how i moved to melbourne part 2

Well, I don't know that I am necessarily more contemplative (being the "action person" that I am, contemplation does not come naturally), but I don't want the story to be lost in time and busyness. So here is the second instalment (which is really the first instalment because I did not really say anything in my first instalment)!

This move has been a long time in the making. Looking back now, I see that seeds have been sown over the course of the last, say, 6 years.

Possibly the first seed was sown back in 2001 when I backpacked around Europe for 6 weeks with a friend. As you would expect, my horizons were expanded and for the first time I asked myself, "Self, do you want to move to London as some of your friends are doing right now?" And the answer was a resounding "No!" I found London to be fab to visit but too crowded and claustrophobic to make a life in. But the important thing was the asking of the question.

Then over the next few years friends moved away, to places like London, Tokyo, Melbourne and Sydney. Another seed.

Then in January 2006, a big seed. After an extended period of workaholism, I needed to have a break from work and decided to get out of Adelaide for a bit. Without a lost of cash, my options were limited. So I visited Melbourne for 5 days. I stayed with some friends who worked, which meant that I had the days free to explore Melbourne. And that I did. Despite it being January, the weather was a little on the average side, so my exploration included a LOT of coffee places. To give you an indication of the number of coffee places I went to, and the amount of time spent in those coffee places, lets just say that I read most of War and Peace in Melbourne those 5 days. But I did manage to spend time in the City, Fed Square, Carlton, Richmond and St Kilda. I went to restaurants, I shopped, I saw live jazz and I spent time with some friends who lived in Melbourne. I had a great time.

Not long after that I decided to start looking for another job. July 2006 marked my 8 year anniversary with the law firm I was working in, and some cracks had begun appearing in my "perfect" job. While I worked with some lovely and talented people, had access to fantastic clients, was given challenging work and had spent a very happy 8 years with a firm who had treated me well, the requirements of the job were evolving into something that, to be honest, I did not want to spend the rest of my life doing. It was make or break time.

There were two choices before me if I wanted to stay at that firm. The first was to make enormous sacrifices to become partner. To achieve this would require me to spend some of my precious evenings and weekends at client functions and relationship building events. It would require me to "put myself out there" and market myself to a large business community full of people I did not know. It would require large amounts of effort in marketing and business development, with the reward so tiny compared to the amount of time sacrificed. And yet that reward was precisely the thing on which my success in that career would hinge. And it would not end once I made partner. I tried it for a while, and to be honest the strain on my time and the worry over whether I would make it took too much of a toll on me. I knew that long term I would end up a stressed and unhappy person. It just was not natural, it just wasn't ME.

The second choice was to stay at the same level, as a "career Senior Associate". While in principle I think that this is a great option, for me it just didn't sit right. I wanted to still be growing and evolving as a lawyer, so this didn't seem to be the right thing for me. It seemed like I would end up in a rut if I ignored that desire that I have to grow and learn.

So, as both options had little appeal, a new job was the order of the day. As law firms are all similar in nature, and I believed I was working for the best firm in Adelaide, it seemed to me that moving to another firm would not fix the problem.

That left inhouse positions. For those non-lawyers among us, inhouse lawyers work for a company rather than a law firm (ie, one client instead of many). Why would that be different? Well, the inhouse lawyer does not need to do all that marketing to bring in new companies as clients. The inhouse lawyer works with the other people in the company to provide legal assistance and solutions, and gets an opportunity to really know the business and to develop good relationships with the business people in the company. And there is plenty of work to do, pretty much all the time. There is no need to go out and hunt it down.

The idea of going inhouse appealed to me immensely. I had always loved the clients that I did a lot of work for, as I got to know the people really well. Once I get over the hurdle of initially meeting someone, I am good at building relationships with them. That is the main quality that I could see would make me more suitable to being an inhouse lawyer than a firm lawyer. Also I loved the idea of having a lot of work to do, without having to scrounge it up.

to be continued...