Why Changing Jobs Will Not Fix It: The Path to the Happy Lawyer with Paul Karvanis

Welcome to Studying Law Around the World. I'm Claudio Claus. In each episode, I talk with lawyers, law students, and professors from different parts of the world to talk about legal education, careers, and what the profession looks like in real life. We talk about the hard parts, the surprises, and the decisions that shaped their paths. Whether you're planning to study abroad, thinking about working in another legal system, or just curious about how law works around the world, this podcast is for you. Today I have the opportunity to have Paulo Cervantes as one of our guests in the show. He has an incredible story of someone who went to law school, went to big law, was an in-house lawyer, and then had a very interesting and intentional career shift. He wrote two books that are just incredible tools for lawyers who want to be happy and want to be successful. Thank you so much for making the time to come to the podcast this evening, Paulo. It's my privilege, Claudio. Thank you. I really appreciate you coming. Can you tell us a little more about yourself, about your journey, wanting to be a lawyer, going through law school, and then going through Bay Streets, and then becoming a coach and author. So law school was always my second choice because I never knew what my first choice was. So at some point we need to grow up and decide what we want to do. And both of my parents were lawyers. So I figured, well, I'll do what they do. They seem happy. Except I wasn't that happy. And then probably in about second year is when I started being unhappy. I don't know that I ever fully bounced back from there. I got happier and more miserable time to time, depending on other factors going on in my life. But I never really got to that level of happiness where I thought, OK, this is a thing that I'm going to make work over the long term. Amazing. Well, thank you. Thank you for sharing that. It's very exciting because I know that a lot of what you do these days is still very much related to law firms and in the lawyer space. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, of course. So I started in one of Canada's top firms on Bay Street. I went in-house at the Bay and then I went in-house at a Crown agency. And that whole journey spanned about 12 years. And for the latter half, a little less than half, I was also coaching. So for me, when we were pregnant with our first kid, I decided I was going to teach them about finances so that they had a strong financial base and never felt trapped. I was also going to teach them about taking risks. Hell, maybe they would be an entrepreneur. And I realized this had nothing to do with the kid. It had everything to do with me. I was trying to live vicariously through my kid that had not even been born yet. I did not even know the kid's sex yet and already it was happening. And so I realized at that point, OK, so me, my unfilled, unfulfilled lives will cost me my chance at being the father I want to be. So I need to do something about it. So that was probably the start of my sort of second professional life. And that led me towards coaching. I was actually doing coaching to test whether I wanted to be a therapist and I ended up liking it so much, I just stuck around and coaching. So the first part of my second phase was coaching predominantly professional, white collar professionals, helping them to be both happy and high performing at the same time. That's incredible. I learned here that as part of writing The Happy Lawyer, you interviewed over 100 lawyers. And then later to write your most recent book, The Successful Associate, you also interviewed about 50 leaders. I'm curious to hear a little more about, you know, this work, about the books you wrote and maybe even what patterns surprised you the most when you were going about doing these interviews and learning about what lawyers were doing. Totally. My hypothesis when I started was that all of the happy lawyers were passionate about the law and I hadn't been passionate about the law. So I was like, okay, this is the problem. This is why I'm not happy. I'm not passionate about the law. But I do this. I do all of these interviews and I find happy lawyers who are not passionate about the law. And I found unhappy lawyers who were passionate about the law. And so it made me step back and realize like, okay, maybe it's not as big a variable as I thought it was. It still matters, obviously, but how it plugs in, I need to get a more nuanced understanding of the formula in order to figure out how to actually leverage it for me. So that was my biggest surprise that I thought that was going to be a much bigger deal than it ended up being. Amazing. And I think that our listeners should go ahead, you know, and read the books to learn a little bit more about, you know, what are some of the main patterns and all of that. Can we have, you know, just one of the main points that you bring about? Yeah, I guess the absolute most important thing that if you never read the book that I hope that everyone who listens to this will take through. The happy lawyers all have a certain level of self-awareness. I asked them questions, they had answers. They thought about it before. Were they, did they know everything? No, absolutely not. But they did their best to understand things for themselves and their lives, which makes sense because when I say the happy lawyer, I don't mean the one that's sitting in the emotion of happy because emotions come and go. And so if you have, if you're trying to hold on to the feeling of your team winning the championship, your country winning the world cup, like that feeling only lasts for as long as it lasts and then it's gone. And so if that's how you're judging the success of your life, you're going to fail. So that wasn't the, the North star that I used for the project. What I used was your good life well lived. And so Claudio, your good life well lived will look different than my good life well lived. So this is one of the reasons self-awareness is so important. You've got to realize what it looks like for you, for your good life. So that's, that's piece one. Piece two is you got to take action. Okay. People who are just self-aware and take no action are generally stuck and people who feel stuck generally, I've found one exception, but they are generally not happy. So what happens is you are aware and then you let your awareness inform the action you're going to take. And then all of a sudden that action now becomes intentional action. And then the intentional action informs your self-awareness. This is how the happy lawyers got happy. They leaned into some self-awareness. It took a step. It did not need to be a big one. And then they used that step to learn something more, which then informed their next step. It was a cycle. You reflect, you take a step and you do it all again. So if people take nothing else from the book or any of my work, that is the most important thing that you reflect, you take a step and you do it all again. And I have faith you'll get there. Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. As we dive into a little bit more of these details, studying law around the world as a podcast is, you know, meant to be a tool also for lawyers who are building careers across the globe. And I do think that many of these points really do apply regardless of the jurisdiction and even outside of the legal careers, really. But a lot of the lawyers, junior lawyers, early career professionals that I get the opportunity to interact with, they bring up some repeat concerns. What are some of the unspoken expectations in law firms that young lawyers often misunderstand in your experience? I'd say the most important one. I don't know if it's the most misunderstood one, but it is the most important one. So I'll start here. Is that there, if you think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, there is similarly a hierarchy of success. Okay. And so I interviewed people at firms all across North America. So I can't necessarily comment outside of Canada and the US, but I spoke to, you know, big M law 10 firms all the way down to small boutiques and everywhere in between. Across all of those firms, the base of your hierarchy of success are two things, quality work and reliability. If you cannot do quality work reliably, nothing else matters. Nothing else matters. Yes. You might be taking great ownership. You might have lots of friends. You might do this. You might have that. But if people can't rely on you to do the work you need to do, then none of the other shit matters. It's not going to work out for you in the long term. So I think that sometimes people don't realize and they try to do everything at once in a way that then undermines their ability to do their work with quality. And sometimes people attack it from the other side of the spectrum where they just only focus on doing quality work reliably. But the reality is that it's a prerequisite for success. It's not sufficient for success. And so doing your quality work reliably is table stakes, which the term comes from poker. That's what you need to have just to sit at the table. Once you're at the table, there's other things that matter too. But you need to be able to do quality work reliably. And quality work is going to depend on your specific practice area, the types of clients you have, et cetera, et cetera. So it is nuanced, right? It's not like there's one standard of quality work. Reliability is a little less nuanced. You do what you say you're going to do when you say you're going to do it. And in the rare cases where you need to not do that, you are managing that proactively and with plenty of advance notice. I love it. Interesting. In your view, what is the difference between, you know, also this healthy ambition of, you know, being a high performer and then maybe that kind of ambition that maybe slowly leads people towards burnout and towards unhappiness? I love ambition. I think it's great. So it's really interesting you use the term healthy ambition because I don't even know that I would normally put the healthy qualifier in front of it. I think ambition is great. I think that we also need to be careful about understanding what fulfilling our ambition will cost us, right? And so understanding that there's actually multiple variables here at play and that if you sacrifice all of some of your resources for a singular one, well, it better be worth it. I think one of the reasons though that I love ambition, apart from the fact that it feels great to, you know, work towards something, to climb that mountain, is because in a way it's almost the overlap between my two bodies of work. So when I did the happy lawyer, we already talked about reflect, take a step, do it all again. That's how they got happy. But then there were other patterns, right? That doesn't tell you what they actually did. So the other patterns were other things that happy lawyers had in common that the unhappy ones, well, they had some of the ingredients, but not all of them. In the same way that if you're cooking in the kitchen and you're trying to bake a cake, it needs all the ingredients that are on the recipe. Because if you're missing a specific ingredient, it might not work. It might not rise or it might rise, but it might not be sweet or whatever, right? And so it's the same thing with happiness. You need all of the ingredients. Now depending on the specific person you are and the life you're building, you're going to use different amounts of each of the ingredients. But the reason I bring it up is that one of those ingredients was the pursuit of excellence. That the happy lawyers were constantly trying to get better. And the way that I drew it out, I wasn't thinking about it in terms of a triangle hierarchy at the time. I just put the, decided you work outside all the way in. The pursuit of excellence ended up being smack dab in the middle of the model. And so I just found it so interesting that, look, I did all of this work to try and figure out what made some lawyers happy when other ones weren't. And the pursuit of excellence ended up being in the middle. So to me, it was more of a very strong suggestion that maybe that was more important than I was giving it credit for. And in the second project, the second book, The Successful Associate, I mean, quality work is one of the table stakes. And so the other thing actually, when you think about the best first year associate that you know, the best one you've ever worked with or been, if that lawyer did not get any better, they'd make a pretty shitty fourth year and they'd make an absolutely terrible 10th year. So it turns out we expect people to be getting better. Our expectations go up over time. And so if you, the most important variable for your success in your career is not actually how good you are at the start, it's how good you are at improving. And so I call this the improvement imperative because it is an imperative that you must improve. And so that actually is the overlap with this pursuit of excellence, because that's how you improve. Like you pursue it, you work at it. And so when people talk about ambition, I'm like, ambition's great. Ambition is going to drive your success. Ambition is going to drive your happiness. The problem is when people over index on it and they spend more of their life resources, right? Like we have time, energy, money, goodwill. We've got resources as individuals. And the problem is that when people spend more than they want to on their ambition, and sometimes what can cause the disconnect is when the ambition, I've heard, what was the author? Her name's escaping me, but she talked about like true goals and shadow goals. So like if you love soccer and it's coming to mind, because my kids play soccer because the world's cup is coming up soon. If you play soccer and you want to be the best soccer player in the world because you love the game versus you want to be the best soccer player in the world because your dad loves the game. And when you excel at soccer is one of the few times he pays attention to you. So you're constantly thinking about it and like, oh, this is a need because if you don't get it, then you're not going to get the love you need. You're not going to have the worth, et cetera, et cetera. It's the same goal on the outside and on the inside, it feels completely different. So I would distinguish healthy ambition from unhealthy ambition, not from what the ambition is on the outside, but from the motivation behind it on the inside, how it's feeling, if that makes sense. It absolutely does. I appreciate you bringing this perspective. It's really so enriching to be, you know, in this seat of getting to learn so much from different professionals. I saw one of your recent posts that you mentioned something about, you know, sometimes there's some feedback that is unsaid when it comes to environment. Sometimes it can be hard to actually understand it without getting too much on your head or maybe assuming too much of what wasn't said. And I do know that this is something that is very country specific as well, right? We have cultures that are very context dependent that don't say much, but express a lot in what's not said. Other cultures are very direct and say everything. I find that the Canadian legal market is in an interesting intersection where things are not said. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, how can young lawyers and professionals become better at recognizing that feedback that maybe is not being communicated explicitly? Yeah, I would agree with you that it, to me, it feels like Canada sort of straddles those two extremes that it really depends on who you're working with and what their style is. Like I was blessed to have a very nice roommate in university who was totally clueless. And so I could not get away with having anything unsaid. Like if I wanted something, I had to ask for it directly. Hey dude, can you turn out the lights? Because I'm trying to sleep. Hey, can we do this? Whatever. It just, and I realized he wasn't insulted when I asked him. And so it really just allowed me to see from a very young age that like feedback and being clear and direct can actually, like, it doesn't need to be insulting. It doesn't need to be a problem. So I've probably trended a little more on the clear feedback side. But even I still have, you know, norms and I'd said things back when I was in practice. As you say, it's very context specific. So the better you understand the context, the better you're going to see what's a little bit different. How has it changed? What's this? What's that? You're going to, you're going to understand the nuance and get to tease it apart and read what might be pushing it in a direction versus another, right? So understanding context is going to help. Trying to see the indirect feedback is going to help, right? Like understanding that it even exists. Step one, trying to find it. Step two, all set against the backdrop of understanding the context, which is step three. A good step four is having a mentor or even just a friend who understands the context and the players and can give you a less biased point of view is going to help. I do think you made a really good point in your question, which is how much can we do this without going crazy, right? If we constantly are looking for, if we're trying to read into everything, we're going to drive ourselves mental. So you've got to do your best and then you've got to let go because the, after you do your best, the incremental gains that you make from that point onward are not going to be worth the cost to your resourcing. Better to just take the energy you would have spent in trying to read into things and instead spend it on pursuing excellence. That'll serve you way better. So in other words, it's a balance. Try and hit the big things. Do the 80 20 rule. Try and spend the 20% of your effort. That's going to give you the 80% of the results and then take the other 80% of effort and spend it on something else that's important to you. Very interesting. And Paul, building on everything that we said so far, you know, you've worked in very different environments in private practice, in-house, public sector. Looking back now, are there a few things from each environment that you feel like that they shape your understanding of leadership, success, happiness? Are there things that you see differently because you've navigated so many different types of practice and maybe even because you were able to talk with so many lawyers practicing in so many different ways? I'm sure. I also think like one of the things that helps is when I interview the senior lawyers and people are telling me they're not worried about hurting my feelings. And so they, I get like this unvarnished truth, which then helps me understand how law firms work like behind the scenes and how the money works and this and that. And like ultimately they're all businesses. So the money is driving so much of what you end up seeing on the outside. And so I think that, yeah, I totally understand. Would, when a partner tells me she's our best first year, meanwhile, she's a fourth year, he would never say that to her, but he says it to me and I understand what's happened. That associate was a great first year, but then didn't level up. Right. And I don't know that she would get the exact same message because he might be worried about hurting her feelings, you know, or about being someone complaining about him if he's too harsh. Do you know what I mean? I'm sure that I see a lot that others don't see because of the breadth of my studies. You seem very focused on helping lawyers to build the careers that are intentional. You just said that it looks different for each different lawyer as well. If they're acting intentionally or if they're just, you know, reacting to pressure, you brought that wonderful concept of shadow goals and how maybe you're leaving the goals of other people, or maybe you're just replicating what, you know, you're comparing yourself to law school colleagues, other ones. What does a successful career actually mean to you today when you're trying to teach other people what that could mean for themselves? Yeah, I think a successful career is measured by whether you are happy and satisfied with your career and your whole life. That's it. It doesn't matter whether someone else is happy and satisfied with it. And it also doesn't matter whether you're happy and satisfied only with the career, but not with the rest of life. Like all of it to me, it's a package deal. I don't know if you've ever heard this expression, don't listen to criticism from someone that you would not ask for advice for, from. So don't take criticism from anyone who you would not take advice from and don't take advice from anyone whom you would not trade places with. So recognizing that we often only see snapshots and yet it's the big picture that really matters. And so you can't compare your life to someone else's snapshot, even though we all try to, or at least any one of us who spent time on social media tries to. So I think for a successful career, you got to look at it on your own. You can't have someone else give it to you. And I think too, like if I'm specifically talking to juniors, I've seen a lot of people fail because they are trying to build the sustainable before the successful. Like when you go into a firm and you're interviewing and you say, what's your work-life balance? For most senior people who hear that, they're like, man, this person is not actually interested in excelling in this role. They're interested in excelling in the rest of life. They are going to be a checklist person who comes in and wants a list for everything. They think that they're just like a cog in a machine. And it's like, well, you're not looking for cogs. I wouldn't want cogs to work for me, right? So just understanding that you will get balance, but you can't always look for it immediately off the bat. The other thing that's interesting is I've seen people get happier by being less in balance. That sometimes searching too intensely for balance is what precludes you finding it in the first place. I would just say, go out there, do your best, be nice to yourself. One final thing that occurred to me while we were chatting, and I want to just create space for it here. When we were chatting about my journey earlier, I think that I believed that I just needed to change something outside and that would make me happy. That was why I left my job at the firm. That was why I left my job in-house. That was why I left my job in the government and tried to start my own business. I kept looking for this outside life that was going to make me happy. And I was missing one of the most important ingredients for being happy, which is self-compassion. I rode myself like a demon and I was unhappy, even though everything else was amazing. So that was one of the critical ingredients. And that doesn't come from outside, right? And so I don't think I ever could have been happy in law then without developing that critical competency. I think if I were to restart, I think I could be a happy lawyer now, even though I had to leave the law before. Does that make sense? So I would just say for someone who's starting out, do your best. Find something that you feel like, you know, I can sink my teeth into this and try and get better at it. Be kind to yourself on the way. I love how simple and profound that is, Paul. I really appreciate you making the time to come on the show and share these wonderful thoughts. It's my privilege. Thank you all so much for tuning into today's episode and we'll see you on the next one.