What Will the Folks Say?

Attorneys who make a career change are likely to encounter resistance from family members and friends, warns Deborah Arron, author of What Can You Do with a Law Degree?, who led a July State Bar CLE seminar on job advancement.

Margaret Watt McKenna, a Milwaukee attorney who opened a solo practice last year, notes that "friends and family who are not lawyers are the most difficult to deal with," especially if you're considering a job move away from the traditional practice of law.

"They don't want to see you leave the law for a lot of reasons, and pride and prestige are chief among them," McKenna notes.

Kit Keller's diverse career path draws "curiosity" from her family, partly because she grew up in a blue-collar town in northern Indiana where most people went to work at a manufacturing plant right out of high school and stayed there until they retired.

"For the most part, my family and friends are supportive and intrigued by my career moves, although they always introduce me as a lawyer unless my current position has a more specific title," she says.

Occasionally, she runs across an acquaintance shocked by her decision not to practice traditional law. "Their attitude is 'What is wrong with you?' Maybe that's a fair question," she adds with a laugh.

Seeking support

Considering a career change can be a lonely endeavor, notes Margaret Watt McKenna.

When McKenna began thinking seriously a couple years ago about leaving the law firm she was with, she found it difficult to broach the topic with colleagues.

"I knew I wasn't the only one who didn't enjoy practice as we knew it, where there's so much emphasis on bottom line profits," she says. "But most people who are considering a change don't find each other because they don't want to be the first to say, 'I'm not happy.'"

McKenna looked around for an organized group of attorneys exploring career changes and, when she didn't find one, formed an alternative career discussion group in the spring of 1997. The group of a half dozen Milwaukee-area lawyers, including McKenna and Jane Pribeck, used formal and informal assessment tools to identify their job strengths and weaknesses and narrow down what type of work they'd most like to do. Notices of the group's meetings are posted in the Association of Women Lawyers newsletter.

After a couple months of meetings, one of the group participants switched to a law-related career and another moved to a different law firm. McKenna went solo.

Kit Keller cites another reason for discussing your career move with others. She finds a valuable component of self-assessment to be networking with people who know her well. "The way people reflect yourself back to you can be very insightful," she says. "We often see our weaknesses clearly, but not our strengths. Other people see our strengths."

With a year under her belt with her general civil litigation practice, McKenna now says, "I've been lucky. I knew instinctively that the time was right to make the change, and now I trust my instincts more than ever before."

"Timing is crucial," she adds. "If you're not certain whether it's time to make a career change, it's not."

For McKenna, the foremost payoff of her solo practice has been the opportunity to rediscover "the enjoyment of practicing law," a marked decrease in work stress, and the chance to "reintegrate myself and stop assigning myself as just a lawyer."

These days, McKenna is involved with another discussion group, this one for solo practitioners; the group is affiliated with the Association for Women Lawyers. "I want people to find each other," she says.

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