What next?

Bif, in the comments for the preceding post, asked me what I am planning to do if I pass or fail the bar. This is a question that I have been giving a lot of thought to during the last couple of weeks and one that I will address over the next couple of weeks.

I’ve addressed touched upon here and there, but never hit head on. To make a long story short, I’m about 99% sure that I’m going to ditch the law and pursue a career in another field. This issue is highly complicated for me and is something that I will attempt to unravel over the next couple of weeks in this blog. It would be a lie to say that failing the bar had no impact on this decision, as it most certainly has. It’s too early to say whether or not I am viewing everything through the prism of bar failure and in the context of the long hard slog that is waiting for my results at the end of May.

I am beginning to think that maybe failing the bar might be the best thing that could have happened to me. Had I passed the bar, I would be more or less stuck in a career trajectory that increasingly holds little interest to me. Even before failing, I had pretty much grown to detest the law with the type of passion usually reserved for lima beans and a certain Texan currently occupying a big white house. I robotically marched into law school armed with a certainty bred sometime in middle school that I wanted to be an attorney. Now, I’ve been able to research and look for jobs that I might actually enjoy and may end up paying more than law.

Anyway, to answer Bif’s question, I am taking the next couple of months before results come out to aggressively look for a non-law job. If I find something I like then I’m going to run with it and forget about law. If I find something, discover I don’t like it, but pass the bar then I can use law as a back up. If I don’t find something outside of law and pass the bar, then once results come out I’ll throw myself wholeheartedly back into the law track. I think what I’m really trying to say (massive hangover seems to be killing any clarity at the moment) is that I don’t want to be caught with my pants down. There is no way I will write the bar a third time, so if I don’t pass I want to be sure that I have something lined up ahead of time so that I'm not left scrambling when results come out.