Lawyers who leave

Dissatisfaction among lawyers is growing, and a surprising number are fleeing the profession.

[Times photo: John Pendygraft] "I'm just extemely happy," says Brenda Taylor about her job as a flight attendant.

By SCOTT BARANCIK

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 3, 2000

Brenda Taylor argued cases before the Florida Supreme Court. She withstood threats from a murderer. And she kept convicted criminals behind bars.

So what's the former prosecutor doing these days? She's a flight attendant at Delta Air Lines.

"I got to the point where if I had to write another appellate brief, I would just throw up," Taylor, 39, said.

Now in her fourth year at Delta, the Temple Terrace native is making $30,000, about $10,000 less than she made at the Attorney General's Office and easily $50,000 less than she would be pulling in if she had joined a law firm.

But her airline job comes with some tempting fringe benefits: 15 or 16 days off a month, and free travel for her and her parents almost anywhere.

"I'm just extremely happy," she said.

Dissatisfaction among lawyers is mounting. Today's lawyers face longer hours, shorter tempers, less mentoring and more public disdain. And while some continue to love the law, a survey by the Florida Bar last year found that 70 percent were working 50 or more hours a week and 45 percent were feeling "great stress."

Rudeness, aggression, grueling hours and social deprivation come with the territory. The hazing in law school becomes a sort of badge of honor.

[Times photo: Jill Sagers] Debra Schrils is living her dream of being a television meteorologist.

But many are getting fed up, and a surprising number are fleeing law altogether.

"Americans don't work for money alone," said M. Diane Vogt, a Tampa lawyer and co-author of Keeping Good Lawyers: Best Practices to Create Career Satisfaction.

Among the ranks of ex-lawyers in the Tampa Bay area are a triathlete, a bookstore owner, a TV meteorologist, a Web entrepreneur and a half-dozen clergy.

"I thought the law would be exciting," said Debra Schrils, 38, a former partner at Shackleford, Farrior, Stallings & Evans in Tampa and now a weekend weather forecaster on WFLA-Ch. 8. "When you think of being a lawyer, you think of all the things you see on TV. You think of being in the library and finding the one piece of evidence that's going to win your case. And unfortunately, the reality of it is you're sitting in a musty, warm library all day, looking through books and researching and copying files and arguing with opposing counsel about discovery dates and stupid little petty things."

Strong words, particularly from a recent president of the Hillsborough County Bar Association's young lawyers' division.

Not all those who have left the profession are so disenchanted. Some say they enjoyed practicing but were drawn away by other passions too strong to ignore, such as an assistant state attorney in St. Petersburg who quit to open a wholesale seafood business. But many lawyers are bitter.

"In my first 10 years of practice, I probably never had a lawyer lie to me. But there's been an erosion of values," said Michael J. Cohen. His nonprofit group, Florida Lawyers Assistance, helps lawyers cope with psychological problems and substance abuse.

"I thank God every day that I don't have to practice anymore."

***

As president-elect of the American Bar Association, Martha W. Barnett is poised to be the legal profession's No. 1 booster. You wouldn't necessarily know that from her May 6 commencement speech at Stetson University College of Law in St. Petersburg.

By 2020, she told the audience, the top starting salary for first-year associates at law firms will be about $270,000.

"But don't get too excited," said Barnett, a partner with Holland & Knight in Tallahassee. "If things go as predicted, there won't be any time to spend that money on play, as the profession is likely to become an intensified version of its current workaholic self."

It doesn't take binoculars to see where the legal profession is going. Just take the current trends -- longer hours, lower morale, larger and more impersonal firms -- and multiply.

Already, a lot has changed. Twenty years ago, fresh-faced associates such as Vogt, the Tampa author and retention consultant, were considered apprentices. Minimum billing requirements? Forget about it. At the same time, associates were willing to put in years of hard work to become partners. Partnership meant prestige, shorter hours, earlier tee times, a slice of their firm's profits and other gilded perks that came with seniority.

But partnership is no longer a universally coveted plum. And loyalty, once a two-way street, is now a dead-end.

Law firms are becoming pickier about who they choose as partners. Quite a few have boosted the number of years an associate must work before being considered. On the flip side, 44 percent of newly minted Florida lawyers who were hired between 1988 and 1996 left their first firm within three years, according to a Florida Bar study.

The bustling economy is at least partly responsible. High-tech start-ups and the Internet have tempted college grads away from legal careers and created a bidding war for those who do pursue law. To cope with the higher labor costs, some law firms are merging, and many have forced lawyers to work longer hours.

Both trends are causing some lawyers to rethink their career. In fact, the number of lawyers deemed "inactive" or "lapsed" by the Florida Bar has increased 32 percent since 1996, to 8,217. That's nearly triple the growth rate of "active" members.

***

After passing the Florida Bar exam on his first try in 1993, Peter Kageyama joined a St. Petersburg firm and began practicing family law.

He lasted two years.

"You see people at their absolute worst," said Kageyama, 35, chairman and chief executive of Cyberscapes Interactive in Tampa. "They're spending hundreds of dollars an hour fighting over lamps, dogs or worse, over something meaningful, like their kids. . . . You do a great job for a client, they still end up hating you."

In one particularly loathsome divorce case, he said, "The one thing the ex-husband and the wife could agree on was that neither one wanted custody of the teenage kid. So basically, I'm thinking my client is a total piece of s- -- -, and I had to go represent her."

That meant going before the juvenile court and asking the judge to take the child, then about 15 years old. "I did it," he said, "and the kid ended up becoming a ward of the state."

Kageyama's way out was to become an entrepreneur. In 1995, the Akron, Ohio, native and two friends decided to form a Web development company. Today, Cyberscapes Interactive is a 13-person operation with clients including Outback Steakhouse Inc. and CBS SportsLine and projected revenue this year of $1-million. Kageyama also sits on the board of the Tampa Bay Partnership, a non-profit economic development group.

"I think back to my days as a lawyer and the closest I could get back then to Outback Steakhouse and (chief executive) Chris Sullivan was to sue them," he said. "We're actually building things now."

Despite his antipathy toward the law, Kageyama refuses to give up his hard-earned license to practice.

"Occasionally, you pull out your "esquire' when somebody is jerking you around," he said. "Unfortunately, in our society being a lawyer is like saying, "I have a loaded gun.' It's an implied threat."

Laura Drake makes Kageyama sound like a cheerleader for the profession.

A triathlete from St. Petersburg, Drake breezed through Tampa Prep and the University of South Florida by age 19 but was unsure about a career. Following her accountant father's footsteps was out of the question; she nearly failed the subject.

"I have an analytical mind, I can be very diplomatic and I enjoy an intellectual challenge," Drake, 31, said. "All those things kind of pointed toward law."

Or so she thought. Her three years at law school were the worst of her life.

"These were not the most intelligent people in the world. They were just the sneakiest," Drake said of her classmates. Sometimes, she said, a law school professor would assign a particular case, then a student would cut the relevant pages out of the library's books to keep classmates in the dark.

"You could see the razor marks," she recalled.

After passing the bar, Drake got a job with the city of St. Petersburg's employment discrimination office. The 40-hour schedule left the lifelong athlete time for her true passion: training for Ironman triathlons, which combine a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bicycle ride and a 26.2-mile run.

By her third year on the job, the desire to compete full time consumed her. She began saving money and moved to Atlanta a year later, where the hills and nearby Appalachian Trail provided an excellent training ground.

Last year, Drake was the second-ranked amateur triathlete in the United States among women 30 to 34. She said she has no regrets about quitting the law.

Still, she admits money has been a problem.

"Even if you win the freakin' race, you might come home with only $3,500" after expenses and taxes are taken out, said Drake, who works part time at a construction company.

Not all of her memories of practicing law are sour.

"My first case out of law school was my own divorce," she said. "I think I did quite well."

***

Joe Glymph took a bit longer to quit the law.

Glymph, 45, is pastor at the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, a 1,000-member congregation in Largo. Before that, he handled labor relations for a construction company, a job he took after graduating from the University of South Carolina's law school.

"Labor and employment work, in my naive mind, was "equal employment' kind of work," he said.

Not exactly. Instead, the South Carolina native found himself in the role of "company man." Though he says he didn't have much of a conscience back then, it wasn't always easy for him to represent management.

"There are times, like with wrongful termination or sexual discrimination, when you just know your people are stinking wrong," Glymph said.

About seven years into the job, Glymph began to think about a life in the church. At first he did nothing about it. But when a job offer elsewhere was revoked, leaving him and his pregnant wife without work, he decided to think about life "more broadly."

"That sounds valiant," he said, "but at the same time, I was shooting resumes out left and right."

Glymph and his wife agreed he should enroll at the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia, S.C., and see how it went. That was 1990. Four years later, he was ordained and then joined a church in Charleston. Last July, he took over the church in Largo.

Glymph said he couldn't have made the career switch without his pastor.

"I just walked in the door and said, "Bob, I don't know what in the world I'm doing.' He said, "I don't either, so come on in and let's talk.' "

Debra Schrils' epiphany came with spring rolls and a bowl of shrimp noodles.

"I was having lunch with my law school roommate, commiserating, and she said, "If you could do anything in the world with no restrictions, what would you do?' And I said, "That's easy, I'd do TV weather.' "

The Tampa native seemed an unlikely candidate for a career change. An honors graduate of the University of Florida law school, she was active in the Hillsborough County Bar and a partner at her Tampa firm. She had no television experience. Her meteorology training consisted of hours glued to the Weather Channel. And she was pregnant.

But for Schrils, practicing law had become confrontational, stressful and endless. Partnership didn't look so tempting.

She started night classes in meteorology at the University of South Florida. Because the school lacked a degree program, she began a study-at-home certification program with Mississippi State University, taking her exams at the National Weather Service.

By 1997, she was offered a job as an assignment editor at Bay News 9. She handed her resignation to her dumbfounded boss and took an 80 percent pay cut. Partners at the firm were supportive. A year ago, she landed the weekend weather gig at WFLA-Ch. 8 in Tampa.

"People come up to me and say, "You're my hero,' " she said.

- Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report.

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