I’ve been having this nagging suspicion that I’m entirely in over my head in my job now.
I’ve been a lawyer for a year now, and I get the feeling that everyone thinks I’m a bit of a dunce. A nice and friendly dunce, but a dunce nevertheless.
I suppose I do have the raw intelligence, but I don’t have any of the ambition, drive, assertiveness, or fucking common sense needed to get through my job. When your boss tells you that you’re being incoherent… damn.
Not that I begrudge him or anything, I think he’s put up with me for quite a while now, and he’s really as good a boss as anyone could expect. It’s really… me.
I was thinking of asking for advice on how to… you know, WORK. It seems like I’m going through the motions, but I’m never getting anything done. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like the concept of actually accomplishing something is avoiding me. I don’t even know where to start.
I know it’s hard to hear after 3 years of law school (we’re still paying for that semester my wife did a few years back . . . ), but maybe you’re in the wrong field. I somehow - believe me, completely inexplicably - worked my way relatively far up the ladder at Bear Stearns. I was the youngest person in my department by a good 10 years. And I felt exactly like you. My heart just wasn’t in it, and by the time I got laid off it was almost a relief, because I knew it just wasn’t what I wanted to do. Now I’m back in school working towards a career I believe I’ll truly love.
I have spent a large part of my career as a lawyer feeling like I was adrift at sea, smart enough to do the work, but lacking the motivation to do it. I have been through 4 different practive areas (native land title (Australia), general commercial, commercial property and finally banking and finance (specialising in Islamic finance)). Until I got into banking and finance, I repeatedly thought I had chosen the wrong career and wasn’t meant to be a lawyer.
This was complicated by that usual female knack of thinking I was even more useless than I was. I felt like a fraud, doing work and giving advice when in all honesty, I felt like I had no clue what I was doing and sooner or later, someone else would figure it out. I finally got to work under the supervision of a truly exceptional lawyer (a female partner who was the best combination of technical skill and mentoring). This partner told me that she had felt the same way right up until she made partner, until she finally realised that if the partners believed in her, it was about time she did!
I left my run too late for partnership (too many career breaks and changes), but I finally realised that I needed to get out of private practice. I now work as in-house counsel for a small investment bank and love my work.
The moral of my story for you - maybe it’s not the law, but the area of law you’re in. Or maybe private practice isn’t for you. What I’m trying to say is, don’t give up just yet - try some other practice areas if you can and if it still isn’t working, look for in-house work. If, after all that, you still hate your job, then I am fresh out of suggestions!
It’s one year. You still don’t even know what you don’t know.
I’m in the exact same boat as you- big firm.
I get instructions. I follow them. I hand in what I believe to be work product, and it looks NOTHING like what they expected to get from me.
Why? Because maybe one word meant something to me that it didn’t mean to the attorney giving me the assignment. And on that word hinged enough assumptions to create a misunderstanding.
And maybe the word was “the.” I’m exaggerating a bit for comic effect, but you get the idea- the miscommunication is over something you wouldn’t think needed clarification and they wouldn’t think you’d misunderstand.
It happens, and I’m told it happens a lot for about three years. You just have to plow through.
In my experience there’s two basic kinds of recent graduates:
those who are convinced God is making a mistake by not asking for their advice,
and those who are afraid that any way they place the toilet paper is going to be the wrong way.
Some of it is needing to find your footing, some may be being in the wrong line; a lot is likely to be absurd perfectionism, be careful not to expect from yourself what nobody else expects.
The learning curve at a new job – especially a first job – is unbelievable. I’m in marketing, which isn’t exactly rocket science (or law), and we still expect new hires to ramp up for at least a year. I spent the first 8 months at my current employer feeling like a leech, because I had no idea what I was doing and didn’t (it seemed to me) get a damned thing done. Took several more months to get rolling, really.
Until one day, I realized that I got how everything vital worked, I knew who to call when I needed help with any given topic, and I knew who had the power in my department, and outside it. That knowledge creeps up on you, but worrying about it makes you less open to absorbing it.
Give yourself permission to learn for a while yet. Despite your job description, that’s really what you’re being paid to do right now. Because once you’ve gotten your feet under you, you’ll be worth their investment.
I had that probelm with being in accounting. I’m good at it, but I don’t really like it. Solved the probelm eventually by finding jobs that valued the accounting experience but let me do things more to my liking. Doesn’t pay as well (I’m at a non-profit museum now), but I get to work in an industry I care about that needs what I can bring to the party, and is happy to let be get involved with the history stuff too. Got to be stuff like that for lawyers as well.
Law? Accounting? Banking and finance? Has it occured to anyone that you aren’t actually “acomplishing” anything? At least not anything tangible that you can point to and say “look what I did!” Most of what these jobs do is filling out and filing paperwork or pushing numbers around a spread sheet as a small cog in a large corporate machine.
If you want to feel like you acomplished something, become some kind of engineer, start your own business, pursue some sort of artistic endevour, or invent some new product or process.
I actually thought my first year was really exciting because I had to learn everything from the ground up. After I did the same series of transactions 4573 times (this was before the credit markets crashed, work has been slower but picking up since the feds are the only ones with cash to back commercial mortgages) I went on autopilot. My fave co-worker and I split our programs 50/50 and we sort of live for the crazy off the wall questions where we don’t know the area of law and we have to meticulously teach it to ourselves. Recently we (by which I mean “I” but I give him half credit because I need him for other things) designed a legal solution (sorry it’s still being battled out in federal court and likely to be the subject of an investigation now so I feel uncomfortable listing what I did specifically) and it felt pretty damn awesome to teach myself that area of law and subsequently have the courts dismiss the boutique firm/attorneys with 10, 15, 20 years of experience in the area in court (state). Also, I know for a fact that the work I did on that project is having a very positive effect in the community. Oh, and saving you taxpayers from misappropriation, which ought to make at least a few people on this board happy :).
My main problem with my job is not that it’s not meaningful, it’s that I work for an organization that I don’t mesh well with in terms of personality and scope of ambition. That and financial transactions are fucking boring and being the lawyer on them is like being a high end secretary while all the finance guys are fanning about collecting exponential versions of your salary.
I’m an engineer, I have a great job and my current project will make a difference for many cancer researchers. However that’s now, when I started 5 years ago I was hired into a failing company that would eventually shut down all the programs that I wrote software for. The 270000 lines of code behemoth that I worked on for at least 3 years never helped anyone make a penny, and the company is now trying to sell all the research it helped do to anyone willing to pay(they are not having much luck). I think if you want a job where you reliably accomplish things you should be a carpenter or a plumber or a handy man of some kind.
I find this attitude about “not being cut out for ‘work’” sort of interesting. Kind of like you tried out for little league and don’t think it’s for you. Fact of the matter is that millions of people have jobs they don’t find particularly interesting or challenging. But they go because they need to pay the bills.
The good news is that there is a support group for those people. We generally meet on Thursdays after work at the bar.
So, Tabby, you’ve been a lawyer for a whole year now, and you still have a lot to learn …
Idiot, fool, slacker, nincompoop - you should have changed the world by now!
And done something about the weather.
People will give you lots of good advice about focusing, really tackling the problem, improving your research skills, producing something, and taking criticism like a grown-up. They are right.
But I wonder … are you about 25, having gone through grade school from about 1990, and is your boss a couple of decades older? You know, even after law school, you really might not have the language skills s/he had at your age (God knows, I never had the language skills my mother had at my age …).
You can improve. Have you ever read Cicero in Latin? Try it; does wonders for your sense of flow and the power of language. It will also teach you to recognize just how every speech you ever hear is trying to manipulate you. (Okay, you can read a translation.)
Then take a course in technical writing. Good technical writing is the best system for communicating facts. (Good technical writing is also nearly non-existent, but I digress.)
Put the two together and you can communicate exactly what you want.
What I am hearing is that she feels that her boss doesn’t think she’s doing a “good job” and that there isn’t all that much about her job that objectively let’s her know if she is doing it well or not. I see that in a lot of these types of jobs. Without objective performance measurements such as sales quotas, widgets produced, projects completed and other tangible accomplishments, you become forced to rely on the subjective opinion of others. And those subjective opinions can often be inconsistent, irrational, petty and have little to do with how well you actually do your job.
OP, I have lifelong experience dealing with managers who are both vague and micromanaging, since my father is one such individual. The trick is to ASK for clarification at early, relevant junctures. Over time, you will anticipate where the decision tree branches. In the beginning, though, you will have to ask lots of seemingly stupid questions. (minimize the annoyance to your supervisors by framing the question narrowly and factually to get the answer you need, so that the question-answer interaction only takes a moment.*) At the end of the day, it’s better to look stupid at the beginning of the project and smart at the end, than vice versa.
Also, many of these facts can be gleaned from a look at the file or by talking to support staff who can point you to the fact you need. ALWAYS treat paralegals, etc graciously and with deference to the their knowledge and experience. Be the person they actually want to help out now and then.
It was a response to the thread title. The OP didn’t say “I’m not cut out for THIS work”. She said “work” as if her year of post law school employment is representative of the entire working world and isn’t for her.
I have to question why the OP thinks the boss is “putting up with her”. Is it, like **Dottygumdrop **stated, some sort of female confidence issue or is there a real performance problem there? And is it an actual performance problem in a sense that she is failing to follow directions or meet deadlines or is it just she isn’t clicking with the boss?
Also, how much of this is just finding out her Allie McBiel / Elle Woods spunky female lawyer setting the legal world on fire fantasies are unrealistic? A lot of being a lawyer is pretty mundane, repetitive, tedious and unglamorous and I have to think that the most mundane, repetitive, tedious and unglamorous work tends to be given to first years. So it might just be a matter of paying your dues for a few years.
“Necessary” is not always the same thing as “important”.
I know a lot of people in some form of finance / accounting / law / consulting and so on. The constant refrain is that most of them don’t particularly like what they do for a living. They like the pay and they find it tolerable, but ultimately they would rather be doing anything else.