People may attract the wrath of a former employer for a variety of reasons, but how easy is it for a company to succeed in a legal challenge against a former employee?

Read the entire column.

With large numbers of lawyers fleeing the legal profession, one ex-lawyer starts a project to try to understand why.

A chat with Marc Freedman about the growing phenomenon of encore careers and the obstacles facing older workers.

Businessweek has a pretty comprehensive online package about second careers this week. You can read the whole group of articles here. They cover the usual ground — networking, informational interviews, inspiring stories of successful changes. But if you’re in a rut you might get some ideas. Most of the stories include a photo slideshow, a nice touch (except when the photos look like stock photo art or mutual fund ads.)

I recently got a two-part question from a second year law student in Florida. Taking a page from Jeremy Blachman, one of may favorite bloggers, who likes to post his answers to such questions on his blog, I’m going to start to do the same whenever it makes sense. I’ve started to get a lot of questions from readers, and I’m guessing that if one person has a question, might have a similar one. Plus, it will share more of my back-story, something I want to do in this blog. And it should give readers an idea of how I feel about the questions I get.

The question was: What prompted you to leave the law after 10 years? I inquire because I am a 2L and would appreciate some candid insight into what I can expect from a career in law. Thank you in advance for your response.

Here’s what I wrote:

What you can expect from a career in the law is an awfully big question and the answer is completely different if you end up working for the A.C.L.U., a small law firm in Iowa, a big firm in L.A., or the federal trade commission in DC. That question is a bit like asking what you can expect from a career in business.

If you tell me a bit more about what you want to do in the law or the kinds of opportunities you’re choosing between, I might be able to shed more light.

As to why I left the law, that’s also not a short answer kind of question. But here are a few reasons.

1. I ended up doing very specialized work that I wasn’t passionate about and after some searching around didn’t feel like there was another practice area that jazzed me enough to try to figure out how to move in that direction.

2. At the same time, I was becoming increasingly drawn to writing. I was reading a lot, taking classes, and the urge to get published was really nagging at me.

When you combine #1 and #2 it was a bit like feeling like your marriage is starting to fracture and then noticing that rather conveniently you were starting to find yourself attracted to an available and willing partner.

This week, for my Shifting Careers column at nytimes.com, I spoke to Stan Halpern, who made one of those career changes that seem to happen when you face your own mortality. Halpern is now an evangelist for green cleaning, and like many who find religion, he spent the majority of his career peddling what he now sees as poison — commercial cleaning supplies that did the job, but probably hurt a lot of people along the way.

Here’s the story:
A New Way to Clean Up

When I left the law to pursue freelance writing, I debated going for a masters degree in journalism. But then I took a few adult education classes and realized that for my goals, it wasn’t necessary to go back to grad school. It also didn’t make much sense to me to invest tens of thousands of dollars for a career where I’d be earning substantially less than my salary as a lawyer. I’m now a huge fan of these kinds of classes. This week, my online column for the New York Times, Shifting Careers, is about why these classes are often all you need for a dramatic career shift.

When I first started writing, I had an inordinate number of mentors. One of them, Tamara Loomis, was about a year ahead of me on the law-to-journalist train and I thought I would never catch up. Tamara treated me as a peer from the start, made time for all my silly questions, and inspired me by the way she quickly became a professional, and then by the ways she continued to reinvent herself — first as a legal reporter for The New York Law Journal, then as a freelancer/new mom. But now I think she’s found her calling, as a snarky, smarty pants daily columnist/blogger for Cookie Magazine, the hippest of the parenting pubs. Even if you’re not a mom, you’ll agree that First Feeding is good stuff.

So, in honor of Mother’s Day, I give you Tamara!