Leaving Big Law: How I Rethought Business Development, Burnout, and Building Something Sustainable
For a long time, I followed the path that was supposed to make sense. I built a successful career in Big Law, worked my way up, and checked the boxes. From the outside, it looked like everything was working.
But at a certain point, it stopped feeling sustainable.
The pressure wasn’t new, but it became harder to ignore, especially during COVID, when workloads intensified and the lines between work and life disappeared. I found myself doing more, carrying more, and questioning how long I could realistically keep going at that pace. It wasn’t just about working hard. I’ve always worked hard. It was about whether the structure itself still worked for me.
That’s when I started thinking differently. Not just about my next role, but about whether I wanted to stay on the same path at all.
Leaving wasn’t a clean or easy decision. It meant walking away from financial stability and a career I had spent years building. But it also gave me the opportunity to rethink how I wanted to work, and what I actually valued in the process.
When we launched Stage, I knew I didn’t want to replicate the same business development strategies I had seen for years. So much of it felt transactional or built around environments that didn’t resonate with me. I don’t golf. I didn’t want to rely on traditional networking channels that felt forced or outdated.
Instead, I focused on something simpler: building real relationships.
I started writing on LinkedIn. I reached out to people directly. I shared perspectives that felt honest and relevant to the legal industry. At the time, I didn’t have a big network or a built-in client base. I was starting from scratch, which meant I had to figure out what actually worked, not just what we had always been told worked.
What I found is that authenticity scales in a way traditional tactics don’t. When you show up consistently, when you’re thoughtful in how you connect with people, and when you focus on relationships over transactions, opportunities start to build over time.
One of the biggest shifts for me was understanding the importance of building a book of business. In professional services, that’s where so much of your leverage comes from. Without it, you’re often supporting someone else’s clients, someone else’s revenue, someone else’s priorities. When you build your own, you create more control over your career, your time, and your future.
And there isn’t one right way to do that.
For some people, it might still be traditional networking. For others, it’s creating content, connecting one-on-one, or finding shared interests outside of work. The key is finding an approach that feels natural enough that you’ll actually stick with it.
Because that’s the other part people don’t always talk about, this is a long game. Relationships take time. Trust takes time. There’s no shortcut to that. But when you invest in it consistently, it becomes a much more sustainable way to grow.
Looking back, leaving Big Law felt like a huge risk. And it was. But it also created the space to build something that aligns much more closely with how I want to work and live.
If you want to hear more about my experience and how I approached that transition, you can listen to me on the The Femme Factor Podcast: Leaving Big Law to Start Something New
By Jennifer Ramsey and Megan Senese