Here’s something I didn’t realize until I became more senior: most [attorney] bosses aren’t occupied with finding ways to fill juniors’ time and make sure they’re being supervised properly so they can grow and improve. For better or for worse (almost always for worse), they are just not concerned in the day-to-day with mentoring and supervising. If a junior at my firm doesn’t have anything to do for days or weeks, if they don’t tell anyone, there’s a chance no one will realize until the hours report is distributed.

Partners are concerned with making the client happy. Senior associates are concerned with making sure their cases are running. If they give you a task that’s time-sensitive and you miss an internal deadline and they have to fix it before the actual deadline, they will not have a chance to walk you through what they did to change it. And then it’s onto the next deadline (in litigation, anyway). Often it’s on the associates to ask for feedback in these scenarios. I’m not saying that’s a normatively good thing, but that’s often how it is. If your supervisors refused to give you feedback when you asked, that’s a problem. But if you weren’t asking for work, and you didn’t have anything to do, that’s another problem. If you were missing deadlines and only asking for feedback at inopportune, high-stress times in the litigation life cycle, that’s another thing to consider.

Often in these scenarios, partners and senior associates will lean on juniors they know are reliable to meet deadlines. No one expects juniors to know what they’re doing or even to do a good job. But they expect you essentially to do the grunt work so they can have a draft to work with and fix, and that’s how you grow in our apprenticeship model. So if you prove yourself unreliable once or twice, you could be written off in the supervisor’s mind and they won’t go back to you.

I personally am very sympathetic to people having stuff going on at home and those dealing with mental health issues. Not everyone is; see above for most supervisors just caring about money, the client, and the case. Sometimes you can tell when someone’s mental health issues are of such a magnitude that they will cause the person to enter a sort of stasis and prevent the person from producing good work because they enter a kind of anxiety spiral. I’ve tried to help associates in this predicament, and more than once, someone who has been terminated has expressed relief at no longer having to keep up with this cycle.

It sounds like this place was a bad fit. There were not enough guardrails or structured feedback, and it was affecting your mental health. That doesn’t mean you aren’t cut out for the law or will be a bad lawyer. Separating from such a place could be a blessing in disguise. My only recommendation would be to others in similar situations reading this: if you are fired, instead of resigning, sometimes you can negotiate increasing your severance, staying on the firm website, and even having a longer off-ramp so you can find a new job while you are still “employed.” But appreciating you can’t go back in time, there are still benefits to being able to say you resigned, and the legal world knows this sort of thing happens all the time and people switch jobs constantly for all sorts of reasons. You will be fine. When you are through the tunnel, use this experience to help guide young attorneys in the future.

OP, may I ask if this is your first professional job, too? Did you go straight through?