You don't hate being a lawyer. You hate the way you're doing it. Erin Gerner spent years believing she had to choose between being a lawyer and being herself, and this conversation is about everything she found on the other side of that lie.
Erin excelled at the path everyone told her to want. Top of her class, then big law, then physically sick before work every morning. When the 2008 crash ended her firm job and a premature baby changed her whole world, she walked away from the law entirely, and ran straight into a question she couldn't answer: who is Erin if she's not a lawyer? What she rebuilt from there, the creativity and community and coaching that law had buried, eventually led her back to practice, this time on her own terms. If you have ever wondered whether you're in the wrong career or just doing it the wrong way, this one is for you.
In this episode:
- Why "I don't want any of this" in big law was information, not weakness
- The identity crisis almost no one warns you about when you step back from the law
- Why the answer is usually not burning it all down, but small, simple changes
- How Erin built a coaching practice (and a full cohort) before she had a program
- What it took to come back to practice after a decade away, and quiet the self-doubt
- Why "and" might be the most important word a lawyer can learn
00:00 Two beach-loving, "yay"-saying lawyers find each other
04:47 Becoming a digital nomad: "we just did it"
09:47 Why she went to law school, and following the path
12:10 Big law, and being physically sick before work
15:36 "Everyone else seemed fine," and why that's a lie
18:00 A baby born seven weeks early changes everything
20:29 The identity crisis: who is Erin without the law?
24:23 Rediscovering the parts the law had sucked out
28:02 Doing it messy and scared
30:20 "Why are you not helping lawyers?"
32:16 Forty women in the DMs, and no program yet
38:33 You don't hate law, you hate how you're doing it
43:57 What success actually means now
45:29 Going back to practice, on her own terms
49:54 Coaching baby-lawyer Erin through the self-doubt
55:44 The one lesson: the power of "and"
About Erin Gerner: Erin is a lawyer, coach, and host of the Powerhouse Lawyers podcast. She helps women lawyers redefine success and design careers and lives that actually fit them, and recently returned to practice under a firm model built for entrepreneurial attorneys and those who are looking to build their practices on their own terms.
Links: Website https://www.eringerner.com/ |LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-gerner/ | Powerhouse Lawyers on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/powerhouse-lawyers/id1686603658 | Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0KpzrGa6PkI7U2HKwpPSQq
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