Yeah, I think it’s definitely true that some lawyers feel trapped in their current career sometimes. Law is a pretty conservative profession and it’s pretty hard to find advice for non-traditional legal jobs. I myself felt this: it was a pretty big career risk to do an internship at FHI the summer after 2L.
(For context, summer after 2L is when most people work at the firm that eventually hires them right after law school. So, I would have had a much harder time finding a BigLaw job if the whole AGI policy thing didn’t work out. The fact that I worked public interest both summers would have been a serious signal to firms that I was more likely than average to leave BigLaw ASAP.)
I think EAs can hedge against this if they invest in maintaining ties to the EA community, avoiding sunk-cost and status quo biases, and careful career planning.
Yeah, I think it’s definitely true that some lawyers feel trapped in their current career sometimes. Law is a pretty conservative profession and it’s pretty hard to find advice for non-traditional legal jobs. I myself felt this: it was a pretty big career risk to do an internship at FHI the summer after 2L.
(For context, summer after 2L is when most people work at the firm that eventually hires them right after law school. So, I would have had a much harder time finding a BigLaw job if the whole AGI policy thing didn’t work out. The fact that I worked public interest both summers would have been a serious signal to firms that I was more likely than average to leave BigLaw ASAP.)
I think EAs can hedge against this if they invest in maintaining ties to the EA community, avoiding sunk-cost and status quo biases, and careful career planning.