FIRING THE LEGAL PROFESSION: MY REFLECTIONS ON THE GREAT RESIGNATION AND THE FIRE MOVEMENT AFTER THE FIRST YEAR
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” This is the simple yet powerful statement of separation between two different phases of a person’s life, going from a negative to a positive situation and most commonly used by those who are consciously striving to overcome addictions to drugs or alcohol. Out of nowhere one morning, as I was starting my morning routine one Monday in April 2021, this phrase emerged in my mind, giving me a soothing sensation about the potential promise of personal empowerment. The sense of calm that I felt was eerily palpable. It marked the beginning of my experience as part of both the “Great Resignation” and the “FIRE Movement.”
As I was having my vague but powerful thoughts of renewal, I was not facing a struggle with drug or alcohol addiction, but I had been struggling with a feeling of being incarcerated in a wearying, unfulfilling, and ultimately depressing career as a lawyer in a large law firm. Over the course of the preceding several months, like countless other attorneys at that time and indeed at almost any time, I had reached a point of sorrowful exasperation with my employment that I did not believe could be remedied. I was also being faced with an ultimatum to return full-time to the office of my law firm after more than a year of COVID-19 pandemic-related work-from-home. Although I did not have any inherent objections to returning to an office setting, this ultimatum gave me a firm basis for considering this moment in time to be a critical decision point. It seemed like it could be a good breaking point with my life as a regular lawyer in full-time law firm practice. Without having lined up any other job, I decided that I would quit my law firm job, take a “sabbatical” of sorts from full-time legal practice, and take a genuine self-inventory to decide what to do in the next phase of my life. Having made this decision, even though it would be a few more weeks before I submitted my resignation, I felt this unexpected sense of calm from having the sudden realization that my decision to resign made this day the first day of the rest of my life, with the soul-starving work-obsessed large law firm life firmly relegated to the past.
There is just something about being a lawyer that can grind away at people until they reach a state of miserable desperation. The legal profession at its best is a noble profession. It offers a unique opportunity to pursue justice by advocating the interests of clients while influencing how laws and other rules are applied to particular cases and controversies. Though not always, it can often also be a lucrative profession. There is also a sense of obligation and commitment to the profession that comes from the lengthy periods of training in school and afterwards that are required to participate and succeed in the profession. Lawyers often develop a sense of identity that revolves around their occupation as lawyers. No matter what happens, it is hard to leave the legal profession.
Nonetheless, lawyers are a uniquely unhappy group. The profession is generally adversarial, with its practitioners in a perpetual state of conflict. Even for the relatively small number who practice transactional work instead of litigation, the paramount concerns are anticipation and avoidance of future conflict over high-stakes situations where matters may go astray. Both the results of individual cases and the underlying circumstances that led to them entering the legal system can be exceedingly frustrating. The profession in whatever sub-field usually requires excruciatingly long hours. The notion of work-life balance is a cruel joke. Lawyers – perhaps in part because of their combined sense of power and frustration – also are often not the best human beings themselves, and the other lawyers and judges that they have to work for and work with are also not very sound as human beings. Many have a warped sense of their own power that causes them to be extremely unpleasant adversaries, supervisors, and co-workers. The art of human relations and even simple human decency are foreign concepts for many lawyers. With these qualities combined with an obsession over money, many become unhealthily materialistic. Especially for high-earning lawyers, there is often a pressure to maintain a certain image of wealth that leads many to become financially overextended.
It is no wonder then that lawyers suffer disproportionately from alcoholism, depression, and other disorders. Disproportionate numbers of lawyers commit suicide, have early heart attacks or strokes, experience divorce, and declare bankruptcy. Yet because of the rewards of the profession, many want to leave but never do, until perhaps when they die an early death.
Over my more than ten-year career as an attorney in both the public and private sectors, I had experienced both the positive and negative aspects of the legal profession. As a criminal prosecutor, I tried nearly 100 cases that went to jury trials and handled thousands of other cases, touching the lives of victims and serving the well-being of overall society. As a lawyer in private practice, I was able to earn much more money and learn other areas of the law, dealing with civil litigation and the nuances of insurance coverage. Over the same time period, my work life grossly overshadowed any semblance of a personal life. As I reveled in the mental, psychological, and material rewards of my work, I had to deal with the worst parts of our society and the most unpleasant and needlessly hostile opposing counsel, judges, and supervisors. At times I was depressed and felt isolated. Eventually, when combined with unknown congenital medical issues, I worked myself into requiring emergency surgery to address what had become my dire medical issues that apparently had developed over time. Though my condition was able to be addressed through surgery and follow-up care, I still was a risk for recurring problems. My unexpected medical ordeal led me to take a fresh look at life, allowing me a new perspective on the fragility of life and in the importance of the time that we have in this life.
Fortunately, over the same period of time I also had gradually learned about the so-called “FIRE Movement” of mostly younger and middle-aged people who rejected the “golden handcuffs” in many different professions and embraced well-laid plans for financial independence. Even though I was financially and mentally far from conventional retirement, I had a pension in hand from my decade of working in the public sector, ready to be accessed later in life closer to conventional retirement age. Of more immediate benefit, I had a decade-plus nest egg formed from my longstanding interest in investing in the stock market that I had come to believe I could manage in such a way as to allow me to experience the fruits of financial independence, even without knowing what the next phase of my life would bring.
And so I quit. I quit my law firm, and for the time being I quit conventional full-time legal work. With this action I effectively enlisted in the FIRE Movement. I did it even though the stock portfolio I had diligently accumulated was not as substantial as would be needed to retire with ease in the conventional sense, according to the metrics of many financial advisors and even many FIRE movement adherents.
Without realizing it at the time, at this unique time in our history after the transitions and dislocations caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, I was also enlisting in another distinct but overlapping movement that would be called the “Great Resignation” – the movement of people from all walks of life who used this post-pandemic period as a means of transition away from unsatisfying work and towards occupations that better suited them, even if that did not involve working right away at another work position.
As I came to learn, the FIRE Movement, despite the last part of the name suggesting “early retirement,” does not necessarily contemplate full retirement in the conventional sense, just as the “Resignation” in “Great Resignation” does not necessarily denote permanent withdrawal from the labor force. Both the FIRE Movement and the Great Resignation are about enduring personal empowerment, in particular an assertion of control over that most precious commodity – one’s time. Financial independence is the tool that makes this leap possible. Financial independence can be defined differently based on varied circumstances. I suspect many people who have been part of the Great Resignation have had an impromptu insight similar to my own: Because life is short and should have great value, opportunities for financial independence should be seized as soon as possible, even if that independence would not be considered to be “prudent” based on conventional mathematical retirement models. In other words, financial independence should be embraced even if a person does not have millions of dollars in the bank. The alternative activities that a person embarks on – whether entrepreneurship, investments, part-time or contract work, or more desirable full-time employment – can be both the means a person uses to fill his time with greater purpose as well as providing the financial means of making early “retirement” possible.
In my case, my “firing” of the legal profession and participation in the Great Resignation coincided with the treacherous post-COVID pandemic bear market in the stock market. Before I resigned from my prior law firm, my own personal stock portfolio had been reaching new high level after new high level. It wasn’t unusual for me to check my brokerage account on a given day and find that I had made some multiple of my usual weekly salary from practicing law, all with individual stocks that I took a relatively short amount of time to research, buy, and hold, with the intention to continue to hold over the longer-term. Soon after I submitted my resignation to my law firm, a vicious “rotating bear market” began, first in the general category of “stay-at-home” stocks, then more generally with high-multiple unprofitable technology stocks, and then more broadly throughout almost all areas of the stock market. This may not have been the best time to “fire” the legal profession and participate in the “Great Resignation,” especially by relying on the stock market to do so. However, with my greater amounts of free time I taught myself options trading and learned the crucial supplemental strategies of writing covered call options and selling cash-secured put options, leveraging the assets I already had in my account to produce steady income and leading to investment in new assets that could in turn be leveraged. Even though the bear market has continued and continues as of the writing on this essay, fortunately I have been able to continue my financial independence by focusing on my stock and options trading and investing. The short options trading indeed has made this continuing financial independence possible with this treacherous market climate.
From the standpoint of September 2022, slightly more than one year after my Great Resignation, I have basically been making investments my quasi-full-time occupation. Stocks and investments have long been a hobby of mine, and at times of frustration with the legal profession I had long wanted to be able to make a living from my investments in the stock market. This past year I have had my chance to do so. I have also been able to continue with my legal practice on a part-time contractual basis, doing both pro bono work for an organization that supports causes that I care about and also doing occasional contract legal work for pay. After the stock market stabilizes and this bear market ends, I may feel more comfortable placing somewhat less emphasis on my stock market endeavors and focusing on other types of business endeavors, potentially including more time devoted to practicing law, but only by doing so on my terms. No matter which path I choose occupationally, I plan on continuing to strive for a life of being accountable to myself, of being more able to linger on life’s precious everyday moments, and of purposefully using this most precious commodity of time.
As I write this, more than one year into the Great Resignation, the overall economy is facing tremendous turbulence. Not only is the stock market still mired in the aforementioned bear market, but inflation is at extremely high levels not seen in more than forty years, interest rates are highly elevated in response, and economic growth is contracting. We are either in a recession, or on the brink of a recession. Many former participants in the Great Resignation have found other full-time employment. And yet, many participants in the Great Resignation instead are continuing with their improvised post-COVID crisis FIRE. People have formed new small businesses in record numbers and are embracing freelance and part-time work. As with my situation related to the stock market, it may be a challenging time overall to “FIRE,” but the challenges are to be expected as part of the price of winning and maintaining financial and overall independence. To paraphrase the Sinatra song about “New York, New York,” if we can make it now, we should be able to make it anytime.
As part of my concentration on investments in the stock market, I have started this website, StockMarket-FIRE.com, to present my own path for achieving and maintaining financial independence, recognizing that it has been different in many respects from others’ paths to a similar goal. While others may be more inclined to small business entrepreneurship or investment in real estate, I try to represent the large number of people who have FIRED their conventional employment in favor of managing their own investments in the stock market. With this approach I am proud to be part of the FIRE Movement and the continuing Great Resignation. Untold numbers of people are toiling away in unfulfilling jobs, trying to “keep up with the Joneses” while not being entirely true to themselves. If more lawyers and people from other professions are willing to go on the path to FIRE and join the Great Resignation, they stand to gain greater control over their own lives, with more opportunity to be better individuals, family member, and citizens. They even stand to ultimately be more productive members of society at whatever renewed self-directed occupation in which they may find themselves. If too many yesterdays have seemed unbearable, anyone in any position should strive to make today the first day of the rest of your life.
Stock Market FIRE.com 