You know what they say about us lawyers: we’re “risk averse”. Maybe you knew you wanted to be a lawyer since you were 8 years old, the day you held your own in an argument with your parents. Or maybe you are a little more like me and ended up in law school because you knew you wanted to do compelling work and law seemed like a safe career. I’ve observed that as a group, we lawyers seem to like excitement but carefully curated within the bounds of our own risk tolerance. I’ve recently been thinking about how this common personality characteristic can limit us when deciding our own career trajectories. Admittedly, my decision to go to law school was not well thought out. I was young, and with some pressure from my parents to continue studying, I thought it…

While efforts have been made to address the gender pay gap in many professions, more work and education is still needed to achieve parity. The gap that many lawyers experience is shared by other professionals, such as physicians.

Happy New Year everyone! We can’t think of a better way to honor the past than with our second LiL Round Up; a compilation of our top 5 Life in Law Blog posts from the past four months. Check out our full list of posts below:

Dear Out of My League: Know you are not alone in how you are feeling. I would hazard a guess that most articling students feel out of their league, at least some of the time. I know I did. It comes with the territory. We learn all sorts of valuable things in law school, but often we still arrive on our first day of articles feeling ill-equipped to tackle the assignments that come our way (let alone the other aspects of articling that we must navigate). I recall one of my very first assignments (as a fresh-faced summer articling student) was drafting an opinion letter for the managing partner. I will admit I was slightly terrified. As I worked on it there was one pesky thought playing on a loop in my head: I’m just a second-year law student, how…

I don’t know about you, but I have spent hours, if not days, of my professional life second guessing myself. It is hard not to when we have all these noises in our head influencing our belief in our capabilities. However, it is not just the noises in our head that are at play. There are concrete examples of biases and societal expectations that are continuing to oppress our development as lawyers and our confidence in the belief we deserve to stand on the front line too.