Leaving BigLaw: Explaining Your Exit and Finding Belonging

The people who knew you at the firm still ask. You get to choose the answer.

Kristy at the coat check

It’s a Friday evening in late January, and Kristy’s standing in the back room of a downtown steakhouse with a club soda she doesn’t really want. A senior partner from her old practice group is retiring, and the room is full of people she used to see every day. There’s a slideshow looping on a screen by the bar, and she’s in two of the photos.

I made Kristy up for this piece. She isn’t a client, she isn’t a real lawyer, and she isn’t drawn from anyone I know. She’s 47, and for fourteen years she worked in the restructuring group of a large firm. Seven months ago she left to open a small estate planning practice of her own.

She’s been in the room for twenty minutes, and she’s been asked the same question four times. Not what she does now. Everyone here already knows that, or thinks they do. What they ask, with a drink in one hand and real curiosity in their faces, is some version of “So why’d you leave?”

She’s given four slightly different answers. One was about wanting her own clients. One was a joke about finally seeing daylight. One was a shrug and “It was time.” The fourth time, she heard herself start to explain the whole year, and she stopped halfway through a sentence and asked about the other person’s kids instead.

Her coat check ticket is in her jacket pocket, a small red stub with the number 61 on it. She keeps turning it over with her thumb. She’s glad she came, and she’s already thinking about the walk to the car.

If you’ve left BigLaw and the hardest conversations aren’t with strangers but with people who knew you there, this piece is about that. It’s about the “why’d you leave” question, how much of your story you share and with whom, and what professional belonging can look like once the firm isn’t the room you belong to anymore.

What this covers, and what it doesn’t

The decision is already made. You’ve left, and you’re somewhere else now, whether that’s your own practice, another kind of legal work or a role outside law. So this isn’t a guide to whether you should leave. If you’re still weighing that, start with my piece on whether to leave BigLaw.

It also isn’t the broad identity piece. There’s a separate article on who you are after leaving a firm, including the “what do you do” question that strangers ask. This one is narrower. It’s about the people who already know your history, and the professional world you’re still part of.

A few boundaries before we start. This is general education, not therapy, coaching or legal advice. It can’t tell you what any agreement you signed lets you say about your departure, and it can’t tell you how you’re doing. Kristy and the other woman in this piece are invented to make the ideas concrete. They aren’t evidence of anything.

“So why’d you leave?” is a different question

A stranger asking what you do is asking where you’ve landed. A former colleague asking why you left is asking for an account. They knew the old version of your days, so the question reaches back into a history they shared with you.

That’s part of why it can feel loaded even when nobody means it that way. The person asking may be curious, or quietly thinking about leaving too, or simply making conversation at a party. You can’t always tell. And you’re often answering in a room where the old rules about how you talk to each other still seem to apply.

The people who ask aren’t all the same, either. A former colleague, a recruiter, a parent who was proud of the firm’s name and a client who followed you all want something different from your answer. One story doesn’t have to serve every one of them.

Look at Kristy’s four answers. None of them was false. Each was a different amount of the truth, offered to a different person, and the one she cut short was the one that started to cost her more than the conversation was worth.

Belonging, in the dictionary’s words

Belonging is one of those words that gets used so often it can stop meaning much. The APA Dictionary of Psychology gives it a short definition that keeps this conversation specific.

That last point matters after a firm. Your training didn’t go anywhere when you left. Your judgment didn’t either. What can shift is the feeling of being accepted by a particular group, because the group you were accepted by is still meeting without you.

The definition doesn’t say how anyone should feel after a career change, and it isn’t a measure you can score yourself against. It just gives a name to something you might be noticing at a party like Kristy’s: you know everyone in the room, and you’re not sure you’re part of it.

Joyce and the blank line on the name tag

It’s a Wednesday morning in early March, and Joyce is at a breakfast meeting of her county bar association’s dispute resolution section. The meeting is in a hotel conference room with a long table of pastries and a coffee urn that hisses when anyone touches it. She’s early. She’s filling out a stick-on name tag at the welcome table.

Joyce is made up as well. She’s not a client, not a real lawyer and not modeled on anyone I’ve known or worked with. She’s 51, and she was a litigation partner at a large firm for many years. A little over a year ago she left to work as a mediator on her own.

The name tag has two lines. The first says NAME, and she writes Joyce. The second says FIRM, and for a moment she holds the pen over it. For two decades that line filled itself in. She writes the name of her mediation practice in small letters, and it looks to her like something a person might make up.

Nobody at the table looks twice. Two people introduce themselves, one asks a question about a scheduling order, and the conversation moves along like any other. Joyce takes a seat near the end and wraps both hands around a paper cup of coffee. She isn’t unhappy to be here. She’s just not sure yet whether this is her room.

When most of your contact lived at work

One passage in the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on social connection offers a useful distinction if your weeks were full of colleagues. In Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, the advisory gives the example of someone who sees colleagues regularly at work but has little time for relationships outside it. It says a person like that isn’t objectively isolated and may not feel lonely, but that common measures can miss whether they’re getting other benefits of connection, such as feeling supported or having close relationships.

That example isn’t about attorneys, and it isn’t a finding about what happens when someone leaves a firm. I’m applying it here myself. If most of the people you talked to in a given week were people you worked with, leaving the firm can change who you talk to, all at once.

The advisory’s glossary is useful here, too. It treats social isolation as an objective state: few relationships, roles or group memberships, and not much social interaction. Loneliness, in its glossary, is subjective and distressing, rooted in feeling isolated or short on meaningful connection. It’s the gap between the connection you’d prefer and the connection you actually have.

Those are two different things, and the difference can help you describe your own situation without overstating it. Joyce sees plenty of people. She mediates disputes most weekdays, and she has friends. What she’s noticing at the breakfast is something smaller and harder to name: a section meeting full of lawyers, and a pen hovering over one line.

How much to say, and to whom

Most of the strain in Kristy’s evening comes down to a single choice she has to make again and again: how much of her story to share with each person. Psychology has a plain term for that.

The dictionary’s research note doesn’t mean that more disclosure is always the right choice. In Kristy’s invented evening, the question is which conversation she wants to have with this person, here.

So it can help to think about your departure story in sizes rather than as one true account. There’s a short version, a sentence or two you can say to anyone at a party. There’s a middle version for people you trust somewhat. And there’s the full version, which you might share with a close friend, a partner or a professional, or with nobody at all for a while.

None of those sizes is more honest than the others. An answer can be brief and honest; you don’t owe a former colleague the full year because they asked kindly over a drink. If your exit involved confidential matters or an agreement about what can be said, what’s permitted is a question for that agreement or a lawyer, not for this article.

Kristy’s fourth answer, the one she cut off, wasn’t a failure of composure. It was her noticing, mid-sentence, that she’d started the full version with someone who’d asked for the short one. Changing course was a choice she was allowed to make.

Both/And: at peace with leaving, and missing the room

You can be sure you were right to leave and still miss the people. Kristy doesn’t want her old job back. She also laughed harder at that retirement party than she has in months, and she noticed it. Both are true on the same evening.

Missing the firm’s people isn’t proof the decision was wrong. Being glad you left isn’t proof you should feel nothing about it. The two can sit side by side without one of them winning.

The same holds for Joyce. She chose to work on her own, and she likes the work. She’d also like to walk into a room of lawyers and feel, without thinking about it, that she belongs there. That wish doesn’t say anything about whether she chose well. It’s simply something she wants.

Of course it’s disorienting to feel like a guest in a world you spent years helping to build. That isn’t a flaw in how you left. In these invented scenes, the old group keeps meeting while each woman considers where she wants to spend her time now.

The Systemic Lens: when the firm was also the social world

This section is my own reflection, applied to two made-up lawyers. It isn’t research about law firms or the legal profession.

A large firm can be more than an employer. For some people it’s also where the friendships are, where the holiday parties happen and where the people who understand your work all gather. When one institution holds that much of your social life, leaving it can rearrange your relationships along with your job.

The Surgeon General’s advisory includes recommendations for workplaces. One asks employers to create practices and a culture that let people connect beyond their work functions.

Another recommendation asks employers to protect people’s time for relationships outside work, including by respecting the line between working and non-working hours. I don’t know how any particular firm measures up against those, and they aren’t a verdict on yours.

The APA Dictionary offers two more terms for this discussion. A membership group is one that people belong to as members, and such groups often draw a clear line between who belongs and who doesn’t. A reference group is one people use as a standard for judging their own abilities, attitudes or beliefs, and the entry notes it can even be a group that denies a person membership.

Here’s my own application of those definitions. When you leave, the firm stops being your membership group. It may keep working as a reference group for a while, the standard you quietly measure your new work against. That might be part of why Joyce’s handwriting on the name tag looked made up to her. She was still checking it against the old line.

Where to bring it

You don’t need to sort out what this is before you talk to someone. It may be ordinary adjustment, it may be loneliness, or it may be something else that deserves a closer look. Figuring that out isn’t something an article can do.

If you’re wondering whether this is affecting your health, the National Institute of Mental Health’s help page names a primary care provider as one place to begin. That page says a primary care provider can carry out a first mental health screening and refer you on to a mental health professional, such as a social worker, psychologist or psychiatrist. It also suggests that if you’ve got a primary care appointment anyway, you bring up your mental health concerns and ask for help.

Therapy and coaching are different kinds of help. A health professional can assess concerns about mood or sleep and discuss whether therapy or another kind of care fits. Coaching addresses professional questions, like building a practice or finding your place in a new part of the profession; it isn’t a substitute for clinical care.

Wherever you take it, you can bring plain observations. Who you talk to in a week now, compared with before. Which questions are hard to answer, and from whom. Where you feel like a member and where you feel like a guest. You don’t need to know what any of it means first.

Kristy at the door

The slideshow has looped back to the beginning, and someone’s started the toasts. Kristy listens to the first one, laughs at the right moment and then slips out to the coat check. She hands over the red stub with 61 on it.

A former associate she used to work with catches her at the door. “We should get lunch,” he says, and she says yes and means it. She doesn’t know yet what she’ll tell him if he asks why she left. She walks out into the cold with her coat over her arm, still deciding which version he gets.

Warmly,
Annie.