Episode Description
In this candid episode, Lauren opens up about a major shift in her legal career. After years of internal struggle, she’s made a bold move that’s transformed her practice and outlook. Join Lauren as she shares the highs and lows of this transition, including unexpected challenges, moments of self-doubt, and the surprising source of inspiration that sparked it all. Whether you’re considering a career pivot or simply curious about the realities of making a big professional change, this raw and honest account offers valuable insights and a reminder that it’s never too late to prioritize your well-being and redefine success on your terms.
Episode Resources
EP 15 – Why I Almost Quit the Legal Profession
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] That weight being lifted has been tremendous. It’s one of those moments where you don’t realize how heavy it was until it was gone. Welcome to A Different Practice. I’m your host, Lauren Lester, and I’m obsessed with all things business, well being, and optimizing the practice of law for solo and small firm lawyers.I started my solo practice right out of law school, built it from the ground up, and now work part time while earning well over six figures. I’m here to share tangible, concrete tools and resources for ditching the legal profession’s antiquated approach and building a law practice optimized for profit and efficiency.
Think of this as grabbing coffee with your work bestie, mixed with everything they didn’t teach you in law school about running a business. Pull up a seat, grab a cup and get ready to be encouraged and challenged. This is a different practice.
Hey everyone. Welcome back to a different practice. Today’s episode is [00:01:00] a little bit different from the usual content. It’s time for a slightly personal update that I have been eager to share with y’all. For those who have been following along, you know that I’ve been open about my struggles with the toxicity, frankly, in family law and how it has deeply affected my mental health.
Well, after three years of contemplation and going round and round and doing a bit of soul searching, I have made a significant change in my professional life and to my practice. That is right. I have finally taken the leap and changed my practice area. So in today’s episode, I wanted to give you an insider’s look into that transition.
I’m going to cover the positive aspects that I’ve encountered so far in making this pretty big change, the challenges that I have bumped up against, and if I could go back and do things differently. what I would change about how I approached it. Whether you’re also considering a similar move or just curious about the realities of making a major [00:02:00] career shift, I hope that you’ll find some value in my experience.
So grab a cup of coffee, settle in, and let’s dive into this new chapter of my legal journey. So I would say that this chapter began in the summer of 2021. If you haven’t already, go back and listen to episodes 15 and 16, where I talk about the real struggles that I had been having being a family law practitioner, the real tension between loving my clients, loving working with them.
You know, they were amazing people just in a really difficult time, trying to get them through that time, but really having a struggle primarily with opposing counsel and how they just made the process. It’s really toxic, really litigious for no real reason. There didn’t seem to be professionalism in the sense that we were the two professionals on the case trying to help these two folks through this difficult time.
It really felt a lot of the times like the other [00:03:00] attorney saw an opportunity to just make money, quite frankly. And so they would take, make choices and file things and just have an attitude that made things more. Conflict ridden than it needed to be. So I’d been struggling with this for a long time, but the culmination moment for me came in the summer of 2021.
My youngest daughter just turned a year old and she started daycare. And if you have children who have been through daycare, you know that as soon as that happens, they are immediately sick for like a year straight. And so that’s what happened to her. She started daycare a couple of weeks later. She unfortunately diagnosed with RSV.
It’s a respiratory illness, and she had it pretty bad. So she had to be hospitalized because she just wasn’t breathing very well. Then, you know, they’re little, and so they need kind of extra support. So I was sitting there in the hospital room. This was certainly unexpected. At one point, I found myself in the bathroom with the door cracked because my [00:04:00] baby In the hospital crib sleeping, and I didn’t want her to wake up because she was so tired, but I had to deal with opposing counsel on this case.
The opposing counsel had filed what I thought was probably a frivolous motion, but certainly a motion that the facts were very questionable on which she relied. There seemed to be some personal interest in the case. Just kind of some shadiness going on, but I was trying to work through it on behalf of my client and get a resolution that was going to work.
I was in the bathroom. Kind of hunched in the, in the bathtub, literally on my phone, trying to not whisper, but still be quiet. And I thought that I was going to have a call with this opposing council about a resolution. She had been emailing me and her email seemed to be positive on like, Hey, you know, we really just want to address this quote unquote issue.
Let’s have a call and discuss it. So I get on thinking this is going to be productive and [00:05:00] positive and just move this case forward. And as soon as opposing counsel gets on the phone, because I think that it’s not tracked, right? There’s no documentation. It’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It’s a different person.
She’s just nasty again. And. Bringing up again, these quote unquote facts that I honestly think were partially made up and partially sort of her work of fiction that she wanted to do to support her motion. And she really wasn’t truly interested in any sort of resolution. She wanted to go to court. She wanted to litigate this issue.
And so because of the nature of the motion, we ended up having to have an emergency hearing before the court. So the next day I had to go out to the nurses. At one point and say, you know, do y’all have a room that I can sit in? That’s a quiet kind of private space because I need to have this freaking hearing, like my child is in the hospital.
She’s getting better, but as a parent, right. You’re always worried. And what [00:06:00] I’m having to deal with is this case that we should not even be dealing with, that it was just sort of ridiculous. And that was really the moment for me of the time that I wanted to be spending was sitting in that rocking chair with my daughter.
And the time that I had to spend was hunched in the bathtub dealing with this opposing counsel and having last minute hearings in some side room that the nurses so graciously let me be in. And that was a real wake up call as to, you know, am I going to look back on my life and really be happy that this is how I spent my time?
That was in the summer of 2021. Fast forward because I am not someone who makes these types of decisions lightly, mostly because. Family law and these particular types of cases, this was more of an outlier, but they started to really trend in this direction. I would say probably from [00:07:00] 2019, 2020, 2021, it was definitely pre pandemic, but the pandemic probably didn’t help anything.
They started, I started to get more and more of these, what I thought were outlier cases. So it took me a while. To make any sort of decision because family law and family law cases had been at least half of my practice. I mean, they were the bread and butter. They were the driving force for revenue. And so thinking to myself, you know, that quiet voice that said, I don’t think I want to do this anymore.
You know, this is, this is just draining. I mean, I’m not in a great headspace. I’m stressed all the time. I’m not sleeping well. It just, it wasn’t good, but it was sort of like, well. If we don’t do this, what happens to the business? So it took me a long time. I came up with a couple of different ideas for maybe how to step back from the contested work, how to be less involved with cases that had an opposing counsel to still be able to focus on what I loved, which was helping the [00:08:00] clients through this difficult time, but trying to stay out of the mess of it.
I did that for a couple of years and it just didn’t. Work great. It it, it was okay, but it was a bandaid. I I was still involved and I still had these cases that very quickly went south and just got really toxic and conflict ridden. And so while I’m kind of mulling this over in my head in, in months are going by my BFF from law school and I decide that we’re going to get together and take a trip just the two of us and we end up going to Boston in the fall of 2023.
And she and I are hanging out. She has her own law firm. And so she and I are kind of talking shop and I’m sharing my love of TikTok and how it’s just been so great for the business and trying to bring her on board. And she happens to mention, Oh, you should check out the account of a colleague of ours who we went to law school with.
She promotes her practice on Tik TOK and she’s a phenomenal roller skater. And so she incorporates that. And so that really just got me intrigued. [00:09:00] And so I said, yeah, sure. That sounds awesome. You know, I just want to check out this cool account, not thinking very much of it. And so that night we sort of retired to our own rooms and I pull up the, this account and, you know, first of all, she’s just doing a phenomenal job in terms of marketing, so I’m loving it.
I’m getting some inspiration. And then as I’m going through her videos, I’m realizing. What her practice area is. And it’s intriguing to me. It’s one that I always loved in law school, but wasn’t one that I thought I could build a consumer focused business around. Cause I thought that it was an area of practice sort of ignorantly.
That was really more for corporate or highly wealthy clients. But my colleague was talking like she talks to sort of normal everyday people and she helps them through, you know, this really difficult time. And so In addition to just loving her account, I thought, ding, ding, ding, light bulb went off. Well, maybe this is my answer.
And I had gone over the last couple of years trying to find a [00:10:00] replacement for family law. I was really struggling to find something else that I wanted to do. And this might be a really good avenue. And so in the spring of this year, 2024, I finally made the move three years later from kind of knowing in my heart that I needed to make a change.
I made the decision to remove the family law services from my offerings. I took them off the website started to tell people and say out loud, which was the hardest part that I just wasn’t doing that anymore. And that’s been, it’d been challenging. And I’ll talk about that here in a minute, being able to have, you know, a bunch of folks call and be ready to hand me some money and say, you know what, I’m sorry, I’m just, I’m not doing that anymore.
And so what is this practice area that you might ask? It may surprise you. And it’s as out of left field as coming across my colleague roller skating on Tik TOK, talking about it, but I have switched practice areas and gone into tax debt [00:11:00] resolution. That’s right. Helping folks who have back IRS or state tax issues, they owe the government some money and they are kind of in a world of hurt trying to figure out how they are going to do that, trying to avoid losing their property or having the government, you know, take.
money out of their accounts automatically garnishing wages. And so I’ve spent the first half of this year really diving into that, getting a ton of training and I’m getting myself up to speed on what’s involved. And I have to say, the more and more I get into it, the more and more, I absolutely love it, which I never thought I would say, but it was my favorite class in law school.
So maybe I should have leaned into that a little bit more all of those years ago, but I’m happy where the journey took me. And I wouldn’t have changed that part of the story at all. So let me share a little bit about what has gone well so far. The biggest change that I have noticed is I feel so much lighter.
I feel like this weight has been taken off just by making the [00:12:00] decision and actually saying it out loud that I was no longer going to work in this particular practice area. It wasn’t going to take on any more of those types of cases that weight being lifted. Has been tremendous. It’s one of those moments.
I don’t know if you have experienced this where you don’t realize how heavy it was until it was gone. So actually as scary as it was to say out loud that I wasn’t going to be doing contested family cases anymore to turn down that work as soon as I did it, it was like, I had this sigh of relief. So that has been the best part of it.
I know in my heart that it is absolutely the right decision. Certainly hasn’t been necessarily easy. And I’ve come back to, well, you know, maybe I could just take a few more cases, but every time I think about that, what used [00:13:00] to be a quiet voice is now very loud inside and says, no, no, no, no, no, this is definitely the right decision for me and for my practice.
And we will. make it work because of just the weight that has been lifted. What’s also gone really well is being reminded of the helpfulness and the goodness of colleagues in the profession. I am eternally grateful for My colleague from law school, when I reached out to her to get more information about exactly what she did in her practice every day and how she worked with everyday folks, very much in the same way that I have had my mission for my firm, she has been an absolutely tremendous resource for me.
She has given me some contract work. I’ve worked alongside her on some of her cases just to help me get up to speed to learn to [00:14:00] kind of see what real world casework looks like. And through this experience, I have just been really beside myself at just the kindness, the generosity, you know, she’s tremendously busy as we all are.
And there was absolutely nothing more that she had to give me. I was grateful even just for the first, you know, 10, 20 minute conversation that we had. And for her to go beyond that, really just restored. My faith in, you know, there are folks in this profession, many of us, but many of you that are professional, kindhearted, generous there to help.
And it, so it was really refreshing to come out of the, what can be very toxic space of family law and step into a new part of the profession, a new practice area, and really just be met with open arms. That, that has been. Fantastic. And I can’t wait to [00:15:00] pay that forward and for each of us to continue, you know, to kind of help up the person behind us and hold the door open so that more of us can do this really good work.
And lastly, what’s gone really well and been really helpful is that I’ve had in terms of services and pricing those services, I had a framework to start with, so it didn’t feel like I was starting over. I pulled out my pricing toolkit, you know, which I coauthored, but became a reader of and worked through it for my tax debt resolution services.
So having that in my toolbox to be able to turn back to that and really think through those four steps made Creating services and pricing those services so much easier. Whereas if before, if I didn’t have that, I really would have just been staring at a blank page and going, what do I do? I’m just going to throw some spaghetti against the wall and see what [00:16:00] sticks.
And I did that for a number of years at the beginning of my practice. And I know how that goes and that doesn’t really work. And it’s really frustrating and you lose money and it just kind of turns and turns and turns until you finally get the gear to kick into place. So to be able to take the framework and having applied it to family law so successfully for so many years.
Having applied it to estate planning, which I continue to do, having applied it to marital agreements, prenups, which I continue to do, but now to plug it into this new space and have it work really well and really be able to use the framework to create affordable services for clients that I know are going to be profitable for the business was really great.
So it was nice to not have to start over in terms of.
What’s been a struggle on the other hand, speaking of starting over is I feel like [00:17:00] it’s day one of the firm. I feel like it’s nine years ago. I just hung my shingle. I have this new business and there are just no clients, right? Like it’s very slow and having run a business for nearly nine years now and just like, Having a faucet of leads come in, really having to turn away business, being able to sort of have the luxury of, you know, picking and choosing clients and really being in a groove to stop that, to absolutely halt that conveyor belts and then turn over to a new one that just doesn’t have the production yet.
That’s been a challenge and it reminded me of those early years when it never went as fast as I wanted it to it was definitely stressful not having the revenue in place yet and having seen what the numbers were for the business for family law cases, knowing that it was half of my revenue. And the last [00:18:00] couple of years to turn that off and then turn on a new faucet, that’s just kind of dripping, right?
Slowly dripping. I know it will come. I know from experience that it will come, but that doesn’t make it any less easy. Some days it definitely is nerve wracking. It can be stressful, but like I mentioned, you know, I’ve told myself, I can always take family cases. Those calls still come in. I still have to turn that work away, refer it out to colleagues here in Colorado that I just adore how they’re running their practices and I’m happy to send them all the business that I can.
It’d be very easy to take some of those cases myself, but as Stressful as it is and as impatient as I feel and, you know, sometimes even just embarrassed that I’ve moved into this practice area and it just as it hasn’t picked up as quickly as I’ve wanted it to. I don’t like admitting that out loud to folks who have sort of been with me on this journey and asked, Hey, how’s it going?
Even despite all of [00:19:00] that, it is not. Worth going back to do family cases. So I will sit in the uncomfortableness for a little bit, but that’s definitely been a struggle to kind of feel like, you know, having a business that’s been really successful going back to square one for this particular practice area is not the easiest thing to do, but I definitely know that it’s the right thing for me to do.
So really kind of working through that bit of it. And on that same note, you know, it just, it’s been a struggle working through the Emotions of that. There’s definitely a fear. The days that go by where there just isn’t the leads, you know, I’m out marketing, it just, it hasn’t quite turned over yet.
Hasn’t quite clicked in yet where folks are starting to find me and I’m starting to have an uptick in the leads for tax debt resolution, you know, that’s scary. It’s stressful, makes me very nervous, especially as I check my numbers every month, right? And I’ve still got a bit of a runway, thankfully, that I was able to [00:20:00] build up over the last couple of years, really riding that wave of family cases.
But it’s, it’s dwindling and it’s getting smaller. So you know, really trying to have faith and Keep at the marketing, even when it doesn’t feel like there’s an immediate return on it, really investing my time in that really kind of keeping that optimism and that hopefulness, you know, that’s, that’s been a struggle to be honest, it’s, it’s.
Not easy, but I’m, I’m not certainly not giving up anytime soon. I know it will happen. I trust in the process. I trust in my ability to market. I know that it has worked in the past. I just have to remind myself that it didn’t. Happened day one. I mean, it didn’t even happen, you know, day 30 or even three or six months in, right?
It took longer than I wanted it to and so it’s really reminding myself that It is not going to be the same practice that it was a year ago I can’t just take out family [00:21:00] law and plug in tax debt resolution and expect it to be exactly the same that would be Unrealistic, but I certainly do remember what it was like to open the practice nine years ago at this point Point and that’s sort of where I feel like I’m at.
And so going, working through those emotions and just reminding myself that it’s going to be okay is sort of what I mentally do every day, you know, really focus on the process, but it hasn’t been easy. If you are. in that space or, you know, thinking about maybe switching practice areas or taking out a new practice area, you know, I think that comes with the territory and I think it’s totally normal, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not hard.
So I’ve tried to look back over the last six to eight months or so when I’ve really, you know, Finally made this decision, really started to put the effort towards it, set up the pricing started marketing on it, actually said, said these things out loud, not just had them swirling around in my head for the last couple of years.
And I thought about, you know, if I could go [00:22:00] back even this short period of time and do anything differently, would I, was there something that I maybe wished I did different in this process? And there were two things that I came up with. The first is, I wish I quit sooner. I wish I would have made the decision to stop taking family cases.
a long time ago. I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, the sort of hard hit moment was in 2021 for me in the hospital room, but that wasn’t all of a sudden that had been leading up for probably 18 to 24 months prior. And I just sort of thought, you know, it’s just, It’s just a bad month. This is just a bad case.
If I could just get through these next couple of months with this case, it’ll get better. And then I would do that, and then the next case would come along. And then it was two really tough cases, and I think, okay, well, you know, just a bad time. I just kind of got a bad apple. I’ll get there. And so, you know, I really held on, I [00:23:00] think, longer than I should have.
It definitely taught me a lot. But if I could go back, I would have quit sooner. I would have. Giving myself permission to say, you know what, this isn’t working for me. I wouldn’t have tried so hard to make it work. I think I felt a little bit like a failure that having to say that out loud to folks would, what, what would that say about me?
What would that reflect about me? And now coming out on the other side of it, I realize That really doesn’t matter. You know, if somebody wants to judge me or have opinions about how I run my practice, you know, that’s certainly their prerogative and they can do that. But at the end of the day, you know, I want to sleep well and I want to have the life that I want to live and working and holding onto something because I’m worried about the opinions of others to my own detriment is not a way I want to live.
And so I wish I would have. Quit sooner. And I think that going into tax debt [00:24:00] resolution or any other practice, maybe I might pick up down the road is, I think going forward, what I’m going to take from that lesson is first be okay with quitting sooner if it’s not working for me. And then being able to accept that and not thinking that quitting means I’m a failure.
It just means that I’m making the right decision for myself, but also going into anything new with a game plan from the beginning about when to quit. I read this recently in a book that I’m reading by Scott Galloway. And the book is about sort of building wealth and financial security. But a part of the book that really stuck with me so far is he has this idea about going into something knowing when you would quit, not anticipating that you would quit, but having that criteria in place ahead of time so that you don’t fall into the trap that I fell into, which is staying around way longer than you probably should have.
And sort of having that lesson learned moment of, I should have done [00:25:00] this a little bit sooner, is to say, you know, if A, B, and C happens, or if this factor comes up, or if I feel like I’m unable to sleep again, if my anxiety ticks back up, if I start having panic attacks again, maybe if I just feel like I’m, I’m trying to power through it, or I feel like I’m having to grind to get to the other side, you know, whatever the criteria is.
To know that up front, so that when it happens, it’s a lot easier to say, you know what, this was on my scorecard. If I can check these boxes, it’s time to pull in the towel. It’s time to say that, you know, enough is enough. Let me figure out something that I want to do. So I think going forward, putting those factors in place for myself so that if tax debt resolution somehow turns to be super toxic and has just a terrible conflict culture, which I don’t think will be the case but who knows?
But if there’s something [00:26:00] about it that I don’t anticipate that does cause, you know, a lot of stress or a lot of mental health struggles or just not a quality of life that I want, I have those factors in place. to know when it’s going to be time to quit so that I don’t hold on too long and kind of cause an additional damage or just loss of time because of that.
So I would have quit sooner. And then the other lesson that I don’t have an answer for yet, but this whole process has really brought to light for me and really emphasized is the question, or really the answer to the question of What is enough? You know, really struggling, I just mentioned with just not having the volume, the revenue for tax debt resolution, the way I did for family law.
I totally understand logically that that is not realistic at that, at this point, because I am comparing the very infant stages of my tax debt practice to the very mature stages of my family law practice. And so it’s not a fair comparison there, but what it has taught [00:27:00] me is, you know, that culture of more, more, more, the next goal, well, I made this much this year, so I need to make that much the following year.
You know, I have fallen into that with. Switching practices is to say, well, I, you know, I made X with family law. And so I have to at least make that this year for the tax debt practice. And that’s just not realistic. And to what end is that? What is the. And so I’ve had a couple of conversations recently, and I think the reason I keep having them unintentionally, they just keep coming up is because I really need to answer that question for myself of what is enough.
And when I get there, Being okay with that, even if outside forces or other folks have different opinions or they’re going for a different enough that is bigger or better or larger than maybe my enough to not get pulled into [00:28:00] that current to be okay, sitting on the shore and cheering them on and saying, you know, that’s amazing.
But for me, this is good for my life, for what I want to achieve and what’s important to me and my values. I don’t have an answer. to it yet. I’ve, I’ve really struggled with actually answering that question for some reason. So I’m continuing to mull it over, but it has been really interesting in this whole process and switching practice areas and kind of rebuilding starting from the ground up again in terms of tax debt and helping clients through that process is really thinking about, you know, this time I’m going to build it off of that hamster wheel where I just feel like the whole purpose is to keep.
Notching the treadmill up, go faster, faster, faster is to say, you know, we’re going to rebuild this. And what ultimately is the enough goal? Is it, you know, a certain revenue that I feel like if I hit that, then I’m good, right? I don’t think I’ll ever coast, but I think that letting off the gas and really just [00:29:00] appreciating what I’ve got and what I have built up without having to feel like I need to achieve more.
resting and being okay with resting, I think is going to be a big shift for me. And I really am looking forward to incorporating that more. And I do see this change as an opportunity to lean into that. So as much as this transition has been It’s been great. It has been messy, but I know it’s the right move.
It hasn’t been an easy move, but I am taking the good out of it, taking the lessons out of it, really using it as an opportunity to grow and keeping the hope and belief that things will continue to pick up. And I really hope that maybe a year from now I will do another. Practice update and can have, you know, really great news about, Hey, I was able to define what enough is for me and able to achieve it, you know, with [00:30:00] the hard work and maybe with some new strategies or cool stuff that I can put in place.
I know that I’ll get there. It’s just always. Slower than I want, cause I’m super impatient, but I want to thank all of you who have reached out, who have been with me on this journey, who have offered your support and encouragement. It always means the world to me. I hope that I can continue to pay that forward and be there as a support for you when you need it.
And to be a cheerleader for you in those moments where you think, why the heck did I do this? Because it is certainly really helpful to not be alone on this journey. So if you’re in this same space, if you’ve had those thoughts sort of swirling around in your head for some time now know that you’re not alone.
There is definitely a real struggle there. There’s a lot to process. There’s a lot to think about. You know, I know that we aren’t folks who make decisions very quickly and without thought, right? We’re very [00:31:00] rational, thoughtful people just as a whole in the profession, which is really great sometimes but can also hold us back.
And so, so I hope that in sharing my experience and hearing what it is like in the trenches and how it is all messy and not perfect by any means gives you some insight and maybe helps you see a little bit more clearly for your own life. Life and your own practice in terms of what you might want. I know no matter what you decide to do, it will be fantastic.
Thanks so much for listening. I can’t wait to connect with you next time. Until then keep building a different practice. I’m over here giving you a virtual high five because you just finished another episode of a different practice. For more from this episode, head over to a different practice. com slash podcast for the show notes.
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