Thinking of leaving your law firm and finding a new job? If you are experiencing any of the fifteen reasons discussed below, it is time to start your search.

1. 15 Reasons You Should Leave Your
Law Firm and Look for a New Job
BCG ATTORNEY SEARCH

2. Summary:
Thinking of leaving your law firm
and finding a new job? If you are
experiencing any of the fifteen
reasons discussed below, it is
time to start your search.
BCG ATTORNEY SEARCH

3. The decision to leave any law firm can have positive or
negative consequences, so it is important to evaluate it
carefully. Leaving a smaller law firm to move to a larger,
more prestigious one could drastically increase your
salary and career prospects. On the other hand, leaving
a large, prestigious law firm to join a smaller firm, or to
go in-house, will make it difficult for you ever to get into
a major law firm again. Whenever you make a decision
to leave a law firm, you make a decision that will either
take you one step closer to being successful and happy,
or that will take you one step further away from the sort
of career and life you are seeking.
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4. The Quality of Your Life is Proportional to the Quality of
Your Decisions
A person’s success is largely a product of that person’s
decisions—good and bad. When you look at the most
successful people in any profession, you can see that a
large part of what made them successful was the
decisions they made. Your decisions in your life and
career will determine who you become and what you
achieve. It is all about making good decisions.
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5. 1. To Get Into a More Prestigious Law Firm
In my profession, there are two types of attorneys who move
law firms: (1) those who are motivated and trying to trade up
and (2) those who are trying to trade down (or
anywhere). Law firms like attorneys who are trying to trade
up. If a law firm thinks you are trying to trade down, the firm
will view you with suspicion due to “the law of momentum”—
once an attorney starts trading down he or she will generally
not stop that downward slide and will leave the profession, or
the law firm environment shortly. Prospective firms will think
the attorney is just trying out an “experiment” and will soon
make yet another move.
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6. 2. Are Compensated Poorly
Some law firms pay as little money as they can to their
attorneys or as much as they can afford. If you are making
significantly under-market salary for the region of the country
you are in, it often makes sense to investigate the market—but
not always. It is important to consider the reasons a law firm
may be compensating you poorly. A law firm will compensate
you poorly for some of the following reasons:
• The law firm does not have the money to pay you well
• The law firm has the money to pay you well but is doing something else with it
• The law firm is having financial problems
• The law firm does not value you
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7. 3. To be Closer to a Significant Other.
If your significant other lives somewhere else and you believe
that the relationship is likely to last, then moving firms to be
closer to that person is a good idea. It is also a good idea to
move if your significant other is in a legal market where there
is more opportunity than the one you are in, or where you see
yourself more likely to settle down.
At the start, though, a question to ask is: “Whose career is
more important?” If you are doing well at your current firm,
have one or more mentors, feel comfortable with the people,
and are compensated fairly, then is it really in your best
interest to leave behind all of the political capital you have
accumulated?
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8. 4. To be Closer to a Family Member, or to Go Home
(Where You are From and Grew Up)
Moving to be closer to a family member, or where you are
from, is a common reason for moving firms and also a good
one. Law firms like it when an attorney relocates to join a
family member and go home. If this is something you are
considering doing, you want to do so between your second
and sixth years of practice—the time when you will be most
marketable as a lateral attorney. Partners with significant
portable business can make this move at any time.
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9. 5. To Get Exposed to More Sophisticated Work
The sort of work done in a large law firm in New York or Palo
Alto is going to be much different than the work done by a
firm in a smaller market—especially on the corporate
transactional side. Within markets, differences regarding the
sophistication of work offered can be quite profound. Small
litigation matters are different than class actions. Large real
estate deals involve different skills than smaller ones.
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10. 6. To Get Better Training
I know an attorney who started work in an insurance defense
firm for his first job out of law school and he was handed 100
cases and told to “handle them” with no training whatsoever
offered. As a young attorney, it is important that you surround
yourself with senior attorneys who train you and offer you
guidance—about the work you are doing and even about the
politics of the law firm as well. When you have people training
you and offering you guidance, you become a much better
attorney more quickly and do not develop habits that may
hurt you in the long run. Having someone hanging over you
and critiquing your work is a real benefit and something that
can help you grow.
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11. 7. Your Physical Health Can No Longer Tolerate the
Conditions of Your Current Firm
Over the past year, I have encountered numerous attorneys
who have had serious health issues (in particular immune
disorders) that seem to have been brought about by the
draconian hours and working conditions of their law
firms. These immune disorders seem to have affected a high
number of women associates in New York, in particular (I can
think of at least five women I have spoken to over the past
year who left their firms due to immune disorders, and there
is likely something to this that merits further study—and I am
sure will be studied at some time in the future because this is
happening too much).
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12. 8. Your Mental Health Cannot Tolerate Your Current
Firm
If you work in a large law firm, the odds are very good that you
know of people who have experienced mental health issues
working inside of a law firm. The working conditions inside of
many law firms are not natural and are too much for many
attorneys. The politics of many law firms can create mental
health issues for many attorneys as well.
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13. 9. There is Not Enough Work at Your Current Firm
If your firm does not have a lot of work—and this seems to be
consistent—you are well served by looking for a new position
and should. Work is the lifeblood of a law firm and if there is
not work for you to do this means that there will not be an
opportunity for you to advance, you will not get enough on-
the-job experience, and the odds are good that you will lose
your job at some time in the future.
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14. 10. You Are a Staff Attorney
As a strategic cost saving measure, many prestigious law firms
are now hiring attorneys with great credentials and from good
schools as permanent staff attorneys. I am increasingly seeing
attorneys from Harvard, NYU, and other law firms working as
staff attorneys. It is perplexing that law firms are doing this
with such regularity. Many attorneys apply for associate
positions, go through rounds of interviews, and then at the
end of the process are offered positions as staff attorneys with
the firm. To my astonishment, the majority of the time these
offers are typically extended to women and minorities. Over
the past year, I do not think I have encountered a single white
male who was offered a staff attorney position (not
necessarily through me).
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15. 11. To Work in a Practice Area That Matches Your Skills
and Interests
Many attorneys join law firms expecting and hoping to do a
certain type of work and then once they start work they find
the kind of work they sought is not available. Other attorneys
develop an interest in a subject matter while practicing at a
given firm and find that they cannot do a lot of this work
because it is not available.
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16. 12. To Have a Better Opportunity for Advancement in a
New Firm
If there is no opportunity for advancement at your current
firm, or the opportunity looks remote, it is important that you
investigate new firms.
At any one time, I am representing senior associates, counsel,
and others at major firms across the country seeking new
positions because they know that the possibility of
partnership is remote at their current firms—and they want to
go somewhere where there is a significant opportunity for
advancement.
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17. 13. If the Culture of the Law Firm is Wrong for You
The culture of the law firm you are in is extremely
important. If you are a fit for the culture, then you will be
around people who understand you and will help advance
you. But if you are in the wrong culture, then everything you
do might be taken in a negative way. You need to surround
yourself with people you feel comfortable with, understand
and vice versa. There are countless benefits to this, but chief
among them is your happiness.
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18. 14. You Have Made Serious Mistakes at Your Job (Social,
Sexual, Political, Work-Related) that Will Haunt You
if You Stay at the Firm
Many attorneys make serious mistakes at their law firms and
need to leave. Here are some examples from the past few
years:
 People get drunk and say and do dumb things at parties.
 Attorneys side with the wrong people in political squabbles
and get on the wrong side of those in power
 Attorneys make giant mistakes in their legal work and mess up
matters
 Attorneys oversleep and miss court or an important closing
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19. 15. You Have No Mentors or the Attorneys Who Hired
You (or Give You Work) Have Moved On or Are in
Trouble.
When an attorney is inside of a law firm, the attorney typically
needs to have an individual (or individuals) who give the
attorney work and who will look out for the attorney and
support the attorney. You need to have supporters in your
job, and nothing is more important than this. If you do not
have any supporters inside of your law firm and believe it will
be difficult to find them, then leaving is something you should
consider—whether you are a partner or an associate.
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20. Conclusions
There are several classes of attorneys who make the decision
to leave their law firms and look for new jobs.
First, there are attorneys who are asked to leave, told they
have no futures or given this advice indirectly in a thousand
possible ways. In this sort of case, the attorney needs to make
sure he or she is evaluating the situation rationally and move
on as quickly as possible. Make no mistake about it: Once a
law firm has asked you to move on, you need to and should
not prolong it under any circumstances. You need to get out
and leave now. The law firm does not want you around, and it
is bad for your mental health to remain in a place where you
are not wanted. Look immediately and look far and wide for a
new position. BCG ATTORNEY SEARCH

21. This article “15 Reasons You Should Leave Your Law Firm and
Look for a New Job” first appeared on BCG Attorney Search is
widely known to be the most selective recruiting firm in terms
of who it represents in the United States.
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