Leaving BigLaw: The Hidden Identity Crisis for Women

What the disorientation is and isn’t, what becoming an “ex” can mean, and where rebuilding might start.

The first Monday after the last day

Sandy is an illustrative composite, not a real client. She’s 52, and until Friday she was an equity partner at a large law firm. Friday was her last day. She handed in her badge at 4:30, her firm email went dark a little after five, and her assistant hugged her at the elevator in a way that made both of them look at the floor.

Now it’s 9:10 on Monday morning, and Sandy is in the grocery store.

She’s standing in the produce section holding a red plastic basket with one bag of lemons in it. The store is almost empty. There’s a man restocking avocados, a woman with a toddler in the cart seat, and the soft music they play when nobody’s really listening. She can’t remember the last time she was in a grocery store at 9:10 on a Monday. For twenty-six years, on a Monday at 9:10, she was on a call, or walking into a conference room, or answering the email that had come in at 6:40.

Her phone is in her coat pocket. She takes it out and checks it. Nothing. She knew there would be nothing, and she checks it anyway, and then she puts it back and feels a little foolish.

The man restocking avocados smiles at her. “Day off?” he asks.

She opens her mouth to answer and finds that she doesn’t know what the answer is. It isn’t a day off. There’s nothing to be off from. “Something like that,” she says, and she moves toward the bread aisle a little faster than she means to.

I spent twenty-six years wishing for a free Monday morning, she thinks. And I’m standing in a grocery store holding lemons, and I don’t know who I am.

If some part of that feels familiar, this guide is for you. It’s for women who’ve left BigLaw, or are close to leaving, and who may be finding that the hardest part isn’t the paperwork or the pay. It may be the question of who they are once the role that organized their days has ended. It covers what that disorientation is and isn’t, how one sociologist’s book on leaving major roles is described, why the question “what do you do” can land so hard, how a job can come to take up most of the room in a life, and some small ways you might begin to build a self outside the firm.

A quick note on where I’m coming from. I’m a licensed therapist, and I also work as an executive coach. This article is general education. It isn’t therapy, coaching or legal or career advice, and Sandy and the other example in this guide are illustrations, not people. If you’re still deciding whether to go, my guide to deciding whether to leave BigLaw is a better place to start. If the money side is what’s keeping you up at night, my guide to pay, benefits and planning your next move looks at that.

This article is educational and developmental in nature. It isn’t a substitute for individualized care from a licensed clinician, and reading it doesn’t establish a therapist-client relationship. If you’re in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, in the United States call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Outside the US, visit findahelpline.com for local crisis resources.

What this is, and what it isn’t

Feeling lost after leaving a firm isn’t a diagnosis, and it isn’t proof you made the wrong choice. It may be closer to a stretch of life when the roles that used to answer the question “who am I” stop answering it, and nothing has taken their place yet.

That definition is useful for what it names and for what it doesn’t. It names uncertainty about the self as a recognizable part of adult life, not a strange or shameful one. It doesn’t say you’re broken. It doesn’t say this is a disorder. And it isn’t a way to diagnose yourself, or anyone else, from an article.

It also isn’t the same as regretting the decision, though the two can show up on the same afternoon. And an article can’t tell you whether what you’re feeling is exit distress, burnout, depression or some overlap of these. Those can look alike, and sorting them out takes a clinical assessment. If what you’re feeling is persistent, getting worse, or getting in the way of your days, that’s a good reason to talk with a licensed clinician.

Becoming an “ex”

One frame I find useful comes from sociology. Becoming an Ex: The Process of Role Exit, by sociologist Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1988.

The publisher describes the book as an interview-based study of various voluntary exits from significant roles, with examples such as ex-doctors, ex-cops, retirees and divorced people. It says the book traces common stages, from disillusionment with a role, to searching for alternatives, to a turning point, and finally to building an identity as an ex.

I want to be careful about what that does and doesn’t tell you. I’m relying on the publisher’s description here, and it doesn’t establish any findings specifically about women leaving BigLaw. The stages it describes aren’t a schedule you’re supposed to follow, and they don’t promise how anyone’s exit will turn out.

Here’s my own application, not the book’s. What I find useful is the idea that leaving a major role doesn’t have to be only an ending. For some people, it may also become part of a new identity, one that includes the old role rather than erasing it. The “ex” here is about a role, not a license. Leaving a firm isn’t the same as leaving the legal profession, and Sandy hasn’t decided anything about that. What she’s leaving is the role of BigLaw partner, the one that told her where to be at 9:10 on a Monday. She’s becoming a former BigLaw partner, someone whose twenty-six years at the firm are part of her story rather than the whole of it. That could become a real identity, and it may take time to learn what it’s like to live inside it.

It can also explain why the exit doesn’t feel finished just because the last day has passed. The badge is handed in. The email is off. But the part of you that knew exactly who you were at 9:10 on a Monday is still catching up.

The “what do you do” question

For years, the question “what do you do” may have been one of the easiest questions in your life. You answered it without thinking. The answer carried a lot with it: that you were serious, capable, trusted with things that mattered, part of a world other people recognized.

Then one day the old answer isn’t true, and the question gets hard.

It can come up anywhere. At a school pickup. In a grocery store, from a man restocking avocados. At a dinner party, from someone who’s only making conversation. The person asking may mean nothing by it. But the pause before you answer can feel enormous, because what they’ve asked in a single casual sentence is the question you haven’t answered for yourself yet.

You might find yourself giving the old answer anyway, the name of the firm, because it’s quicker and it ends the conversation. You might give a long, careful explanation that goes on longer than anyone needed. Or you might say “I’m between things” and then feel oddly exposed. None of those answers is wrong. They’re all ways of standing in the middle of a change while someone asks you to describe where you’ve landed.

It may help to know that the question is doing more than it seems to. Sometimes “what do you do” can work as shorthand for “who are you” and “where do you fit”. If the job was answering all three, losing it can feel like losing all three at once.

A birthday dinner, and a question with no answer

Shanti is a second illustrative composite. She’s 40, and she’s counsel at a large firm. She hasn’t left. She isn’t sure she will.

It’s a Thursday evening in late October, and she’s at a friend’s birthday dinner at a small Italian place with low lights and a long table pushed together for twelve. She arrived forty minutes late, straight from a call, and she’s sitting at the far end next to the birthday girl’s college roommate, a warm, curious woman who teaches fourth grade.

The bread basket goes around. Someone orders another bottle of wine. The roommate turns to Shanti and asks, the way people do, “So what do you do for fun?”

Shanti laughs. She starts to answer and stops. She runs through the week in her head and then the month. There’s the work. There’s the gym at 5:45, which she does so she can keep doing the work. There’s a book on her nightstand she’s been on page 40 of since the summer.

“Honestly,” she says, “I’m not sure I have a good answer to that.”

The roommate says something kind and easy, and the conversation moves on to someone’s new puppy. Shanti smiles in the right places. But the question stays with her through the pasta and the candles and the singing. On the drive home she tries to think of one thing she did in the last year that wasn’t, in some way, about the firm.

If I left tomorrow, she thinks, I’m not sure there’d be anybody left underneath.

She pulls into her garage, turns off the engine, and sits there for a minute with the question before she goes inside.

When the role took up most of the room

What Shanti is noticing, and what Sandy is living, is what can happen when one role takes up most of the room in a life.

That’s part of why leaving can shake more than a schedule. If the firm was supplying most of your description of yourself, your skills, your standing, what you spent your days doing, and who needed you, then leaving can feel less like changing jobs and more like having a paragraph cut out of your own biography.

If that’s happened to you, it may not have felt like a choice. It can happen a year at a time. You say yes to the matter that needs you, and then the next one. The hobbies thin out. The friendships outside law get harder to keep up with. It may have felt less like giving up a self and more like meeting the demands of the job. I’ve written about a version of this in founders, in my guide to role engulfment, and much of it applies to a partnership track too.

In the fiction here, Shanti still likes the book on her nightstand, even at page 40, and Sandy still knows how to cook, even if she’s standing in the produce section trying to remember what she used to make. For them, those are small signs of parts that haven’t had much room in a while. What’s true for you is something you get to find out.

If you’re coming out of a different demanding world, my guide to the identity crisis of leaving private equity or investment banking looks at a similar experience in finance.

Both/And: proud of what you built, and grieving what it held

You might find yourself stuck on a question that doesn’t have a clean answer: Am I supposed to be relieved, or am I supposed to be sad?

Both/And means you don’t have to pick one. You can be proud of the skill, judgment and endurance you built over years of practice, and you can grieve the structure that held your days together. You can be glad you left and still miss it. You can feel sure about the decision and still feel like you lost something real.

For Sandy, Both/And might sound like this: she’s proud of twenty-six years of doing hard work well, in front of people who knew how hard it was, and she’s grieving the version of herself who walked into those rooms and knew exactly what she was for. She doesn’t miss the 6:40 emails. She misses being needed by 9:10.

For Shanti, it looks different, because she’s still inside. She can be proud of the career she’s built and attached to what it has made her capable of, and she can be quietly frightened by how little else there is. Both of those are true at the same dinner table.

That can be hard to allow, especially if you’re used to making a decision and then committing to it fully. It can feel like missing the firm means the choice to leave was wrong, or that wanting more room means the career was a mistake. Missing it doesn’t settle either question. A decision can be sound and still cost something, and grief on its own isn’t a verdict on the decision.

If the grief feels bigger than you expected, my guide to founder grief looks at grief after a founder leaves her company, including when she chose to go, and some of it may translate to leaving a firm.

The Systemic Lens: a job that asked to be your whole schedule

So far this guide has looked mostly at what happens inside one person. That’s only half of it. When a firm asks for a particular shape of life, that shape can make leaving feel like losing more than a job.

When a job measures time in billable increments, expects you to be reachable in the evening and on weekends, and rewards the person who’s always available, it can end up organizing much more than your working hours. It can decide when you eat, when you sleep, whether you make it to the birthday dinner and how late you arrive. Over years, the job’s calendar can become the calendar of your whole life.

If your firm worked that way, then part of what you’re losing when you leave is that calendar. The structure may have been exhausting, but it may also have been clear. Someone else decided what mattered on a given Tuesday. When that structure ends all at once, the empty time can feel less like freedom and more like standing in a grocery store at 9:10 on a Monday with no idea what the day is for.

There’s a cultural piece too. In some professional worlds, the story of success runs in one direction: up, toward partner, toward the corner office. Leaving can feel like stepping off that story, whatever your reasons were and however much of the decision was yours, and it’s easy to hear a quiet verdict that you “didn’t make it” that has nothing to do with why you actually went.

None of that takes away your agency in what comes next. But it does mean that the disorientation isn’t simply a private weakness. What this lens offers is a different question. Not “Why can’t I handle having free time?” but “What did the job ask of me, and what do I want to build now that it isn’t asking?” If you’re earlier in the process and burnout is the bigger issue, my complete guide to lawyer burnout looks at that side.

Building a self outside the firm

My own recommendation is to start small. Here are a few things you could try. None of them is a formula, and none of them promises a particular result.

• Give the empty time a little shape. Not a new billable schedule, just a few anchors. A walk at the same time each morning. A standing coffee with one friend. Structure you chose can feel very different from structure that was imposed.
• Try something with no scoreboard. A class, a craft, a sport you’re not good at yet. It can feel strange to be a beginner after years of being expected to perform. That strangeness can be part of the point.
• Practice a new answer. You don’t need a perfect sentence for “what do you do”. Something true and short can be enough for now: “I left my firm, and I’m figuring out what’s next”. Saying it out loud a few times can make it easier to carry.
• Tell one person the true version. Not the polished version about how relieved you are. The one about the grocery store. It doesn’t have to be a big conversation.
• Notice what you reach for. When the time is yours, what do you find yourself doing? Those small choices can be early information about who you are when no one is deciding for you.

If you’re like Shanti and still inside the firm, some of these can start now, in smaller doses. You don’t have to leave to begin making a little more room.

Sometimes it helps to have support while you do this. Therapy is clinical care from a licensed professional. It can include assessment and treatment, and it can also work on current and future goals. Executive coaching is nonclinical work toward professional goals you and the coach agree on. The International Coaching Federation’s guide to referring a client to therapy says a coach doesn’t diagnose or offer treatment, and should refer when a client needs help outside the coach’s qualifications, experience or contract. For more on coaching, see my guide to trauma-informed executive coaching.

If you’re looking for a therapist, the National Institute of Mental Health suggests a few places to start, including a primary care provider, who can do an initial mental health screening and refer you, and your insurance company, which can tell you which local providers your plan covers. NIMH also suggests preparing a few questions, such as what experience a provider has treating someone with your concerns and how they usually treat it.

For more on life in and after BigLaw, the BigLaw resource hub gathers related guides in one place.

Still in the aisle

It’s 9:25 now. Sandy has added a loaf of bread and a bunch of flowers she didn’t plan to buy to the basket with the lemons. She hasn’t figured out what she’ll say the next time someone asks what she does. She stands in the checkout line behind the woman with the toddler and lets herself not know.

Across town, it’s a normal Monday for Shanti. She’s on her first call of the day, and the book is still on her nightstand at page 40. She hasn’t decided anything. But she’s thought about the question every day since the birthday dinner.

That’s a real place to be, for both of them. You don’t have to know who you are after the firm by the end of the first week, or the first month. If the role you left was a big part of your life, its absence may take up room for a while. You can start by noticing what you reach for, one ordinary morning at a time.

What I hope you’ll keep is this: the person who did that job is still here, and she’s allowed to become someone new.

Warmly,
Annie.