Historically, the legal profession has pushed a clear – if narrow – definition of success. However, Rachael Karlyl has argued that it’s no longer fit for purpose – and that legal careers need to be redesigned so that lawyers can define their own success.
Speaking on a recent episode of The Boutique Lawyer Show, Rachael Karlyl, Australian Public Service principal legal officer, argued that lawyers need to take a more deliberate approach to designing their careers – so that success is measured on their own terms, not by inherited expectations.
Karlyl emphasised that career design isn’t about abandoning the law or its foundations; it’s about reclaiming control over what success truly means for the individual.
“Designing [your career] essentially is setting yourself up for success, but for your personal success as opposed to someone else’s version of that,” she said.
While completing her MBA, she shared how she discovered design thinking – a method for solving problems by focusing on human needs.
“When I started to look at this, it was really something that came up for me when I did my MBA,” she said.
“It comes from a concept of design thinking, which I’m sure a lot of people know about. The concept of design thinking requires you to start with a problem or an issue or a statement and figure [it] out, start to talk to the humans that are affected by that problem.”
Rather than applying it outwardly, Karlyl turned the lens inward, using the framework to rethink her own career and define success on her own terms.
“The reality was, at that stage, I didn’t want to solve anyone else’s problems, so I started to look inwards at the problem of what do I want to be when I grow up? That then helped me to start to define what I wanted things to look like,” she said.
Looking back, Karlyl described enduring gruelling 16-hour days with minimal support, unclear career prospects, and modest pay, warning that too many lawyers push themselves relentlessly, clinging to rigid, harmful notions of success until they reach their breaking point.
“At that point, I was working, probably, 16 hours a day. I wasn’t getting paid amazingly, and I didn’t have a huge amount of support. The development track for my career wasn’t really clear, and I was probably just going to be stuck in the position that I was going to be in for a long time,” she said.
“I know that a lot of people do get to that point and then just keep battling and battling and battling ‘til we get to the point of our version of a breakdown.”
Rather than continuing down that exhausting path, Karlyl explained, she took a step back to challenge a deeply ingrained assumption in legal culture – that a lawyer’s career must define their identity – and began recognising and valuing the other important aspects of her life.
“So for me, design was taking a step back and looking at. Instead of just looking at my career as my life and my identity, I was then able to be like, hold on. I actually have other aspects of my life that are not just my career or my identity as a lawyer,” she said.
To truly design a career, Karlyl explained, lawyers need to reflect on deeper, often-overlooked aspects of their work and how they want their professional life to feel and unfold.
“Design is, how do you want to feel? What do you want your day to look like? How do you want to show up? How much do you want to get paid? What impact do you want to make on the world? Who do you want to do that for? Why are you doing it?” she said.
She added: “Flipping it on its head and being like, how can I do this in a way that actually makes me feel impactful, aligns to my values, and makes me feel like I’m doing the things, doing things for the people that I want to do things for?”
“Just having that different level of a mindset for me is probably the definition of design. Creating your full life, as opposed to just creating that one element of it.”
