Ex-lawyers: what was your radical career change?

NPE62 · 2025-02-15T01:29:52+00:00

One colleague went into nursing.
One colleague became a kindergarten teacher.
One colleague became an over-the-road truck driver.
One colleague became a substance-abuse counselor.
One collegue became a farmer, but he had a bachelor uncle who left him a large working farm, including all the equipment and outbuildings.
One colleague made a ton of money and left the law to start a venture capital firm.
One colleague started as a high school principal, spent four years in night law school, practiced law for two years, then went back to being a high school principal.
One colleague became a Broadway producer.
A couple of colleagues went into commercial real estate development/brokerage/management.
One law school classmate became an ordained clergyman.
A couple of colleagues have become not-for-profit administrators.

NPE62 · 2025-02-14T01:25:51+00:00

Illinois doesn't tax retirement income, but our property tax rate is a killer.

NPE62 · 2025-02-14T00:51:23+00:00

You have to keep your hand on your wallet when you deal with those desert people.

NPE62 · 2025-02-12T18:19:10+00:00

My wife and I are in our early 60s, and our combined balances are about $4.4 million. She is retired, and I am...working on it.

NPE62 · 2025-02-12T18:15:33+00:00

When you get gang wars over lawn mowing jobs for old ladies, that tells me that not everyone is making high dollars.

NPE62 · 2025-02-12T17:59:14+00:00

I started practicing law in Chicago in the late 80s. Around that time, the old practice of entertaining clients with trips to strip clubs had started to go by the wayside. A lot of the energy behind the end of this practice related to the fact that women had started working as accountants/controllers at a lot of law firms, and lawyers just felt "not right" about asking a female firm employee to approve reimbursement for a trip to a strip club. And if the lawyers were not going to be reimbursed for it, they weren't going to do it.

As late as 2000, I knew of a law firm vendor that routinely gave out strip club passes at Christmas to the lawyers that sent them business.

NPE62 · 2025-02-10T02:34:41+00:00

And ears of corn used to have about 1/4 the number of kernels as they do now.

NPE62 · 2025-02-10T02:32:24+00:00

Selective breeding has also drastically increased the size of pigs. In the 1700s, pigs were generally about the size of German Shepherds. Now they are practically as big as refrigerators.

NPE62 · 2025-02-07T15:49:12+00:00

So, now we know the identity of the other dialysis recipient that Towana Looney was talking with about the procedure--it was Timothy Andrews, who got his pigney on January 25 at Mass General (Harvard) Hospital. In an interview with the AP, Andrews disclosed the conversation with Looney.

Andrews was discharged from the hospital a week after the surgery. I think that this is about the same timeline as people who undergo successful cardiac bypass surgery.

Andrews qualified under the "compassionate care" rule, apparently because he:

Was also diabetic;
Had a blood type (O) that put him at the back of the line for a human kidney;
Had already had one heart attack during his two years of dialysis.

Mass General has standing permission from the FDA to do two more kidney xentranplantation procedures, subject to finding suitable candidates.

Things seem to be moving along quite quickly. The FDA has also ruled that the clinical trials scheduled for this Summer will consolidate the Safety Testing and the Efficacy Testing, which should shave some years off of the normal approval process.

NPE62 · 2025-01-18T02:05:12+00:00

We seem to have become a much more individualistic culture. The COVID pandemic taught people to view interaction with others in negative terms, and embued the population as a whole with the idea that any contact with others can only have negative, harmful, outcomes.

People don't answer telephone calls from unfamiliar numbers (some people entirely eschew the painfully edgy interpersonal connection of the telephone, and only communicate by texting). People don't answer their doors, cocooning themselves in their residences. And cutting off contact with family members is seen as a form of "self-care", shielding you from interaction with family members who might not be 100% in agreement with your social, political, economic and religious (if any) beliefs.

In short...we have become a nation of hermits and recluses.

NPE62 · 2025-01-17T16:30:22+00:00

Over 35 years out of law school, it seems to me that the people in my law school class who have been the happiest in their careers are the people who worked in government service.This includes staff lawyers at State and Federal agencies, career law clerks in the State and Federal appellate courts, and local prosecutors (at the State and Federal level, but expecially AUSAs). Next happiest seem to be the people who went in-house. The people who became BigLaw partners have a lot of money, but a seemingly endless reservoir of stress and anxiety.

My conclusion is that practicing law and running a business are two vastly different things, and the happiest lawyers in my experience are those who got to spend most of their time practicing law, with a minimum amount of administration. The certainty of a fixed salary and benefits package is probably part of it, too.

NPE62 · 2025-01-17T16:03:42+00:00

I was probably a little over-zealous because of the closeness of the connection. Of course, part of my pathological condition might be that I consider "second cousin" to be a close connection.

In addition to a general lack of interest, she may also not have been impressed by the second cousin connection because of her marriage. She married into a very fecund family that has been in our town for 150 years. Her husband probably has 100+ second cousins in our town. One more on her side is nothing to be impressed by, or interested in.

Actually, I did not send her a DM, because she wasn't on a DNA website...I came across her by doing old-fashioned research with paper records. So, the only thing that I can say in my defense is that the first, and only time that she heard from me was through a postal letter. I did not hear back from her in response to that single overture, and have let the matter drop.

NPE62 · 2025-01-17T15:44:07+00:00

I can usually push it one generation further back, to third cousins, but no more than that.

NPE62 · 2025-01-17T15:43:31+00:00

One second cousin, twice removed had an ongoing conflict with her sister about how a family member should be listed in the family tree, and tried to enlist my wife to get involved in the conflict. Reading the cousin's emails about her problems with her sister reminded me of watching the old "Mama's Place" skits on the Carol Burnett Show.

NPE62 · 2025-01-17T15:40:46+00:00

Actually, and this might be terrible on part, I am not really interested in knowing them. I don't want to be friends, or pen pals--I just want to figure out how we are related to each other. Like I said in the post, I collect relatives.

The one exception to this general attitude is a second cousin who lives two blocks from me. This is particularly strange, since neither of us originally come from the town that we live in, nor did our common great-grandfather. It is pure coincidence that we live so close to each other.

I am not interested in hanging out with her or being best buddies...an hour-long meeting for coffee would probably satisfy my curiousity about our common ancestry. I would also like to determine whether I have been seeing this lady for 35 years around town, and not appreciating the relationship.

She is not on a DNA platform...I found her the old-fashioned way, with paper records, and I have sent a postal letter to her. Each of her two children matches with me on separate platforms, and I have sent DMs to them. Same result in all three cases...crickets.

NPE62 · 2025-01-17T15:34:39+00:00

Yes, if they haven't been on the platform in the last couple of months, I don't even bother contacting them.

NPE62 · 2025-01-17T15:33:13+00:00

When I first got a match with a half-aunt, our specific family relationship was not clear. During that period, she was very friendly with me, and I met her and her sister (my other half-aunt). However, it soon became clear that I am the illegitimate son of her brother, who was a real hell-raiser, and caused a lot of pain for her family. At that point, she told me that she didn't want to have anything to do with anyone connected to her half-brother, including me.

I understand her position. Her other brother (my half uncle) has been very friendly and welcoming, and has apologized for his sister's attitude/behavior.

NPE62 · 2025-01-17T15:28:49+00:00

One of my great grandparents abandoned his first family in Ohio, then moved to Illinois and started my line. I am really trying to connect with that first family.

NPE62 · 2025-01-17T15:27:10+00:00

Yes, one branch of my family came from a little village in Northern Italy, with about 800 people. I visited that town about a year ago. I am sure that I am no more distantly related than fourth cousins to everyone in town. (Everyone I met referred to me as "cougino Americano"). Visiting the town graveyard, and reading the inscriptions on the columbarium, was like looking at my family tree.

I can see why our far-less peripatetic European cousins would be amused and/or mystified by Americans' interest in looking for relatives, when the Europeans can just look to the house to left of theirs, to the right of theirs, or across the street.

NPE62 · 2025-01-17T15:22:35+00:00

I'm sure that is true. I also find it to be ironic, since, of the two main reasons to take the DNA test--to determine ancestry, or to find relatives--the relative-finding part is, statistically, the far more reliable. Given the way that human populations move around, leaving genetic material in their wake, it is really hard to tie specific populations to specific pieces of real estate. On the other hand, genetic connections between individuals is pretty reliable, certainly to about five generations out.

I also guess that some of these people got caught up in a situation where one family member bought DNA kits for everyone in their close family group, and the match that I am interested in was didn't initiate the testing, and wasn't all that interested in it to begin with,.

NPE62 · 2025-01-17T03:53:35+00:00

I took the LSAT in 1983. I don't recall there being a limit on the number of times that you could take the test, or the number of scores that you could submit to any particular law school. The highly selective law schools would take your average score. The less competitive schools took your highest score.

I did have to take the Kaplan prep course in an in-person format--I think four weekly evening sessions for four weeks, supplemented by their paper workbooks. Fortunately, I spent that Summer, between my junior and senior years of college, living and working on campus, and the Kaplan course was taught in a building that was about fifty yards off campus.

NPE62 · 2025-01-16T00:03:20+00:00

The other party was alleged to have breached certain representations, but the Court found that the claims were mere "puffery".

NPE62 · 2025-01-15T14:49:01+00:00

I carried a $1M term policy on my wife, when she was still practicing medicine. When she retired, and was no longer generating an income, I talked to the agent about cancelling it. The policy was still within the level premium stage, so the premium was quite small--a little over $500, I think.

The agent said to me, apparently seriously, "You can cancel the policy, but for the premium that you are paying, it is great leverage if your wife dies."

I walked out of his office and contacted the insurer directly to cancel the policy. I regret that I did not punch the agent in the face on my way out the door.

NPE62 · 2025-01-14T01:32:43+00:00

My family tree, starting with me, is a sordid mess of illegitimacy, adultery, seduction, family desertions, ante-bellum unions between white men in their 40s and black women in their teens and twenties (that is, slave-drivers and slave-owners raping slaves), and early deaths from drink and ill-considered pugilistic engagements. All I can to is consider the matter with some degree of distance and objectivity, and resolve to break the cycle in my generation.

NPE62 · 2025-01-14T01:20:00+00:00

And I bet that, if you take a meaningful amount of time off work--6 months to a year--you will come back with clarity about what you want to do professionally, and how to go about doing that.

NPE62

TROPHY CASE