I Prefer To Keep The Law Separate From My Personal Life

Work. Don’t get me started about work!

Some lawyers are fortunate to love everything about practicing law. These individuals immerse themselves in the law, discuss legal topics outside of work, subscribe to legal trade magazines, and genuinely seem most content when they surround themselves with the law in their personal lives.

I am not one of these people. I do not enjoy many things about the legal profession, and I definitely do not want to think about the law or my work during personal time. As a result, I often do not consume certain kinds of media or engage in some activities in the same way as other lawyers.

This manifests in many ways, and I am especially particular with the legal media I consume in my personal life. Although I spend several hours a day listening to podcasts, I rarely listen to podcasts about the legal profession. The only exception to this rule is Above the Law’s “Thinking Like a Lawyer” podcast, which only comes out once a week and is very entertaining. I do not subscribe to any law journals or other legal publication, and I only consume legal media that is light-hearted in nature like this very website. I have to deal with enough serious content in my day job.

I am also very deliberate with the legal shows and movies. It is difficult for me to get immersed in a legal drama that does not have at least some baseline of accuracy, since it is excruciating for me to view legal media that does not even try to be accurate about the legal profession. Accordingly, I had a hard time getting into “Suits” or “Goliath” since those shows were particularly unrealistic. However, shows like “Rake” or “Better Call Saul” definitely kept my interest since they involved themes other than merely legal subjects. Documentaries about legal subjects can also be boring because they remind me too much of work, and I definitely want to keep a work-life barrier when managing my personal time.

In a similar vein, I usually do not read legal books now like I did before I started practicing law. I was never into legal fiction (besides David Lat’s “Supreme Ambitions” which I truly enjoyed reading earlier in my career). However, I used to enjoy reading numerous legal nonfiction works before becoming a practicing attorney as well as earlier in my career. I haven’t been able to pick up a legal nonfiction book in years, in part because it is difficult to enjoy reading for pleasure and in part because I do not want the law to invade my private time. When I do pick up a book, I am much more likely to read popular fiction or nonfiction works that cover topics that do not involved the law.

My aversion to letting the law intrude on my personal time also impacts the friends I keep. I do not have any friends that I meet up with regularly who I worked with at any of the four law firms at which I worked before starting my own firm. I do have some lawyer friends from my time at various shops, but these friends are mostly counsel of co-defendants and adversaries that I stayed close with over the years. I can only think of a few times that I met up, outside of the office, with people I worked with, and most of the time, this was long after we stopped working at a shop. In 2018, I hosted a reunion for people who used to work at one particular law firm, but I doubt I’d be interested in organizing such an outing with people I still worked with.

When coworkers meet up outside of work, there is a tendency to discuss the workplace and the law even though it is not work hours. This is not pleasant for me, since I want to enjoy my personal time without think about my job. If other people make friends with coworkers, even when they are working at a given firm, let me know, perhaps I am the only one putting up walls. However, I prefer to just keep work friends and personal time completely separate so I can preserve the work-life balance.

All told, the legal profession can be a grind, and practicing law is usually not as fun as movies and television make it out to be. In order to preserve my work-life balance and experience as little stress as possible, I try not to let the law invade my personal time.

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothman.law.