From Law to Consulting: My Jerry Maguire Moment and the Birth of Archon Advising

Jerry Maguire is one of my favorite movies. I love the story and complex characters, especially that kid. But I really love it for the scene when he leaves his job. It’s impulsive, it’s dramatic, it’s loud, and most importantly, it's without any initial success.

I have loved stories of people who made brash decisions and then immediately regretted what they did…before it worked out like they planned. This past week, I got to experience my own Jerry Maguire moment as I announced I was done being a full-time attorney and was going to start introducing myself to the world as a trauma consultant and resilience coach. 

The fear and embarrassment leading up to that decision were overwhelming at times. And because I wasn’t fully sold on what I was doing, I used humor to make the announcement on LinkedIn; and not in a great way.

I posted that I was leaving being a full-time attorney behind because I was terrible at it. That’s bullshit. I am a fantastic attorney; when I want to be. The problem is I don’t want to be an attorney all the time. And I missed an opportunity to say that aloud, proudly, and with confidence that not only sold myself as someone who believed in what they were doing in helping people, but also started my brand off with a vigorous roar. Instead, because I was scared, my expression was timid and feckless. And that’s awesome and amazing and a beautiful failure on my part. I saw almost immediately after posting it that I had done something I had done for years under a previous mindset and allowed myself to act mindlessly. It was a wonderful reminder that I’m still so far from being able to proclaim myself as anything but a humble practitioner of life.

I used to be someone who didn’t speak their genuine truth and opinion because I was afraid of what others would say. I was afraid of saying what was bothering me about a situation because more people in the room seemed to be okay with it. I was afraid to lose friends who didn’t agree with me or understand my viewpoint. I was…I was… I was.

I am not that anymore.

I’m a strong motherfucker and I’ve got a loud voice. And I’m ready to be heard.

I’d like to have a conversation with you and everyone else about how trauma, especially men. I want to talk about how it is affecting your life and the proven ways to overcome self-placed obstacles. In that, I want you to stop complaining and move past the obstacles that are keeping you from your best self. And then I want you to help me find other people who need to stop complaining and focus on moving beyond the obstacles that are keeping their greatness at bay.

Over the past few years, I became a voracious reader and the books I’ve read added to my existence in some beneficial way; even the terrible book. One of those was Good to Great by James Collins. If you are ambitious in any sense of the word, this book is a must read. The takeaway for this is Collins’ recipe for finding your purpose: The Hedgehog Concept. Collins used it to show how organizations can sustain greatness, but I saw immediately how it was the perfect recipe for every individual to use as a way to find their own purpose inside their profession. Here it is:

1. Do what you’re passionate about;

2. Do what can make you money;

3. Do what you can be best in the world at.

I was reading Good to Great during a time when I was pouring my heart, soul, and all my free time into becoming the best business attorney I could be. At the time, I had just taken a year off law to write Ruthless. I had hung a shingle trying to figure out my next niche in law, I figured business would be my best option as my favorite job in law was as a general counsel of a large logistics company, but getting good in-house positions is harder than finding gold with a toothpick. And by this point I had started to obediently salute the “I ain’t working for anyone ever again” flag.

In The Hedgehog Concept, and most if not all of Collins’ ideas and correlations, I noticed how much of it fit perfectly in line with Stoicism. Arete is a Greek concept and word that means “excellence” and it was what all Stoics aim for: the best version of yourself. To get there, Stoics believe we should live according to nature, which calls for human progress to be on the back of the cardinal virtues. In this opportunity to remind you what those are, I’ll also remind you cardinal means hinge, as in all other virtues hinge upon these. They are courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom.

If you had read Ruthless or are familiar with my story, you know I used Stoicism to audit my life in order to pull me out of a very selfish and self-destructive mindset. Stoicism made me instantly aware of the victim-mentality that had driven my motivations and the heaps of anger, grief, and fear that resulted in harmful actions to others and my own existence. But here’s the boldface truth: I never completed the audit to the end. Even though the audit became the basis of my journaling program and guide, The Goodly Dozen (now revised to, The Honesty Experiment, to coincide with my podcast, which we’ll get to in a bit), I stopped before I got to profession. The list covers twelve areas of life and I audited them all but my profession because I thought I had long settled on being a lawyer. In writing my memoir, I saw how my life was objectively fucking amazing. I had great health, a virtuous existence, and my family was wonderfully good. But I could not say the same about my professional efforts.

I had found a local business attorney to mentor me and all was going well. I was giving myself a crash course MBA and reading all the books. I had gotten through five or six of them when I came across Good to Great. During that time, probably due to Collins own attack on non-humble leaders, I had also just decided I was going to rewrite Ruthless to remove my ego. I had included a lot of salacious stories that I thought readers would enjoy and to drive home the point that “I had seen and done some shit.” But in reviewing my objective against my ego, I realized the stories weren’t needed. The book as it stands now does a pretty decent job of capturing just how much of a shit show I was; the ego stories just added to it gratuitously.

By the way, besides Good to Great, Never Split the Difference, and Rich Dad, Poor Dad, were also instrumental in my education and should be the starting point for every human’s adult education, be they entrepreneur or middle school teacher.

If you are not a lawyer, you may not understand fully what I’m about to say. Being a lawyer in the 21st century fucking sucks. Well, first caveat, being a civil litigator in the 21st century sucks. Everyone else, I suspect you may have similar feelings, but I only know civil litigation. First, I was inside catastrophic insurance defense and I was a probate litigator dealing with high-value and complex trust disputes. I’ll readily admit I went to law school simply to impress people, but the second reason is because I love nearly EVERYTHING about law; how it’s thought about, crafted, debated, codified, executed, and then revised in practice.

I love Ann Arbor, Michigan and love to tell people it’s where I went to law school. For some, they’ll leave it at that and assume I attended the prestigious University of Michigan, which I did; for football games and use of their law school library to feel smart by osmosis. No, I went to Cooley Law School, whose claim to fame at the time was they were the biggest law school in the country. That’s not a claim you ever want to hear from a law school. From the first time I took the LSAT, I knew I was an imposter. To be clear, I was not suffering from imposter syndrome; I felt like a legitimate imposter. It was the same way I had felt ghost-writing speeches for Republicans who didn’t know I was pro-choice and agnostic or for Democrats who didn’t know I was pro-gun and anti-affirmative action. I was talking with kids who spent their Friday nights reading Descartes and Locke and their Saturday mornings giving their impressions at coffee shops. Meanwhile, most nights I could be found building beer pyramids in a friend’s garage and most Saturdays drinking, driving, and shooting my way to 112 on the golf course.

A law degree certainly made me feel accomplished, but it made me feel more scared than anything. Here’s a nugget of unsolicited advice for any young professional: do everything you can to find your niche early. When I passed the bar exam (after my third attempt) I figured the money would just flow in. How could it not? I was a licensed attorney now and could command upwards of $200 an hour. Do the math: $200 at 8 hours a week for fifty-two weeks is $416,000.00. For a first-year attorney on his own with little to no overhead? Are you kidding me? Let’s go!

Good luck if you think that is even close to how being a lawyer plays out.

After a decade as a lawyer, I took a year off to write my book. When I came back, I tried family law, thinking, ‘Is there a better area of law for a practicing Stoic than the most emotional one? Late last year I was four months into what was supposed to be a partner-track position when I found the owner of the firm sitting in my chair when I came back from a hearing. She told me she didn’t want me representing her clients because I said “fuck” to a client in a conversation and I had forgotten to write down a few task items during a call the previous day.  They were lame excuses to justify the moment’s action and didn’t convey the real reason she didn’t want me associated with her firm. I was a terrible attorney for her clients.

I was delivering what lawyers call “zealous advocacy” for the firm’s clients, but I really didn’t care about their experience with me. I was like a doctor with terrible bedside manner. Instead of keeping them feeling secure and at ease, I only cared if I was hitting my billable hours. I had once again made law about maximizing money. But why? I was working intimately with people I cared deeply about and wanted them to succeed in every way possible. I needed answers and Jim Collins’ question came calling.

What can I be the best in the world at?

Thus, I sat down to finally finish my audit inside my professional efforts. I took what my nature and natural inclinations directed me towards and asked myself, how can I make the world better given my skillset and experience? And what the hell was I going to do to make money?

Then I caught a glimpse of one of my tattoos.

On my forearm, I have “The Obstacle is the way.” It is a line I stole from a modern Stoic writer, Ryan Holiday. It is as true for me as it is for you, the obstacle is always the way forward and the only way you’re ever going to feel, sense, or live happily. The obstacle for me, believe it or not, was talking about my past. Even though I had written a book about it and shared as many of the heinous and despicable things I had done in my life, I still hadn’t actually had any conversations with a handful of people about what I had experienced. But what did that look like? How do I monetize talking to people about trauma? How do I become the best in the world at it? What exactly is my product?

Then I got a message on LinkedIn from a fellow attorney that changed my life. This particular attorney was Karen Cianfrani but she is, admittedly and proudly, retired. But before Karen retired, she worked tirelessly for children in the system in Orange County, California, including me. I found Karen doing research for my book, but our previous conversations had been fairly short given her retirement and my lack of substance to the conversation other than requests for contacts or information about my file. After I published my book in December, she reached out in January to say she had read it and wanted to put me in contact with her daughter, who was also an attorney and worked with folks going through the parole process in California. Her daughter had a client who she thought could get something form my story and asked me to send him a copy of my book. I did and Rachael and I started talking.

That was less than two months ago. Since then she has put me in contact with authors, speakers, Hollywood agents, and podcasters who have all told me the same thing: start a podcast, do a documentary, become a speaker, start engaging with people. Okay, but guys… you can’t just wake up on a Tuesday and start calling yourself a podcaster, documentary film producer and director, and speaker…

Or so I thought.

Since that conversation, I have started a podcast, announced the launch of The Honesty Experiment - a documentary about overcoming trauma through honest journaling, am speaking to groups about trauma and journaling, all while continuing to serve clients I continue to pick up along the way. But not legal clients.

Archon Advising was born last week with the aim to be the best trauma consulting agency in the world. Archon means ruler in Greak and the work of this agency will ensure the rulers of their communities who have been affected by trauma can continue to give the world their best product of good. I struggled for a bit in calling myself a coach because I feel it cheapens the impact I’m striving to make given all the work therapists do in the world and have done for me, but that is exactly what I do.

Specifically, I want to talk to men. Hurt begets hurt, men. And if you don’t become aware of it, work on it, and protect against it, your children and those around you are going to suffer. Most importantly, holding onto unprocessed trauma caters only to a victimhood mentality that is a ball and chain to your personal success.

Does this mean I’m done being a lawyer? Hell no. I love the law and I love helping people. And truthfully, I know I’d be fool to toss away the opportunity to help people with legal issues, but it’s not going to be my identity anymore. If you’re paying me to fight a traffic ticket or negotiate your next business deal, you’ll have been an Archon client first.

So, there it is: my Jerry Maguire manifesto and proper announcement for why I’m leaving the law full-time. Besides writing this to cover my earlier bonehead post about starting this thing, I also wanted to do it to highlight my story for all the professionals out there who feel stuck in their profession.

If you are questioning your professional efforts, ask until you’ve got answers. Don’t be afraid of coming up with an answer that puts you in a different seat next week. We need you to be at your best and if you think your best efforts are better served in another field, give me a call and let’s figure out how to make the swap responsibly, but quickly.