“Circling Back” On Why You Wanted To Post That

Written from a departure gate.

On whiplash, liminal time and what to do while you are between two places in your career.

I am writing this from an airport in Turkiye, waiting for a flight to Poland, in that particular stretch of a trip where you have left one country but have not yet arrived in the next one.

It is not a sightseeing day. Oh no no, it is a travel day, which is a different thing entirely to an organised eldest daughter with leadership qualities. There is no itinerary to follow, nothing to tick off, no reason to be anywhere except this row of seats near Gate 8A.

I have found on this trip that my ideas only arrive once I stop moving, and this is one of them, so it is getting written here before boarding the flight.

Also, I have been sitting inside the exact thing I wanted to write about (transition and liminal time) and the analogy has only just occurred to me.

My last briefing was written fast.

Someone was in the middle of it, the advice was honestly overdue anyway and the whole thing had the energy of a person putting a hand out to stop a door closing on someone's fingers. I stand by every word of So You've Accidentally Gone Viral.

I also think it only did half the job.

So I am “circling back”.

In inverted commas, the full corporate flourish, because the substance is where the real conversation was and I skipped straight past it in a flurry of Cappadocia hot air balloons and another great coffee find.

That briefing was about how to post. This one is about what you were actually trying to say.

The departure lounge

Anthropologists have a word for the space I am sitting in. Liminal, from the Latin for threshold, the middle stage of a rite of passage where you have separated from your old identity but have not yet been given the new one.

Airports are the purest version of it in modern life I think. You are nowhere in particular. The clocks show four cities at once. Everyone around you is a stranger, all of you are mid-transit and no one really belongs here. The signage assumes you already know the system and the language. The food is wrong for the hour. Somewhere in the last week there was a rest stop with a drop toilet and no warning whatsoever, which is its own kind of orientation lesson, delivered abruptly as all necessary travel lessons are.

You are not where you started but are not where you are going. Nothing here is designed for you to stay, which is precisely why it can feel so uncomfortable to be stuck in it.

Now, have a think about the first year of legal practice with that framing in mind.

The feeling underneath the post

Almost every accidentally viral video that gets a junior lawyer in some sort of trouble is about the same thing. Not a client. Not a matter. But the conditions. What it is actually like to be twenty four years old, freshly admitted, three weeks into the job and quietly wondering if “this is it?”

The technical word for what you are feeling is whiplash and if you cannot remember it for yourself then respectfully, you have been practicing for too long.

Now I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this argument that is lazy. The gap between the fantasy of legal work and the reality of it is not new and it did not magically arrive with TikTok.

Ally McBeal was on television in 1997. Legally Blonde came out in 2001, Boston Legal in 2004, Suits in 2011.

Every generation of law student has walked in holding a picture assembled from courtroom drama then walked into a data room full of documents that they wouldn’t leave for days (true story). That is not a scandal, it is the oldest story in the profession.

But what is different now is the second layer.

Previous generations were mostly comparing themselves to fictional lawyers en masse, which is at least a fair fight, because everybody knows Elle Woods is not real (*sad face*). This generation is comparing itself to real people of the same age who appear to be living a version of the job that photographs beautifully.

OOTD. GRWM. The 6am pilates, matcha, blowdry, Anna Quan, Ferragamo, RM Williams or a vintage blazer. The corporate aesthetic content that shows the commute, the coffee and the building lobby lift with the good light but never once the 1am finish, again, the stimulants, the relaxants, the billable tracker, the pressure, the tears, the frustration and the credit card debt, brand deals and/or parental assistance funding the whole thing.

Just to be clear, nobody is lying, they are just filming the eleven minutes of the day that look like the brochure.

Corporate cosplay for the short form video generation.

The difference between this version of reality and yours may reinforce a sense of confusion.

You may quietly ask yourself: “Am I the only one feeling this way?” “Am I the only one failing?” “Why can’t I afford a new Scanlan dress every week or so?”

The Three Ds

Somebody reminded me recently of the “Three Ds” of legal work.

✨ Drudgery.

✨ Details.

✨ Deadlines.

You can move practice areas, move firms, move in-house, move countries. You, mostly, cannot move away from those three.

They don’t photograph particularly well or appease social media algorithm daddy though, so you don’t see them in the DITL video. Why would you?

All benefits aside, (and there are many) the Three D’s really are the job and every senior lawyer you admire is a person who made peace with them so long ago that even they have forgotten they ever had to.

The one live variable is the first D.

AI is genuinely eating the drudgery, faster than most of the profession has admitted out loud, which sounds like unambiguous good news until you sit with it for a minute.

For better or for worse, the drudgery was also the apprenticeship.

Nobody learns how a deal is built by only being told. They learn it by doing the schedule, checking the annexure, chasing the signature page and slowly noticing the shape of the thing over time. I have written before about whether we trained for a career that does not exist anymore and this is the sharpest edge of it.

If we remove the “boring” work without replacing the teaching that was hidden inside it, we will produce a generation of juniors who are faster, more anxious and less sure of what they know and what they don’t.

We are excellent at doorways and hopeless at corridors

Study life has enormous autonomy inside it and most people don’t notice until it’s gone. You choose when you sleep. You choose whether the nine o'clock lecture is worth attending or whether you will read the notes on Sunday. Your worst week is followed by a break and really, you are the only person setting the pace of your experience for the most part.

Then you graduate, which is beautiful. You get admitted, which is genuinely moving with the flowers and the photographs and mum crying in the third row. The profession is superb at ceremony and we will put on a whole event for a threshold when you step over one.

Then it is Monday and you are in a chair from half past eight until whenever they let you leave, with no ritual at all for that part.

No ceremony for the loss of autonomy. No acknowledgment that you have just handed over the structure of your own days to a stranger's inbox. You go from the most self-directed years of your life to the least, in a single weekend.

Of course it feels like something happened to you. Something did!

This is the corridor part. Old identity gone, new one not yet earned, nobody explaining the signage or the language. You are a lawyer on paper and not one in any way that feels real yet, surrounded by strangers irl and online who all appear to know where they are going. You have departed but you have not yet arrived.

The profession loves a doorway. Admission, graduation, the partnership announcement, making silk, the humble brag LinkedIn post #blessed #grateful. It has built almost nothing for the corridor in between, which is where early career lawyers spend a lot of their time.

The tension

Now for the part I think I owe you, because I realise my two briefings sit slightly at odds and I would rather say so than let you feel it and not know why that might be.

Here goes…

The last one said play the game and play it smart. This one says you were not imagining any of it.

Both are true and holding them together is an actual skill in cognitive flexibility. You can be completely right about the conditions while still being strategic about where and how you say so.

Being right is not a defence to a professional conduct or employment issue but it is also not nothing.

The instinct that made you want to post was not immaturity, it was accuracy without an outlet and the answer is not to stop noticing. The answer is to choose your venue. Time and place.

This is the whole reason I do what I do.

Ungatekeeping is not a personality trait or some cute content strategy of mine, it is a long overdue corrective.

When the information is not shared, this is what you get. Bright, capable, thoroughly prepared people arriving into the first year of practice with a picture that was sold to them by prospectuses, firm marketing and a television show from 2011, then discovering the actual terms of the deal on day nine, alone, at their desk, with nobody to ask whether this is normal or not

So whose fault is it?

Law schools have a real case to answer, and I say that as someone who loved law school. Teaching people to think like lawyers while telling them almost nothing accurate about what the work feels like, what it pays, what it costs and how the industry actually selects people is a choice.

Law firms are in it too, running clerkship and graduate campaigns that are indistinguishable from lifestyle advertising, then expressing surprise when the people who bought the advertisement notice the discrepancy and want to warn others.

I am not going to hand you a briefing that blames everyone except the work itself, because part of this is simply the shape of a hard job that takes years to get good at.

Please remember that they call it legal “practice” for a reason. It is an apprenticeship in a puffer vest and it 👏 takes 👏 practice 👏.

Time.

Sets and reps.

Pattern recognition.

Like learning any new skill, you just have to put in the hours.

You are not going to be good yet, you are going to feel stupid regularly and the gap between the standard you can recognise and the standard you can produce is going to be uncomfortable for a good while. That gap is the job working correctly.

Unfortunately, some of you will deal with all of that without a single decent leader to help you through it, because a great many people in this profession were promoted for technical excellence then never trained to lead another human being well. I have written about what it takes to lead differently, though that is a repair job for the people above you rather than a task for you in month four.

Some of you will land somewhere that is not psychologically safe, which is a different category altogether. That is not the three Ds. That is not settling in. If you suspect you are being capital B Bullied, excluded or systematically undermined, please read The Dickhead Dominated Industry because the useful move there is documentation rather than endurance.

What to do while you are in transit

✨ Separate normal hard from not okay, in writing. Two columns. Normal hard is boredom, detail, deadlines, feeling slow, missing your own schedule and being corrected a lot in ways that feel personal but really aren’t. Not okay is humiliation, exclusion, being screamed at, being set up to fail or having a shoe thrown at you (another true story). Most weeks the first column is full and the second is empty, which is genuinely reassuring to see on paper. If the second column starts filling up with dates attached, you are no longer in transit, you are in a situation, and it needs formal advice rather than more resilience.

✨ Do not make the big decision at the gate. Nobody has ever made a good structural decision about their life while disoriented, tired and surrounded by strangers. Twelve to eighteen months before you decide what any of it means for you is my rule of thumb. You are allowed to feel lost inside that window without it being a career decision that stays with you forever. It isn’t a prison. Put your head down, do the work honestly and with curiosity, collect as much new data as you can and come up for air soon.

✨ Allow yourself to change your mind, later. I promise that you will have real data for the first time and that updating your view on the strength of it is a sign of a functioning brain rather than a failure of commitment. Just do not make the dramatic version of that decision in month three, at eleven at night, after a bad week. The scenic route is still a route applies here and it works far better as a choice than as an escape.

✨ Build the ritual that nobody will build for you. Something that marks the end of the working day so it does not bleed into all of the hours. Something on a Saturday that is entirely yours. The autonomy you lost at work is largely recoverable outside of it though only on purpose.

✨ Find one person two to four years ahead of you. Not just a mentor with a capital M and a formal program. One person who remembers the corridor clearly enough to tell you what is normal and what is not. That single relationship does more for a first year than any amount of content, mine included.

✨ Give yourself space and grace. You are learning a craft, absorbing a culture, adjusting to a new structure of time and managing your own expectations all at once, while being billed out to clients at rates that will feel ridiculous to you for a while. That is a lot and it is entirely manageable. It just is not manageable at speed.

Now Boarding…

None of this is permanent, okay?

It is intense, with a few extra ingredients unique to law, being the personalities, the billable hour, the perfectionism and the Three Ds. Liminal spaces are crunchy to sit in, though they are only ever the middle of something. Nobody actually lives at the Gate.

You are allowed to find it hard. You are allowed to say so, in the right room, to the right people.

If you want the long version of all of this, Part Six of The Ungatekept Guide to Legal Careers is the Big Sis Real Talk installment covering mental health, burnout, failure, redefining success and knowing when to pivot.

If you want to work through your own version of it with someone, that is what a 1:1 session is for.

They have just called my row.

Now Boarding: All Eldest Daughters Who Have Been At The Gate For 45 Minutes Writing Career Advice For Junior Lawyers.

🙋🏻‍♀️

Mel

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