The media portrays the life of attorneys as being fabulous but in reality, there are many things that can and do go wrong. Daniel DeKoter, highly experienced attorney servicing the residents of Iowa and Osceola County, discuss the common challenges that should be understood by anyone aspiring to become a legal professional. They are listed below.
Conflicting Priorities – Home Versus Work
All practice areas require some sort of sacrifice when you are an attorney. The real estate lawyers rarely get the possibility of having a vacation during summer while family lawyers tend to lose months as they get ready for hearings. A business lawyer can always work 24-hour shifts in order to close deals that have tight deadlines and if you run a law firm, you never know when you have to work.
For many lawyers juggling work and family life is really difficult. This is why most of the lawyers are not married. Climbing the ladders at a law firm is stressful and time for personal life is often not available.
Running The Law Practice And The Business
Sole firm partners and practitioners will juggle the practice and the business side of running the agency. You basically need to be sure that the firm is running well. That includes budgeting, networking, marketing and even human resources. Obviously, you can always delegate but the simple fact that you run a business can easily lead to huge problems in actually running the law practice.
When you juggle both clients and the business at the same time, problems can appear, simply because of a lack of time. You are forced into going to events that you would rather miss and have to deal with many other tasks that have nothing to do with representing your clients. You basically have problems in being a lawyer and a businessman at the same time.
Addiction
A firm culture can enable the addictive personality to be engaged in behaviors that are damaging. For instance, your clients may want to celebrate their wins in an extravagant way, all while expecting the lawyers to be a part of celebrations. Then, there are networking lunches you have to drink at. Various drinking opportunities exist when you work as an attorney so that can quickly turn into a problem for some people. If stress is high and you go through damaging behaviors, it is easy to become addicted to drugs, gambling, alcohol or others.
Errors Take A Toll On You
The last important thing mentioned by Daniel DeKoter is that in the profession, professionalism is a really common trait. This can easily lead to a fear that mistakes can cost money, clients can lose child custody and go to jail. At first view, this is just a part of the job but in time this can easily have a strong toll on the attorney. Clients need to have strong attorneys and for an attorney it is not as simple as it seems to remain objective and not affected by feelings at all times. Combine this with high stress and lack of vacation days and it is really easy to understand why so many lawyers end up depressed.
2018 · 
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