Big Sis Briefing: What Nobody Tells You About Staying in Corporate Law

There's a version of a corporate legal career advice you've probably heard a hundred times.

Go to the “right firm”. Do the reps and bill your time. Build your skills. Move in-house when the time is “right”. Get the GC or CLO title. Then NFP Boards followed by a couple of plum paid Board gigs. Done. Successful corporate legal career unlocked. 🔓

What that narrative conveniently skips is the part that tends to happen somewhere around year eight or nine for many of us, when you've done most of those things and you're sitting at your desk on a Tuesday afternoon, in a role that looks good on LinkedIn, a salary that makes sense and a quiet voice in the back of your head saying: is this it?

I want to talk about that voice today.

Because I think a lot of us are carrying it around in silence. I know I was.

The performance of a lifetime

Here's what high-performing lawyers are exceptionally good at: functioning, delivering and showing up even when something doesn't feel right.

The legal profession trains you early to push past discomfort. You learn to compartmentalise, to deprioritise your own experience in service of the client, the matter and the deadline. You get very good at being productive even when you're unhappy.

In fact, productivity itself is a balm… depression hates a moving target, yeah?

The moment when your career stops feeling right is not, as you might expect, a dramatic breaking point.

It's much quieter than that.

It's dreading Sunday evenings for no reason you can articulate. It's finding it harder to remember why you cared about the work. It's noticing that the things that used to feel like wins (the deal that closed, the contract that held up to scrutiny, the board update that landed well) now just feel like the next thing on a list that never gets shorter.

You're not struggling and you're certainly not failing. You're just... floating? Fading? Slowly and in a way that's very easy to explain away.

I'm just tired…
It's been a big quarter…
I need a holiday…
I'll feel better when this project is done…

Maybe. Maybe not.

What staying costs you that nobody talks about

The financial cost of leaving a legal career gets a lot of airtime. The opportunity cost of staying gets almost none.

I'm not talking about the obvious stuff like the long hours, the pressure and the always-on culture. You knew about that an you signed up for it, at some level, even if the version you signed up for looks different from the version you're living now. Incentives were once aligned and the tradeoff was a good deal.

I'm talking about the subtler costs.

The cost of spending the best hours of your day on work that doesn't connect to anything you actually care about anymore. The cost of performing confidence, passion and competence in rooms where you feel none. The cost of the version of yourself that doesn't make it through the door at 8am: the curious one, the creative one, the one with opinions that don't need to be approved by a committee first. Remember her?

Lastly, the cost of the slow erosion of trust in your own instincts.

Because when you spend long enough overriding your gut and your nervous system (stay, deliver, push through) you start to lose the ability to hear it clearly at all.

You're not lost, the map was just incomplete

The corporate legal career pathway, as it was handed to us millennials, was built for a very specific kind of person with a very specific kind of ambition: linear, hierarchical, externally validated.

If you find meaning in status, structure, stability and institutional prestige, and plenty of people genuinely do, that map works incredibly well. It takes you somewhere that feels like home and pays very nicely thank you very much!

But if you're someone who finds meaning in autonomy, in connection, in building something, in genuine impact over technical output, the map will still get you somewhere impressive but that doesn't feel like yours.

I don’t think this is a character flaw, ingratitude, a lack of resilience or even a quarter / mid-life crisis.

It's just new information.

About who you are now and what you actually need from work today.

So, what do you do with this?

I'm not here to tell you to quit anything and I'm not here to tell you to stay anywhere.

What I am here to tell you is: the voice is worth listening to. Not acting on impulsively, not suppressing, but listening to.

If you've been performing "fine" for long enough that you're not sure you remember what genuinely good feels like, that's worth paying attention to. If the idea of doing this exact job, in this exact configuration, for another five years makes something in your chest tighten, that's data.

You don't have to blow up your career to honour it.

But you do have to stop pretending it's not there. Because, it won’t go away, I’m afraid. Trust me, I tried and the body keeps the score.

The work I do with lawyers in this exact season, not at the beginning, not the ones who are clearly done, but the ones in the muck, still good at it, still showing up, but slowly wondering, starts with one question:

What would you do if the only person you had to convince was yourself?

That question, usually, is where things get interesting.

💖

Mel

If this landed for you, it might be time for a Career Big Sis session. Not to be told what to do but to figure out what a deep and beautiful part of you already knows.