Why Being A Lawyer And An Entrepreneur Is Not The Most Natural Career Combination
[00:00:00] I want to be both a lawyer and an entrepreneur. What is a career that combines...
Being a lawyer combines having your practice as does being a law firm lawyer that gets clients. Lots of attorneys go to law school and practice for a year or two and then do entrepreneurial businesses.
If you want to be an entrepreneur, there are all sorts of things you can do. And used to be that in California and all these different markets, like the people that started Shakey's pizza, which is a big pizza chain and California guys were, they couldn't pass the bars. They started a pizza place and became big.
There are all sorts of things you can do as an entrepreneur and a lawyer. The problem with being an entrepreneur versus a lawyer is lawyers advise people and businesses of risk and how to be risk-averse. The best attorneys, like I was thinking about some attorneys yesterday we'll think of everything that could go wrong.
And that's really what a good attorney does. They will counsel and talk to you forever about all the things that could go wrong in whatever [00:01:00] you're trying to do. And that's just how their mind works. And so if you're going to be an attorney, you need to be able to think what could go wrong in everything that happens and you need to be able to advise people about that and that should come instinctively to you.
It's like being a doctor. Like a doctor, should want to cure people that are sick and a lawyer should fix people that have issues. So that's an important thing. You should prevent people from getting in trouble.
The problem with an entrepreneur is, they're called risk-takers. Most entrepreneurs/ big lawyers don't do well in business because they're not enough of a risk-taker.
They think that if they're a good lawyer, they see everything go wrong. Now, if they're more entrepreneurs than a lawyer, then they don't. But the problem is the two are incompatible and that's one of the things that I would just be concerned about, I think you need to think about what comes naturally to you. Now, if the idea of you as an attorney, you should get excited about, following around a business person and telling them everything can go wrong.
That should become natural to you and should make you feel good about yourself. If [00:02:00] that doesn't make you feel good about yourself and you probably shouldn't be an attorney, but that's what an attorney and attorney should feel good. Giving people advice and protecting them and get very uncomfortable when it looks like something could go wrong.
It's just instinctual. This is what has to happen. For an attorney. Entrepreneurs should see risk and within reason not care. So one of the things that happen it's a funding dynamic is in-house counsel versus the company. So a good attorney that gets into a company with this instinct, with these kinds of the idea of being so risk-averse, they'll see the things the company or are doing, especially new people and they'll lose their mind because they'll see all this risk and they'll see cutting corners, bending the law. And they'll often be sped out of in-house jobs like a plague.
The best attorneys are often not good in-house counsel, the best in-house counsel can be people that help firms bend the rules. And certainly, law firm companies need people to do that, but when a good attorney goes in the house, many times, they don't [00:03:00] like what they see.
