Designing a Legal Career You Actually Want

A Design-Thinking Approach for Early-Career Lawyers

May/June 2026 By Nyssa P. Chopra

In their #1 New York Times bestseller, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life,1 Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans introduced a radical idea: you can apply the same design principles used to create breakthrough products to design a career and life you actually want. The book, which emerged from their wildly popular Stanford course, has sold over a million copies and helped countless people escape careers that don’t fit.

But what struck me when I first read it was that the methodology could perfectly apply to legal careers as well. It’s a helpful framework for all lawyers, but especially lawyers in their first five years of practice who are realizing that their first legal job might not be their forever job.

So, this is for those of you who landed a job that looked great on paper, but are now two, three, maybe four years (and beyond) into practice, and something feels off.

Maybe you’re working 80-hour weeks on matters that don’t excite you. Maybe you look at the partners above you and can’t imagine yourself enjoying those set of demands. Or maybe everything looks fine—good firm, decent salary, respectable work—but you’re already burned out and wondering if you can do this for 30 more years.

What Burnett and Evans understand—and what no one tells you in law school—is that you can’t think your way into a better career. You have to design your way there with intention.

Traditional career planning asks, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” Design thinking asks, “What experiments can I run to discover what works for me (and what doesn’t work)?”

Below, I’ve adapted the core principles from Designing Your Life specifically for early-career lawyers. The book offers broadly applicable frameworks, but the legal profession comes with its own challenges—and opportunities—for applying design thinking to our careers.

Why Early-Career Lawyers Struggle With Career Design

You’re trained to analyze, not to prototype. Law school taught you to spot issues, weigh precedent, and construct arguments. This makes you an excellent advocate, but a terrible career designer.

You treat career decisions like binding contracts with no escape clauses. You think in binary terms—stay at this firm or leave, pivot completely or stay the course forever. You wait until you’re absolutely certain before making a move, which means you hardly ever move at all.

And if you’re in your first few years of practice, you’re also dealing with specific pressures: the sunk cost fallacy (“I just spent $200K on law school”), the prestige trap (“What will people think if I leave?”), and the exhaustion factor (“I barely have time to do my work, much less redesign my career”).

But the question isn’t, “How do I justify the investment I’ve already made?” The question is, “Starting from where I am today, what do I want to build?”

Before you start designing, you should identify your “gravity problems.” In design thinking, a gravity problem is a situation you cannot change (like the fact that the sun sets or that big firms have billable-hours requirements). You don’t solve a gravity problem; you accept it as a reality of the terrain and design a way to navigate it. If your dissatisfaction stems from a gravity problem, the goal isn’t to fight the unchangeable, but to design a path—or a different environment—where that reality doesn’t hold you back.

Three Design Thinking Principles for Your First Five Years

Design thinking doesn’t ask you to have all the answers. It asks you to start where you are, stay curious, and keep moving. The three principles below are your framework—not a formula. Use them as lenses for examining where you are now, tools for imagining where you might go, and permission to test before you commit.

1. Reframe the Problem

Early-career lawyers often frame their dissatisfaction as “I hate litigation,” “I picked the wrong firm,” or “Maybe I’m not cut out for law.”

Design thinking teaches us to reframe the problem. The real problem might be “I need work where I see the direct impact of my contributions,” “I’m drained by adversarial relationships and energized by collaboration,” or “I love legal research but hate business development.”

Better problem definition leads to better solutions. “I hate my job” is too vague to solve. “I need a role with more mentorship and less solo document review” gives you something to work with.

Try this: Complete this sentence five different ways: “The problem I’m trying to solve in my career is . . .” Don’t edit yourself. Then ask, “Which of these problems can I actually solve right now?”

2. Generate Multiple Prototypes (The Odyssey Plans)

One of the most powerful exercises in Designing Your Life is the Odyssey Plan, where you map out three completely different five-year scenarios for your life.

For example, for early-career lawyers, this might look like:

• Plan 1: The Current Path Optimized. You stay at your firm but get intentional about your development. You request specific assignments, find a real mentor, and build skills that matter to you. What does your current path look like if you actually designed it instead of just survived it?
• Plan 2: The Lateral Move. You’re still practicing law, but you switch lanes. Maybe you move from litigation to transactional, Big Law to boutique, or firm to in-house. What could you do with your law degree that would feel like a fresh start without starting over?
• Plan 3: The Portfolio Career. You practice law part-time and do something else the rest of the time. Maybe you teach, write, consult, or build a side business. What would you do if you gave yourself permission to not be a full-time practicing lawyer?

When you create three plans, you stop treating your career as a single-path decision tree. You realize you have options. You notice which plans energize you and which ones feel like an obligation.

The key is to actually test these plans out. Talk them through with colleagues, mentors, or friends who are a few years ahead of you. Use those conversations to evaluate each path and refine your thinking.

3. Prototype Before You Commit

Designers don’t build the final product first. They build quick, cheap prototypes to test their assumptions. You can do the same with your career.

Think you might want to go in-house? Complete a client secondment or conduct an informational interview with an in-house lawyer who is willing to share what a typical day might look like. Curious about a different practice area? Take on a pro bono matter in that space. Wondering if you’d like teaching? Offer to present at a CLE.

Here are some low-risk experiments for early-career lawyers:

• Rotate through different practice groups if your firm allows it.
• Join a substantive bar committee in an area you’re curious about.
• Write an article or speak on a panel to test thought leadership.
• Propose a new project or initiative to see if you like building things.
• Attend an industry-specific conference and talk to people in that space.

The point is to run small experiments that generate information about what you actually want while keeping your current job.

Track Your Energy, Not Just Your Time

The “Good Time Journal” from Designing Your Life asks you to track your daily activities and note your engagement and energy levels. Are you fully absorbed or watching the clock? Are you energized or depleted?

For one week, keep a simple log. At the end of each day, write down what you worked on, your energy level (1–10), your engagement level (1–10), and whether you were fully absorbed or counting the hours. Or look at yesterday’s billing entries. Draw a plus (+) next to tasks that felt like “flow” and a minus (-) next to tasks that felt like “drudgery.” If your week is 90% minus signs, you aren’t “bad at law”—you’re just solving the wrong problem.

You might discover that you love taking depositions but hate document review. That client emails energize you while internal meetings drain you. That you’re most engaged when teaching junior associates or that legal research is where you lose track of time.

This data tells you what to optimize for, even within your current role. Can you get more of the high-energy work and less of the depleting work? Can you trade assignments with colleagues who have opposite preferences? Can you talk to your assigning partner about the kind of work you want?

Your energy is information. And in your first five years, when you’re still figuring things out and haven’t yet been pigeonholed, this information is especially valuable.

This Is an Ongoing Practice

Career design isn’t a one-time fix. It’s an iterative process. You don’t create one perfect plan and execute it flawlessly. You design, test, learn, adjust, and redesign.

Your first five years are when you build the muscle of intentional career design that will serve you for the next 30 years. The earlier you start thinking this way—treating your career as something you actively design rather than something that just happens to you—the more control you’ll have over where you end up. It’s also directly correlated with how much career satisfaction you might feel.

Getting Started This Week

If you’re ready to start designing your legal career:

• Name the problem you’re actually trying to solve. Be specific.
• Create your three Odyssey Plans. Map out three different five-year scenarios.
• Design one prototype. What’s one low-risk experiment you could run this month?
• Track your energy for two weeks. Pay attention to what work energizes you and what drains you.
• Take one action. Email one person for an informational interview. Volunteer for one new assignment.

Your legal career is one of the most important things you’ll design in your life. And your first five years are when you have the most freedom to experiment, pivot, and figure out what actually works for you. Don’t waste them just surviving; use them to design a life and career you actually want.

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