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Episode 97
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Professional Skills
Resilience, Your Way: Building and Maintaining Healthy Habits in the Practice of Law
Law as stated: 24 August 2023
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This episode was published and is accurate as at this date.
Superstar family lawyer and tech entrepreneur Fiona Kirkman joins the podcast to breakdown the break down of mental health, touching on building effective strategies to monitor health and wellbeing, and tackling failure.
Professional Skills| Why is this topic relevant? | Resilience is an important quality for anyone; but for lawyers on the frontline it’s fundamental to personal and professional wellbeing. In The Road Not Taken: Navigating the Early Stages of Legal Practice with Aden Bates, Aden spoke about the importance of trying new things and encouraged young practitioners to think about and to experiment with where in the legal industry they wanted to be – but building the confidence and resilience to do that can be a challenge for many. To help with this challenge, lawyers need to exercise resilience when transitioning to new careers within the legal field. Making career changes within the legal sector often entails adapting to unfamiliar roles, responsibilities, and environments. This demands a high level of emotional strength and adaptability to cope with potential setbacks, uncertainties, and the learning curve associated with the new role. Resilience empowers individuals to navigate these obstacles, maintain their confidence, and persist in the face of difficulties. |
| What are the main points? |
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| What are the practical takeaways? |
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| Show notes | Aden Bates, The Road Not Taken: Navigating the Early Stages of Legal Practice (2023) Richard Susskind, Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future (2013) |
David Turner = DT; Fiona Kirkman = FK; Ross Davis = RD
| 00:00:00 | DT: | Hello and welcome to Hearsay the Legal Podcast, a CPD podcast that allows Australian lawyers to earn their CPD points on the go and at a time that suits them. I’m your host David Turner. Hearsay the Legal Podcast is proudly supported by Lext Australia. Lext’s mission is to improve user experience in the law and legal services and Hearsay the Legal Podcast is how we’re improving the experience of CPD. Now, resilience is an important quality for any professional in any workplace, but for lawyers on the frontline, it’s fundamental to personal and professional wellbeing. On the last season of Hearsay, you might remember that we spoke with Aden Bates in The Road Not Taken: Navigating the Early Stages of Legal Practice. And in that episode, Aden spoke about the importance of trying new things and encouraging younger practitioners to think about and experiment with where in the legal industry they wanted to be. But building the confidence and the resilience to do that can be a challenge. Now joining me today is Fiona Kirkman. Fiona currently works as the Global Family Law Evangelist for Smokeball Australia. She’s the co-founder of FamilyProperty, a principal of Kirkman Family Law, and a Family Law Course Facilitator at the Law Society of New South Wales. Her expertise in family law combined with her roles in legal technology provide a unique perspective on resilience in the face of career pivots. Fiona, thank you so much for joining me today on Hearsay. |
| FK: | Thank you, David. Great to be here. | |
| DT: | Now that is quite a few hats balancing all on top of one another on your head there. Tell us a little bit about how you got to this point in your career. | |
| FK: | Well, I’m actually coming up to 20 years this August. | |
| DT: | Wow. | |
| FK: | So I like to say “since I was two, I’ve been in the legal profession” but I’m a little bit older than that! And I’m somebody who likes to wear many hats. I like to keep busy and I like that intersection between the law and legal technology. | |
| DT: | Couldn’t agree more. Obviously our listeners know I have that same interest. But tell us a bit about how you found that interest, especially that sort of nexus between family law and legal technology, because we were actually talking about this just before the show, right? There’s this really interesting sort of access to justice purpose there, isn’t there? | |
| 00:02:25 | FK: | Yes. So I started out my career in a suburban law firm and then I became increasingly specialised in the area of family law. I found that was my passion, providing assistance to families going through a really difficult time in their lives. And so I worked at three different law firms for four years each, becoming increasingly specialised as a family law specialist and then in the family dispute resolution space. And then in early 2016 I started my own practice, Kirkman Family Law, which at the time was quite unique in that it specialised exclusively in family mediation and collaborative practice work. And there was a few naysayers; “oh you can’t do that type of work, you need to do traditional family law.” But I was really focused on resolution without court and really trying to help families reach a resolution. So, I did that for a couple of years. And I continue to run Kirkman Family Law, I’m the principal there and I do a number of mediations per week. But at the same time my hubby and I were having a number of conversations around the kitchen table, around the pain points of the admin associated with family law and family mediation, how it’s quite time consuming, very costly around the admin and getting information, disclosing information, preparing court documents etc. And where there’s a lot of repetition, my techie husband Tim said there’s a lot of opportunity for automation. And that set off a number of ideas for both of us and we started developing two products, LawSwitch and FamilyProperty. And suddenly we became known as the couple in law – myself and Technology Tim. So we created those two products and really it’s been a journey since then in the legal tech world as founders of both products, LawSwitch and FamilyProperty. And those products were acquired by Smokeball in 2021. So now we’re part of the Smokeball global journey. |
| DT: | And both are doing very well, FamilyProperty expanding to the US you were telling me. | |
| FK: | Yes, which is rather exciting. So Australia is such a small market compared to the US. And I think the number of family lawyers in Australia is equal to or even more in the state of California. So really big market there and we’re looking at a simplified product over in the US and have our FamilyProperty US president who’s started, who’s got a family law attorney background and really looking at taking that product to market by the end of the year hopefully. | |
| DT: | Those comparisons to the size of the US and Australian legal practice market… | |
| FK: | I know it’s crazy. | |
| DT: | … someone was telling me the other day that there’s the same number of legal practices in Illinois than there are in Australia, something like that. And Lext will get there one day but not yet. | |
| FK: | I’m sure it will. | |
| DT: | Now wearing all of those different hats, I suppose you’ve had to manage a lot of different challenges with resilience and we’ll talk about all of them during the show. But I imagine you’ve got in legal practice and especially in family law, there’s issues of vicarious trauma. There’s taking on stresses and challenges of your clients. Then in startup world, in founder world, you’ve got stress around funding and cash flow and growth and customer expectations. Before we go into all of those though, we’re talking about resilience today. How do you define that term? | |
| 00:06:00 | FK: | I actually taught resilience and wellbeing for the College of Law for a period of time. And during that course, we really looked at resilience and what it is like to be well in the law. And when we looked at resilience, it’s about preparing ourselves for challenge and also how we respond to challenge. I’ve done the mental health first aid course and I found that really valuable in learning the tools and skills to keep myself well in the law, but also to assist colleagues and to assist clients who are obviously going through a really difficult time in their life with their family law separation. So I actually completed one of the first mental health first aid courses for lawyers and then I was a mental health first aid campaign advocate in the ‘I am one, be one too’ campaign. |
| DT: | Another hat! | |
| FK: | Yes, another hat. | |
| DT: | I really like that you describe it as a skill. I think sometimes we talk about resilience as an innate quality. Someone is or isn’t resilient. Someone’s kind of got what it takes to handle a career in the profession or not. But it is a skill that can be cultivated and a bit like a muscle, it can be improved, it can be strengthened. | |
| FK: | Yes, so we actually ran a State of Family Law Series recently as well and we had Dr. Adrian Allen, who’s a psychologist, speak to us at that session around vicarious trauma in the family violence space and he also discussed what tools and skills are important for us as lawyers because the reality is if we’re working with people, we are going to come across material and speak to clients that are in really difficult and traumatic seasons of their life and we, it’s likely, will be impacted as lawyers as well. So how can we look after ourself and I guess put our own mask on first, looking after ourselves so that we can best look after our clients. And I think what I learnt from that is having a big toolbox of skills and resources that we can tap into when we’re faced with challenge. So the basic things around sleep and good eating and exercise but also the importance of having a good mentor, having that network of people that we can relate to and get advice who’ve had their own lived experience of stress. And I know for me I’ve had stress and burnout and vicarious trauma and then I can share those experiences and help others in the field as well. | |
| DT: | Now we’ve both mentioned vicarious trauma a couple of times now. For a listener who maybe isn’t familiar with the term, I imagine most family lawyers are probably familiar with the term but maybe some of our listeners not in that field; what does vicarious trauma mean and what are some of the strategies to manage it? | |
| 00:08:55 | FK: | Vicarious trauma is the emotional impact of working with people who have been traumatised and the associated material of, for example, speaking to clients about family violence, speaking to clients about child abuse, having to read all the material and prepare their evidence for court. And even though that trauma hasn’t happened to us as lawyers, we’ve basically got this secondary trauma that what we hear from them or what we read, we feel that emotionally ourselves. And for me, for example, I had a really bad child abuse case, child sexual abuse, and also at the same time other family violence cases. And at the time I had children of similar age and I would wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares thinking; “oh, is that my children or is that the client’s children?”. And I was quite impacted at the time. I didn’t realise. I think we did a survey in our webinar and there was about 80% of people identified as either having vicarious trauma or perhaps having it. So it’s hard to sometimes identify it but I was really surprised at that statistic. 80% – that’s the family violence sphere in particular. |
| DT: | Wow, that’s extraordinary. It’s really about taking on that sort of trauma and internalising it, isn’t it? Even not coming from a family law background, you can see how as a lawyer your perspective on the world is changed by the work that you do. I suppose you tend to see outliers and you think of the outliers as what’s normal. You see family violence in family law work and you tend to, I suppose, think about it as much more prevalent, much more dominant in your mind than it might be in reality. TIP: More than a few studies have been conducted in Australia and around the world to investigate the welfare of law students and legal professionals. Among these, the most well-known Australian one was carried out by the Brain and Mind Research Institute in 2009. They surveyed 924 solicitors, and 756 barristers, and found that 31% of solicitors and 16.7% of barristers experienced considerable distress levels, reaching a severity that necessitated clinical evaluation. In contrast, this was notably higher than the 13% distress rate observed in the general population. How do you manage vicarious trauma? How do you get yourself through that or avoid taking it on in the first place? | |
| FK: | It was interesting. Dr. Adrian Allen said it is perhaps unavoidable in our field and for other legal fields like criminal law and family law, where you’re working with people going through these difficult situations, we are prone to vicarious trauma but coming back to resilience, it’s looking at preparing for that and having those tools and having the support necessary. So to reach out and get help when we need it. And I think that mental health first aid training has really assisted me as well. There will be times and seasons in our lives where we will, depending on what’s happening personally in our life and what’s happening at work, that we will be impacted more and it’s just being able to tap into those tools in our toolbox and get the help we need to be the best we can be in our health as well. | |
| DT: | What I’m hearing is you can’t do it alone in the sense… | |
| FK: | You need that support network. And I did a post recently on heroes and mentors in the family law world and the importance of having that connection and I know for me there’s a lot of online communities I’m connecting with but I also have a handful of people that I can pick up the phone and talk through these things confidentially and they’re a bit older and they’ve had these experiences and they can provide some guidance. So I think mentorship is really important as a tool in our resilience toolbox. | |
| DT: | And how did you find a mentor, or your mentors, I suppose? Because you’re in a boutique practice with a specialisation, you might not have a lot of practitioners around you in your office setting that are dealing with similar experiences at a similar level of experience to you. So how do you find those people that you can talk through with? | |
| 00:13:32 | FK: | When you’re working as a sole practitioner, it can be quite lonely and there’s not that automatic network of people to tap into. For me, I worked in those three different law firms before I started out in my own practice and I continued to have those relationships with my colleagues and continued those relationships as mentors. But through LinkedIn I connect with people and say “oh, this is somebody whose career has been really inspirational to me” and I just message them and say “your career has been very inspirational to me, would you mind connecting and could we have a chat”. And it’s through some of those ad hoc discussions that I can then go; “oh, this is a person I think I relate to that might be able to assist me.” Also, I’m a continuous learner so I love study and my husband said “no more study.” I did my masters and I started in 2008 and I finished in 2022. So it took me quite a while to finish my masters. |
| DT: | Wow. What’s that? 14 years? | |
| FK: | I had a few breaks in between but I met some people through that as well as my family dispute resolution studies that I really related to and then when there’s a difficult mediation and I need to talk through it and have a debrief, I can pick up the phone and have a chat and I hope I’m that to other people now that I’m more experienced in my career. I take on a number of law students and mediation students who are doing their placement and I really love giving back and sharing my experience as they start out in their career in law and mediation as well. | |
| DT: | One of those other resilience challenges from practice that you mentioned you’ve experienced is burnout. I definitely share that. I think I’ve definitely experienced that in private practice and I’m sure many of our listeners, if they’ve been in practice for any meaningful amount of time, will have felt some shade of it. How did you know you were experiencing burnout when you did? | |
| FK: | Well I was in ICU for six weeks | |
| DT: | Wow. | |
| 00:15:37 | FK: | It wasn’t exactly burnout but I guess the story was, at the time, we had just launched both LawSwitch – which is a chatbot platform that we’ve now sold – and then FamilyProperty which is an expert system in family law for family lawyers. I was also continuing my work in Kirkman Family Law and doing some work at the College of Law and the Law Society in my Family Law Fundamentals course, so a lot of different hats, and I had young children. And I think the combination of just the stress of all of my different work experiences and my personal experiences. I actually had an autoimmune disease and I got meningitis. |
| DT: | Wow. | |
| FK: | And it just suddenly hit and I was taken off in an ambulance, ended up in ICU for six weeks and I was told at the time by the specialist that I may never work again… | |
| DT: | Oh my goodness. | |
| FK: | …and I may have brain damage. And that was a real wake up call and I guess for me it was; “do I choose to give in to this health crisis or do I fight it?”. And it was interesting because as a lawyer the doctors would come around on their rounds and I’d be; “here, Annexure A, I’ve completed this Sudoku puzzle. Annexure B, I’ve read a book today. See, I’m not going to have brain damage.” And when I was in hospital we actually found out that we had won the Legal Geek World Tour for our legal tech product and as part of that competition we’d won a trip to London and our specialist had said; “there’s no way you’ll be going.” And when somebody says to me there’s no way you’ll be doing X, Y and Z, I have to prove them wrong. So that was quite a good motivation to get well and three months later we were off on a plane to London stopping off at Singapore going to Ireland for three weeks to showcase our product over in London. So… but it was a real wake up call and I really had to fight to get well and really had to rely on family. And God willing I did get better. But I have had some ongoing health issues with autoimmune related flare ups. So I’ve just got to be careful and health always comes first. And so we do have to remember that as lawyers sometimes particularly with burnout we can get so stuck into our work but if we’re not looking after ourselves we’re no good for anyone. | |
| DT: | You were saying earlier that one of those skills in your sort of resilience toolkit to cultivate resilience is all of those good physical health habits, getting enough sleep, eating well, exercising and I suppose that story demonstrates what can happen in the reverse. When you’re feeling so much stress, when your resilience is really tested that can manifest physically. When someone’s feeling burnt out, I suppose if you’re admitted to hospital that’s going to be a fairly obvious sign of it, but do you think in hindsight there were some early warning signs that you might have missed? | |
| 00:18:53 | FK: | I think for me when I’m feeling very stressed and burnt out, the first thing that goes for me is the sleep. Having said that I’ve got children and even though they’re 12 and 10 now I don’t think I’ve slept through the night since they were born. So I still have that tendency to wake up. But I now do get back to sleep fairly easily. But I do know that if I’m going through a very stressful period, particularly with work, it’s very difficult for me to get back to sleep. And it’s that two o’clock wake up and it’s the action plan in your mind at two in the morning and that’s a sign for me, a red flag; “oh, I’m stressed.” And so that’s something I need to look at. And it’s also… I go into a bit of an overdrive mode, everyone responds differently to stress and I tend to delegate as much as I can. But then if people are themselves starting to feel stressed because of the work that I’m delegating, that’s something I’m aware of now as well. |
| DT: | Yeah that really sounds familiar to me. It sounds contradictory but when you’re feeling that level of burnout you start working more, kind of obsessively because you feel the stress to get through it and you just want to, I don’t have time to stop working I’ve just got to get through it… | |
| FK: | I’ve just got to get through this! | |
| DT: | …and then I’ll feel better. That’s definitely how I respond to that level of stress as well and of course you can see how that when you wake up at 2am to grab your laptop and fix something because you just thought of how you can solve that problem or you can’t get back to sleep until that’s off your to-do list, you can see how quickly that can affect you physically. What sort of strategies for managing burnout could you give to our listeners so that they don’t get to that point or if they’re at that point they can step away from it? | |
| FK: | I think it’s recognising when you are at that stress point. There’s good stress and there’s bad stress and there’s a very fine line between the good stress and the bad stress. And it’s really important to look at what’s your normal level of running. And for me people look at me and go; “oh how can you do all of this? Wearing this hat?”. But that’s how I am and how I’ve always been and I operate on a very high level of efficiency and getting a lot done in a day whether that’s work or my personal life. But when things change and when you’re seeing that you’re either not being productive or whether you’re just doing too much and you’re waking up as we said in the middle of the night. I think you need to come back and go; “what are my tools?”. Get back to basics, sleeping, eating, exercise, catching up with friends and having that balance. There’s no true work-life balance though – I think that’s a myth – but it’s just having a sufficient balance of work and life and fun as well. I’m a big believer in that; work hard, play hard. And having that time with family, I think having children grounds you in that respect that you can’t be working all the time, they want your attention and I think that helps. | |
| DT: | They’re good at giving you a bit of perspective that’s for sure. | |
| FK: | Definitely give you perspective and we love to travel. Now that COVID’s over, we’re planning lots of trips. | |
| 00:22:13 | DT: | I want to go back to that idea around work-life balance because I think it really depends on how you define that term. It’s often bandied about but we don’t really stop to describe what we mean when we say work-life balance. I think for some people it just means not working so much. For me it means having the flexibility to work as much as you need to and do everything else in your life as much as you need to. As a parent, I’ve got young children, there’s not a lot of personal time for me but work-life balance means being able to spend time with my children when I need to and work when I need to. And for me that might mean work-life balance is leaving the office a bit earlier to spend time with my kids so that I can work later in the evening. It doesn’t necessarily mean just not working as much but it’s interesting that we all have sort of a different definition of what that means. I think that can sometimes make it hard for us to achieve that work-life balance because we don’t really know what we’re talking about when we use that term. Now something I’m really interested to get into with you is the resilience challenge of change, especially change in your career, something that you’ve experienced a lot. As we said, wearing all of these different hats, going from practising in a small firm to starting your own firm, practising as a mediator, starting a legal tech business, selling that legal tech business, all of these changes in a career can be quite a challenge for resilience. Your sense of identity changes, there are new demands on your time, new routines to get into. What have you noticed from your own experience and as a mentor to other lawyers, what are some of the common challenges that lawyers face during a career pivot? |
| FK: | I think lawyers traditionally don’t like change. | |
| DT: | Fair enough. Yeah, fair statement. | |
| FK: | I personally do like change, hence the different hats and the different types of works I do. But it’s interesting the legal tech sphere, one of the biggest challenges to adoption of new technology is change management. Even if people are doing things in a very cumbersome, manual, traditional way, if that’s the way they’re used to, they often would prefer to do it that way than change to a new, better, more efficient way, which is quite interesting. But I think it’s our makeup as lawyers as well. We like to be good at what we do. And change, whether it’s a career change or a technology change, means that we’re not necessarily going to be good at it first time around or the new career pivot, etc. I would just encourage people to be willing to change, be willing to explore new things, whether that’s a career pivot or technology change and get in the sandbox and give it a go. And I think for lawyers, there’s also, and I know for me personally, that fear of failure, and we like to be good at what we do, but change in a career or change in technology, we may fail. And sometimes that’s okay. And I think for me, the failures that I’ve had in life have made me a better lawyer and a better legal tech entrepreneur, etc. And have taught me a lot. So I think we need to stop being so afraid of failure. | |
| DT: | I think there’s a reason why the kind of expert career path is such a common one in law, right? You continue to specialise and specialise because it’s kind of comfortable, right? You’re building on a foundation of knowledge. You know that with each sort of little accretion of specialisation that you’re already very proficient at what you’re going into. You’re building up and you’re not necessarily dropping down to that learner state, you’re not dropping down into that state where you’ve got to make mistakes and fail. And you can see why so many lawyers, and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it, but choose to specialise in an ever more granular way as their career goes on as a way of learning and growing because there’s less risk of getting it wrong, I guess. But I suppose you and I have both had that experience of going down a very different path, trying something very different in terms of business model, product, the skills required to succeed. And you do, you have to learn through failure. | |
| 00:26:36 | FK: | There was a lot I had to learn in a legal tech startup. And I like to have the certificate to say; “I’m qualified to do X, Y and Z”. But in the startup world, everything from the business, the marketing, the sales, the client success, which I didn’t even know there was a whole team of client success people, all of that was a big learning curve for me and some of it, like the marketing side of things, I loved. Others I’m like; “ooh, data doesn’t get me up in the morning but I know I have to love the data and love the metrics. So how can I learn to love this?”. And I think to work in a startup, legal tech world, I learned so much. And to bootstrap that company with my techie husband, it was an experience that I would never change. We were quite blessed though, to be able to sell FamilyProperty to Smokeball, which is a global practice management system based in Australia, US and soon to be UK. And to sell it at the peak was really quite a blessing. And to now be part of Smokeball as firstly, I was general manager of FamilyProperty and now I’m the Global Family Law Evangelist. But to be able to build out those relationships and really sell the benefits of the family law features of Smokeball and FamilyProperty, it’s just been a really exciting journey and a different journey to the traditional family lawyer path. So, I learned a lot, definitely. |
| DT: | Absolutely. And I want to go back to something you said, because it really rings true to me, this idea that when we start our careers in legal practice, we do get a certificate from the Supreme Court or whatever jurisdiction we’re in and then from a regulator that says, you’re allowed to do this, you passed the test, you are good enough at this to do it, but you’re safe to be unleashed on the public. But not many career paths actually have that level of regulation. I found that when I was learning to be a programmer, to be a software developer, there’s no software developers society of New South Wales that gives you your practising certificate, right? There’s no one who’s going to tell you that it’s safe for you to be unleashed on the public and let you adopt that identity as, you know, “well, I’m good enough to do this now.” It is, as you say, there’s a learning curve there. And you’ve kind of got to, I suppose, develop that skill set and be confident in yourself and have that level of self awareness that you were describing earlier, that you have those skills or that you’re cultivating them or that you’re learning them. I think that can be quite a challenge for lawyers making a career change because outside of practice, there’s not necessarily that external validation that comes from, well; “yes, you’re qualified to do this”. | |
| 00:29:29 | FK: | Richard Susskind, who talks about the future of law and he’s been in the artificial intelligence space, he talks about the skill set of lawyers for the future. And I think IQ and getting that certificate from your law school to say that you’ve passed your university degree is one thing and obviously important in our industry to have the IQ, but the other skills around the EQ, so that emotional intelligence, particularly if you’re working in a people related law field, like family law, and then the business skills of the marketing yourself, marketing your firm, discussing difficult issues around invoicing, all of those business skills, understanding your budgets and what you need to achieve, those business skills are really important. And I think increasingly the AI or the technology skills are really important as well. So I’m starting to talk about, in different fields that I’m working in, the importance of the winning formula of the IQ plus the EQ plus the AI plus the BX. I think it’s important for the next generation of lawyers and mediators to have that holistic approach to learning and what we offer our clients and our firms. |
| DT: | I suppose, as legal information is democratised, you know, that less and less is the identifier or the unique value that a lawyer provides, right? | |
| FK: | Yes, definitely. | |
| DT: | Increasingly, it’s the experience, it’s the connection between human experience and that information that makes us valuable, that ability to contextualise, that ability to pass, to understand, to interpret, that sets us apart from a tool that provides that information in an artificial intelligence powered or a programmatic way. It sounds like what you’re describing is that as those skills that are required change, it’s not just that career opportunities might present themselves, but actually what a career in the law looks like for many people will change just as a matter of course, that might not be avoidable. As you were saying before, lawyers don’t love change, but what are some of the skills that a lawyer might need to look at those challenges, those changes that are coming that might change the way we practice, whether you want to or not, to look at those as opportunities rather than as threats? | |
| 00:32:04 | FK: | I think it’s really important to continue to educate yourself as to where the market’s at and where the market is going. Things are changing rapidly and we noticed with COVID, for example, those law firms that were so focused on having paper files and working in person, they found it really difficult to pivot during COVID times, to have paperless files, to do Zoom meetings, etc. And legal technology products really thrived during that COVID period. I think for me, being a continuous learner is really important and looking at different opportunities that are available and not being so focused on this one career path. I know when I first started, I was like; “I work in a law firm, become an associate, become a senior associate, become a partner”. That was the traditional career path. But there’s a lot more in the career as a lawyer now. And I recently was involved with the College of Law Forage Project, which looked at NewLaw careers and providing virtual work experiences for people who are new to the law or people that want to have a career pivot. And it was a really good opportunity for them to understand, well, what other careers are available in the law, such as in legal technology, legal operations, legal research and knowledge and mediation. So I was part of the mediation work experience component and we had some tasks and it was small modules where they could test out what its like to be a mediator. If you’re not happy in your current career path, don’t necessarily just look at another job in the same sort of career path, because you’re likely to have the same problems. But look at experimenting in alternative career paths and give it a shot. What’s the worst that could happen? You won’t like it, you go back to what you did or do something different. Our time is limited and it’s important to do what you love. |
| DT: | And I suppose some people have the opposite problem, right? Where there are all of these opportunities now. And again, I think of our interview with Aden, there used to be a perception that you started in private practice, probably at a larger firm, and then you’d get very senior there and then you could go in house or become a partner or you’d go to the bar, I guess. And that was kind of the 3 options. | |
| FK: | Or start your own practice. | |
| DT: | Or start your own practice. Those are kind of the options. And now the options are kind of broader at every stage of your career. There are great options for in-house lawyers at a very early stage. You can start your career in the law in-house and have great training. You can kind of take those legal skills as a legal engineer in legal technology or in publishing or there’s a whole range of different opportunities and that can be paralysing. TIP: We’ve mentioned that episode with Aden a couple of times throughout this podcast. It’s episode 82 titled The Road Not Taken: Navigating the Early Stages of Legal Practice. We’ll leave a link to it in the show notes. So for someone who’s considering making that leap to pivot their career or go in a different path, how do they assess that opportunity? How do you choose the right opportunity for you? I suppose you had this sort of experience in deciding to take the leap with your legal tech ventures. How do you assess all of those options and make a good choice, I suppose, in a way that’s not going to add to that stress and really erode that resilience? | |
| 00:35:55 | FK: | Interesting question. I think for me, I’m not somebody who 10 years ago thought; “oh, in 10 years I’m going to start my legal tech product with my techie husband.” It’s something that the opportunity came up. It looked like a good opportunity. It was something new, something innovative. Let’s go down this path, see if it works. So I’m not perhaps as big a planner as some people, but what I would encourage people to do is look at, I guess, their goals, look at their personality. I’ve recently done some personality testing with a course that I’m doing and some careers will really fit with your personality and fit with your skill sets, others won’t. I know for me, when I started my career, it was an opportunity for litigation or transaction work. And for me, straightaway litigation. I wanted to work with people. I wanted to help with the resolution of disputes. I didn’t want to be doing the transactional contract work. So it’s understanding yourself and that self reflection on what you like and don’t like, what fits with your personality, but then also giving it a go. And there are some considerations, income as an example, if you’re deciding to start a legal tech product as a startup bootstrapping, that’s going to impact your income as opposed to being a senior associate in a large law firm. But I think if you find what you love doing and what you’re good at, the income will flow as well, that’s been my experience. And the most valuable thing is your time. And if you’re doing something that you’re not completely happy in or that doesn’t fit your skill set or personality, then I’d recommend to give something else a try. But speak to people in your network and speak to people who are your heroes or inspiration and those who have trodden that path and ask them, “what’s the day in the life of a mediator?” Because there’ll be ups and downs. Every job has those ups and downs. It’s not always going to be roses. |
| DT: | Yeah, absolutely. I guess having that kind of realistic perspective on… | |
| FK: | Yes, definitely. | |
| DT: | … every job does have its ups and downs. And just going back to something you said there that time’s precious and, you know, if you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, look for an opportunity to change that. I think something I’d add there is, I think you need to be really conscious of the extent to which it needs to change in that sometimes the change isn’t as dramatic as you might think it is. I can kind of candidly speak from experience here. I used to practice as a barrister. And at the time, I thought that this was the thing that I was working towards in my career. And once I made it to the bar and started practising at the bar, that was the be all and end all. And I found I really didn’t like it very much. It was kind of lonely. You got involved really at the end of matters where you had no ability to kind of influence the strategy. You’d get a brief and it’s going to trial in three weeks. And you think; “oh, I wish this had settled a year ago. I would have done this so differently”. And I found that I was really surprised at how unenjoyable I found it. And I started thinking; “well, I’ve got to get out of the law then. I’ve got to stop practising altogether. Maybe I shouldn’t be a lawyer because this is what I was working towards in my legal career and I don’t like it.” But when I took a step back from that, and again, you kind of need that network. You can’t do this on your own because you do spiral and get into that thinking of; “oh, well, I just need to leave the law completely.” I was able to see that, well, no, maybe it was actually just that I needed to practice as a solicitor again. Maybe having that closer relationship with the client, being involved earlier, working with a team, having that greater scope to set a strategy at an early stage, that was what I was missing. And so I went back to practising as a solicitor. And what do you know, I enjoyed practising again. And so I think sometimes when we’re unhappy in work and we’re facing those challenges in our resilience, we have a really strong desire to make a dramatic change, right? I want to go and be a graphic designer instead. I want to go back to school and become a vet, right? I’m sick of the law completely. But we can make more subtle changes in the way that we work or the place that we work or the tools and habits in our practice that can actually make a really profound difference to how we experience work. | |
| 00:40:18 | FK: | In law, there’s so many transferable skills. Somebody once said to me that law is the new Arts degree for intelligent people. So you do the Law degree and there’s so many skills we learn that don’t necessarily just have to be used in the traditional lawyer path. |
| DT: | I agree completely. I think the stats are now that something like 45% of law graduates practice. It’s a very popular skill set in the public service, certainly. I think some people see it as a useful management skill in the corporate world as well. So there are a lot of opportunities outside of practice. But for those of us who have chosen to practice, being unhappy in the role that you have in practice doesn’t necessarily mean having to leave altogether. | |
| FK: | Yes, definitely. | |
| DT: | I suppose it’s important to look at those opportunities to find why you were enjoying work before. | |
| FK: | Yes. And what’s your why? What gets you up in the morning and what really motivates you? And that might be changing the law firm culture that you’re in, it may not be the right fit and it may not mean that you have to leave the law completely or even change to a NewLaw or alternative law career. Particularly if you’re a new graduate, it’s important to maybe experiment and find the right place for you because there is one. | |
| DT: | Absolutely. Speaking of new law graduates and law students, we talked about a lot of different topics in our interview today. We’ve talked about the way legal technology is going to force some career changes and create some opportunities for career changes, how we can manage the impact on our resilience that comes with those career changes. We’ve talked about burnout, vicarious trauma. But when we talk about all of these kind of traumas and stresses and the burden on your resilience and mental health that comes from practising, that sounds quite scary to law students and new graduates. I remember thinking in law school; “geez, what am I getting into here?” | |
| FK: | It’s the reality of law. | |
| DT: | Yeah, you know, the second highest rate of depression after dentists, you know, in law, you know, it’s a tough gig. For those of our listeners who are law students, who are recent graduates, who are kind of wondering what they’ve gotten themselves into now that we’ve talked about all of this, what sort of tip would you give them for having a healthy, resilient relationship with their career in the law? | |
| 00:42:35 | FK: | There’s a lot of benefits of being a lawyer and we’ve talked about the negatives a bit today, but we can do a lot of good. And if you’re working in a people area of law, I really get joy myself in seeing families being able to resolve their disputes amicably and efficiently through dispute resolution and through using legal technology to make things more time and cost effective. So I think it’s looking at what drives you and making sure that you’re doing something you’re passionate about is really important to me. And I think it’s a bit cliche, but for me, I’ve got that access to justice heart. And as a lawyer, you can provide that access to justice and really help people in their time of need. And if you’re motivated by that, there’s a lot of reward in law. |
| DT: | I think that’s a great tip to leave our listeners with. It really is about coming back to that why you’re doing this, why you’re in the profession, whether it’s to help people in a difficult time in their lives, to be that officer of the court, uphold the rule of law and the administration of justice and all that good stuff, to provide access to justice for people who don’t have it. Those are noble goals and I think keeping those in sight can help us get through the tough times and also help us identify when we may be not going down the right path in our careers. | |
| FK: | Definitely. | |
| DT: | And for those of our listeners who are interested in learning a bit more about the Smokeball Practice Management System or FamilyProperty, we’ll include links to both of those websites in the show notes. | |
| FK: | Thanks so much and feel free to reach out and I’d love to speak to you. | |
| DT: | Well, Fiona, thank you so much for joining me today on Hearsay. | |
| FK: | Thank you, David. | |
| 00:44:35 | RD: | As always, you’ve been listening to Hearsay the Legal Podcast. I’d like to thank today’s guest, Fiona Kirkman, for being a part of it. As you well know, if you’re an Australian legal practitioner, you can claim one Continuing Professional Development point for listening to this episode. Whether an activity entitles you to claim a CPD unit is self-assessed, but we suggest this episode entitles you to claim a professional skills unit. More information on claiming and tracking your points on Hearsay can be found on our website. Hearsay the Legal Podcast is, as always, brought to you by Lext Australia, a legal innovation company that makes the law easier to access and easier to practice, and that includes your CPD. Hearsay is recorded on the lands of the Gadigal People of the Eora nation and we would like to pay our respects to elders past and present. Thanks for listening and see you all on the next episode of Hearsay! |
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