Coaching vs. Therapy After Leaving BigLaw

A career transition can raise different kinds of questions. The support you choose should fit the question, not a timetable.

Two intake forms in a quiet reading room

Veena is an illustrative composite, invented for this piece. She isn’t a client of mine, and no real firm ever had her as a partner. She’s 49, and until June she was a partner in a capital markets group, where she’d spent twenty-one years.

It’s 2:15 on a Tuesday in late September, and she’s at a long oak table in the reading room of her town library, the one with the green-shaded lamps. The radiator under the window ticks on and off. A volunteer is pushing a cart of returned books down the far aisle, and one squeaky wheel announces every stop. Veena’s laptop is open to two browser tabs, and she’s been switching between them for forty minutes.

The first tab is an intake form for an executive coach a former colleague recommended. It asks what she’d like to be different in six months. The second is an intake form for a therapist whose website she found late one night. It asks what brings her in. She’s typed an answer into each one and deleted both.

Her answers keep coming out the same. I don’t know what I’m doing next, and I don’t know why that bothers me as much as it does. She reads it back and wonders which box it belongs in. Then another thought arrives: If I pick the wrong one, am I going to spend six months finding out?

She closes the laptop halfway. Then she opens it again and goes back to the first tab.

If you’ve left BigLaw, or you’re on your way out, and you’re weighing coaching, therapy or both, this piece is for the question Veena’s stuck on. It compares what each service is for and where each one stops, and it gives you questions to bring to an actual provider. It won’t tell you which one you need. It doesn’t prescribe a universal order, it won’t assume that everyone leaving a firm should use both, and it doesn’t treat leaving as a clinical problem. Wanting help after a big change is ordinary, and so is not being sure what kind. Neither one, on its own, tells you whether something clinical is going on.

I have a stake in this comparison, and you should know it. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist, and I also work with clients as an executive coach. I offer therapy for clinical care and executive coaching for leadership, decision-making and professional growth. That’s part of why the question interests me. Nothing here describes how any particular provider, me included, handles intake, records or a move from one service to another.

Some of what comes up after a firm needs more than coaching or therapy. Questions about your rights and obligations, such as your bar status or a restrictive covenant in your partnership or employment agreement, and questions about benefits coverage or significant financial decisions call for advice from an appropriately qualified legal, benefits or financial professional. You can still plan, and talk through how those questions are affecting you, in coaching or therapy. That conversation just doesn’t replace the qualified advice.

If you’re looking for the identity side of this transition, I’ve written about who you are after the last day at a firm separately. This piece stays with the choice of support.

Coaching and therapy after BigLaw, side by side

Here’s the comparison in one place. It’s built around purposes, limits and questions, because those are the things you can actually check with a provider. It isn’t a scorecard, and nothing in it will tell you which column you belong in.

There are two things the table can’t show you. The rows aren’t a test, so you don’t have to fit neatly into one column to make a reasonable start, and a single question can sit in both. And the label on a service doesn’t settle what’s being provided. What’s actually agreed and done tells you that.

Veena’s sentence, the one she keeps typing, would fit in either column. I don’t know what I’m doing next can be a planning question. I don’t know why that bothers me as much as it does might be one too, or it might be something else. The table doesn’t decide that for her, and it doesn’t have to.

What therapy is for

Therapy after a firm can look a lot less mysterious once you know what it’s meant to do. Here’s the plainest description I know of, from a federal health agency.

The same NIMH page says the right treatment plan depends on a person’s individual needs and medical situation, and that choosing it should happen with a mental health professional’s guidance. That matters here in a specific way. An article can’t tell you whether therapy is what you need, and a list of feelings can’t either. That’s what an assessment with a qualified professional is for.

Therapy isn’t only about the past, and it isn’t only for a crisis. It can include how you’re making decisions now, what worries you about what comes next and how the change is landing at home. If you spent two decades reading every clause before you signed anything, it can feel odd to walk into a service without knowing its terms.

So ask. NIMH suggests questions for a prospective therapist, including what the goals of therapy are, whether the therapist recommends a specific time frame or number of sessions, and how progress will be assessed. Those are fair questions for a first call. You’re allowed to interview someone before you decide to work with them, and their answers give you something close to the terms you’re used to reading.

What coaching is for

Coaching gets described in so many ways that it helps to start with one careful definition and then look at what it leaves out.

That’s one organization’s definition, and its code covers the people it names, not every coach. Titles and training vary, so it’s reasonable to ask any coach what training they have, which standards they follow and what the work would look like week to week.

After leaving a firm, coaching can be a place to think out loud about what’s next with someone whose job is to help you move. What do you want your days to look like? What would you say yes to now, and what’s a clear no? How do you describe the change in an interview without apologizing for it?

Coaching isn’t built for clinical assessment or treatment. Feelings may come up in it, since conversations about work can touch them. Talking about feelings doesn’t, by itself, decide which service you’re in; the actual purpose, scope and work do. If what you’re carrying starts to look like a concern about your mental health, that’s a reason to seek an assessment, and seeking one doesn’t have to wait for your coach’s permission or for a career decision to be finished.

For a broader look at coaching on its own terms, I’ve written a longer piece on trauma-informed executive coaching and what it involves.

Paint swatches and a start date

Brandy is a second illustrative composite. She isn’t a client of mine, and her firm isn’t a real one. She’s 41, a senior associate in a litigation group, and she gave notice three weeks ago. She starts an in-house role in November.

It’s a Saturday morning in early October, and she’s standing in the paint aisle of a hardware store, holding a fan of gray-green swatches up to the fluorescent light. The spare room at home is going to be her office for the new job, the first one she’s had with a window that opens. A man in an orange apron asks if she needs anything mixed. She tells him not yet.

Her phone buzzes in her back pocket. It’s her sister again, with the name of a therapist a friend of hers liked. Two days ago it was a law school classmate, with the name of a coach who works with lawyers moving in-house. Brandy’s saved both names. She hasn’t called either one.

The new job is a good one, and she knows it. She negotiated it well, she’s relieved to be leaving, and she still checks her work email before she’s out of bed on weekends. I should be happy about this, she thinks, holding a swatch called Harbor Sage next to one called Quiet Moss. Why does it feel like I’m about to get it wrong?

She slides both swatches into her jacket pocket and walks toward the front of the store without buying any paint.

Brandy’s situation isn’t clearly one kind or the other. She has practical things to sort, like how to set up her first months in a new role and what she still owes her old firm on the way out. She also has a feeling that doesn’t match her circumstances. Some of that might suit a coach, some might suit a therapist, and some of it needs an adviser. Sorting that out is what the next section is about.

Questions that sort the help, not the person

When you’re not sure what help you need, it’s tempting to sort yourself first. Am I a coaching person or a therapy person? That question is harder than it needs to be, and it can feel like a verdict. It’s usually easier to sort the questions instead.

Try writing down the three or four things you’d want help with, in your own words. Then look at each one and ask who’s actually positioned to answer it. Brandy’s list, if she wrote it on the back of a swatch, might have four lines: the client-contact clause in her exit paperwork, her first ninety days in-house, the weekend email habit, and the feeling she had in the paint aisle. Only one of those has an obvious owner.

Some questions turn on rights, obligations, coverage or significant financial decisions. Whether your bar status needs attention, what a clause means for your next job, what happens to your health coverage and how to handle a major financial choice tied to your departure call for advice from a lawyer who represents you, your plan or benefits administrator, or a qualified financial adviser. You can still plan around them and talk through their impact in coaching or therapy. That just doesn’t replace the qualified advice.

Some are about what’s next: the role, the pace, how you want to lead and be led. Those are the kind of goals coaching is set up for, and they can come up in therapy too.

And some are about how you’re doing. If you’ve been concerned about your mood, how you’re sleeping, your appetite or anything else about your mental health, that’s worth an assessment. NIMH points to a primary care provider as one place to start, since they can do an initial mental health screening and refer you to a mental health professional.

None of this is a readiness test, and there’s no score. A question can belong in more than one place. If you can’t tell where something goes, ask the provider you’re considering whether it’s something they’d work on, and what they’d suggest if it isn’t.

Records are worth a question of their own. Before you share something sensitive, it’s reasonable to ask how notes are kept and who can see them. Coaching and therapy may handle this differently, and so may individual providers, so ask the person in front of you instead of assuming. If you’re worried about how something you share could bear on your license or a legal matter, take that question to a lawyer who represents you.

If something feels urgent

Urgent help doesn’t wait for a coach, a contract, a career decision or a comparison like this one. You don’t need to finish sorting your questions, and you don’t need to know which service you’d choose.

In the U.S., in a life-threatening situation, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room. In the U.S., if you’re suicidal or in emotional distress, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Outside the U.S., your local emergency number is for life-threatening situations.

Both/And: using one, both or neither isn’t a verdict on you

It’s easy to treat this choice as if it says something about who you are. Picking coaching can feel like proof you’re fine. Picking therapy can feel like proof you’re not. Neither is true. The choice is about what kind of help a question needs, and questions change.

You can want a sharp plan for your next role and also want to understand why leaving has been harder than you expected. For some questions, coaching may fit. For others, an assessment may be the right place to start. Leaning on people you already trust can help too, though it doesn’t replace an assessment you need or urgent help. None of that makes every choice automatically fine. It means the choice says something about the question, not about your worth.

If you’re considering both at once, ask each provider how they’d want to handle that. This article can’t tell you whether two services will fit together for you, or how two providers would work alongside each other. That depends on what you need, what each one offers and what each of them is obligated to do.

Veena, at the long table under the green lamp, is closer to this than she thinks. She’s been treating the two tabs as a test she could fail. They’re two questions, and she’s allowed to ask both.

The Systemic Lens: when the firm shaped your support, too

For years, a lot of what held your life up may have run through the firm: the health plan, a calendar that decided when a doctor’s appointment could happen, the colleagues you talked to late at night. When you leave, several of those things can change at once, and even choosing support can start to feel like one more task without the structure you’re used to.

That isn’t a personal failing. It’s what can happen when one job takes up so much of the calendar that it ends up carrying other parts of life as well. The structure was real, and so is the adjustment to its absence.

It’s also a practical reason to ask a few plain questions as you go: what coverage you’ll have and when it changes, whether anything you used through the firm continues after you leave, and whose policies apply to what. Those answers come from the plan, the program or the adviser, not from an article.

Brandy hasn’t looked at any of that yet. Her new employer’s coverage starts on her first day, and she isn’t sure what happens in the weeks in between. It’s a small question. It’s also one reason the therapist’s name is still sitting in her phone, unused.

Where Veena and Brandy are now

It’s Thursday, two days later, and Veena’s back at the long table. The radiator is quiet today. She’s rewritten her answer on the coach’s form: what she wants to be different in six months is having a sense of what her days are for. On the therapist’s form she’s written one sentence and left it there. I left a job I was good at, and I don’t feel the way I thought I would. She hasn’t pressed submit on either one.

Brandy’s swatches are still in her jacket pocket. She’s called the number for her current plan about the gap and sent the clause to a lawyer she trusts. The coach and the therapist are both still names in her phone. She thinks she might call one of them on a lunch break next week. She hasn’t decided which.

Neither of them knows yet what the right mix will be, and nothing here can tell them. What they have now is a clearer picture of which question goes where.

If any of this sounds familiar, you don’t need the answer before you ask the question. You can bring what you’re carrying to a coach, a therapist or an adviser, find out what each one actually does and decide from there. And if something is urgent, it goes first.

Warmly,
Annie.