they’re probably still going to be doing it because that’s the world they, they got themselves committed to.
So I think there’s a hell of a lot more strategic planning needed for people’s careers than, than actually gets done. And interestingly, and maybe perversely, the more successful you are in law school, the higher your grades, the more, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re going to win [00:34:00] prizes. the more likely that you’re going to get sucked into one particular part of the system.
I did great my first year of law school. I finished fifth. They used to rank us. I finished fifth in my first year of law school. That got me a letter from the largest law firm in the city inviting me to have a summer job after year one. Okay. And of course I took that and then I took the one for year two, you know, you, you, it’s, I didn’t think about where I was going.
I just, you know. Got drawn into, into a system.
LAUREN: Yeah, it really requires more intentionality. I think that law school certainly doesn’t talk to us about because like you said, they go, great, you’re ranked high. Here are some opportunities. Or I always heard in law school, big law was the only option, which to me didn’t feel right.
That wasn’t the direction I wanted to go in.
MURRAY: Well, it is the only option, according to law schools. If you don’t, by the time you graduate law school, you pretty much think that if you don’t work in big law, you [00:35:00] are a loser. Yeah. Yep. Just a loser. You know? And it’s funny because look, obviously there are a lot of very bright, capable people in, in big law and a lot of them, you know, have become very successful and that’s great.
But there are other people who are, you know, they’re just cogs in that system.
LAUREN: They
MURRAY: don’t become the most brilliant lawyers.
LAUREN: And it’s easy, like you said, to get pulled into that if you’re not really thinking about it or thinking about what is my strategy, where do I want to go, that you can get in that current pretty quickly especially out of law school.
MURRAY: And also, and also, nobody tells you about it. I graduated law school, nobody explained to me I had to have clients to be in control of my career. How did I get through? And I went to four years of law school because, not three, because long Complicated story, but in Canada we have, we have one province on a different legal system.
So I got two different law degrees so I could practice in both Quebec and in the rest of the country. Four years of law school, nobody sat me down [00:36:00] and explained about why I might want to develop the skills to bring in clients. You know, a very wise lawyer who I started you know, who I met early in my career.
He explained to me when you’re when there’s something going on and you can’t understand why people are acting the way they’re acting, just sit and follow the money. Just follow the money. Well, you know, when you’re sitting in the boardroom at law school that has a plaque from this firm, and then you’re, you know, you go into the Moot court auditorium where that’s been donated by this other firm, and then the practitioners from those firms are coming into, sorry, sorry, coming in to speak to the class, and then you’re competing for prizes given by that firm.
It’s not hard to start thinking that that’s what the successful people do, you know, and right now, I don’t, you know, I don’t know how many big law lawyers will listen to this but if they [00:37:00] hear this, they’re likely to say, yeah, yeah, that’s right, I don’t get his point.
LAUREN: Yeah, it’s hard when you’re in it to the, what’s the phrase, it’s hard to see the trees or the forest when you’re in the trees.
Yeah, when it just is your norm, it seems like it’s norm. Why would you do any different way?
MURRAY: If the people around you are earning these big dollars, it just becomes the norm that you want to earn those big dollars. How many people sit down and think, you know, I’m talking about lawyers earning over a million bucks a year.
I never came close to that in my career, by the way, but here I am happily retired living where I want to live. Traveling, you know, I, I had my domestic reorganization and lost a ton of money doing that. And somehow still from a medium sized suburban firm, I say medium sized in Canada, it tends to be smaller than what you guys think of.
It’s, you know, we were like 20 to 40 lawyers during most of my career. Somehow I accumulated enough money to sit and [00:38:00] have what I think is a great retirement. These people have earned two and three times, you know, earning two and three times. I just don’t know what they need all that money for.
LAUREN: Yeah, it comes back to
MURRAY: Maybe my needs are simpler.
You know, I’m, I live in the country. I moved to the country. I bought a pickup truck. Yeah, that’s it. And I, and I’ve been traveling for two full months every winter. I mean, that sounds amazing. I take it. Yeah. And, and I didn’t need to earn a million bucks a year to do that. So I’m not sure. , not sure You get sucked into this system and it, and it seems normal to you.
Yeah.
LAUREN: And I, and I love your idea of, and, and the question of what is enough? And I think that can be really hard to answer, but we all have to sit down and do a little bit of soul searching and stay really focused on our answer. ’cause it can be very distracting when you’re looking at colleagues who have defined it differently or haven’t defined it at all and are just chasing a bigger and bigger and bigger number.
MURRAY: What is enough and what is [00:39:00] success? People just ask me, do I like practicing law? You say, I love practicing law. I hate the stress I do it under. And by the time, you know, I got toward the end, I hated the stress. I did it under more than I loved doing it. And then I knew it was time to get out. They have to ask for your definition of success.
If somebody says to young person. So if you get divorced, you maybe get it, you know, pick up some addictions. You, you work these crazy hours. It affects your, your health. You’re, you know, but you have the perfect house in the huge area of town and everyone knows who you are and you know, you’ve got, got the fancy cars and I mean, is that success for you?
And I, you know, I don’t, I don’t think anyone asked me those questions back in the day. Nobody, you know, and nobody’s, nobody ever said, and how much investables would you have to have in the bank to think you felt secure [00:40:00] and you could fund the type of lifestyle you wanted? And will you stop trying to earn more of them when you get to that number?
Nobody does this type of planning, right? Until they’re close to retirement. Then they start thinking about it a lot.
LAUREN: Yeah, but then sometimes that’s, I don’t want to say too late, but you don’t have as long of a runway at that point. So really doing it while you’re younger, early in the career can make such a world of difference in so many different aspects.
MURRAY: I think of it like Tetris. You know, the pieces are falling. I got to manipulate them. The longer I wait, the more room, the less room there is to maneuver in. At a certain point you’re, you’re screwed. You, you’ve got no more maneuvering room. So yeah, of course you should be looking at it years, years before coming up with a plan.
LAUREN: And that’s why I appreciate I know that you’re on the the you’ve taken the exit ramp and are in loving life and retirement, but I appreciate your sharing your wisdom for folks like me who are earlier in their career to be able to remind myself to [00:41:00] keep thinking about those answers to those questions and being intentional about my practice.
I am curious and we always end I always end my Interviews with attorneys with asking them how they define success. So this is like a little full circle moment to me, but I’m sure your definition now is probably different than when you practice. But if you could go back in and tell your younger self, hey, maybe actually think about this or think about a definition that’s going to be more fulfilling.
What would that be?
MURRAY: Well, in the short run, it would have been, you know, many, many years ago, it would have been get control over your life and get control over your life in the legal profession by having an excellent client base, because with an excellent client base, you can make decisions. The next thing I would have told myself is firm culture is really important.
It’s very, very difficult to change. If you get to the point where you’re not happy, Stop fighting. [00:42:00] Get out. Move. Set up on your own. Go out with, you know, a few people you like. Do something. But don’t sit and continue to, to howl at the moon and try to, you know, get other people to see things your way. I think as I, as I went on had I listened to that type of advice then perhaps I would have got to a setting where I wanted to work longer.
And because I was working in a more measured fashion, only dealing with clients I like, only being surrounded by people I like. And maybe if I’d done that earlier in my life. And I, you know, my definition of success might have included working even, you know, longer, retiring even later, you know, on a, on a part time basis, whatever.
At this stage of definition of success is, is, is very simple. Don’t blow the money that I’ve got. Travel as long as I can because the music, music might [00:43:00] end and here in Canada, for me, how the music ends is the moment I can’t get insurance to travel, the game’s over. So I know insurance in the States works, you know, health insurance in the States works quite differently.
I don’t know how the, how the traveling part of it works, but here with the exception of some people who are members of these wonderful pension plans, which govern them travel insurability for life, you know, somebody like me, I’m now, you know, over 65. I applied with my wife for travel insurance. We’re going on a two month cruise.
She gets she gets fill out the form. Thank you. You’re covered. I get, yeah, we’ll send you a health thing to fill out. Right. So here I am. I, you know, I, I, I love to travel and it only works until the music stops. As soon as I can’t get the insurance. You know, the music stops. So I’m busy trying to travel as much as I can now spend all the money.
You gotta be careful. You don’t spend it. Your kids are going to get it, you know, and you know, that isn’t my definition of success. So how do I define [00:44:00] success now? Holding on to the money I’ve got. Keeping myself busy, you know, a little bit busy intellectually. I like to work for an hour a day.
This, this was my work for today. If you can call it work. Not every day, not on consecutive days, not when, not when it’s warm outside. So work as much or as little as you feel like just to keep yourself occupied and do whatever it is you like doing. In my case, it’s traveling. Live where you want to live.
I moved two and a half hours out of Toronto to live in the country. And you know, for me, it’s having the freedom to be out walking every day in the woods. And, as I say, work an hour now and then, write an article. People will like it on LinkedIn. I’ll feel good about myself. And get out and travel as much as I can.
LAUREN: Well, it sounds like a lovely life, and I hope that you can soak up every moment of it. And like you mentioned, you do post on LinkedIn also on Law360 Canada. So folks can definitely check that out and subscribe. Maury has some just [00:45:00] wonderful insights. And I think that he’s a voice that we can need to continue to listen to.
If anyone would like to connect with you directly or just learn more about you, where’s a good spot for them to do that?
MURRAY: Well, the best stop to learn more about me would be my website. Which you can get to at Murraygotthal. com or at lawanddisorderinc. com. Love that. And alternatively you can, as you said, connect on LinkedIn.
Or just reach out to me. I mean, that’s what I sort of do nowadays. People just reach out. They say, oh, we met you, we saw you on LinkedIn, or We heard you speak, or whatever. We could, you talk to us. And they just, you know, drop me an email. Murray, Murray got how.com you know, we set up Zoom calls, we talk, I have this.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, Lauren. I have this mentoring schedule. Oh, no. It’s on my website. So it’s my fee schedule for mentoring. And it goes like this. If you’re young and new to the profession and don’t have a lot of money, it’s free. If you’re sort of a little more [00:46:00] established and you have a little money, it’s 100 an hour.
If you have a lot of money and you can well afford to pay it but you’re cheap, It’s 200 bucks an hour. And if you have a lot of money and you’re not cheap, it’s 250, 350 an hour. And if you’re one of these people who just abhors hourly billing and thinks everything has to be a fixed fee, then it’s 1 million.
I love it. So people call me and, you know, the vast majority never pay me, you know, I have one young lady who’s a lawyer in a boutique firm and doesn’t have a great relationship with her, with her family and I think she thinks I’m her dad now. So she calls me, you know, certain times she calls me every, every day, tell me how things are going, you know, how things went today.
Other times things are going better. I don’t hear from her for a week or two at a time. I have some, you know, a good number of other people who, who just get in touch to talk. And some, some of them pay me, some of them don’t pay me. I’m tired of chasing billable hours. I don’t [00:47:00] blame you there. But I do like to keep busy and I enjoy meeting people.
In fact, all my, you know, this all started in COVID and I, and most of the people I was talking to I, you know, I’d never met in person. I just met from, from my activities online, including teaching courses and stuff. And The last two years I’ve had a barbecue at my house. So last year we had 35 people, and they’re all driving up from Toronto.
They’re all driving from at least two hours away, two and a half hours away. They all came up to my place in the summer for barbecue, and that’s how I meet the people who I’ve met electronically. And you know what, hey, it’s something to do. It’s something due and it keeps me sort of tied into the profession.
I meet nice people like you and that’s how I’m entertaining myself for the wild.
LAUREN: Well that sounds lovely to me and I can’t thank you enough for your time. I feel, I feel very fortunate to be able to Spend this your hour of work today. Hopefully it wasn’t too much of work. But like I said, your voice is ne still needed in the profession.
So I hope that you keep sharing and [00:48:00] thinking and publishing because we certainly need to be a bit more intentional about how we practice.
MURRAY: Well, thank you very much, Lauren. And thanks again for inviting me to speak to you. It’s been fun.
LAUREN: Absolutely. Thanks for joining me on another episode of A Different Practice.
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