After almost a year away from the mic, Owen comes back with Megan Senese—co-founder of Stage, host of So Much to Say, and one of the most honest voices in the legal community. Brilliant, kind, utterly and indelibly herself.

Megan spent her career as a business development professional inside big firms, which meant being, in her words, “non-old, non-man, non-partner, non-lawyer, and so therefore you don’t know anything.” She and two colleagues planned their exit in stealth for a year, lived on one salary to test the downside, resigned the same morning, and launched with zero clients. The first thing she discovered was that all the advice she’d been giving lawyers actually works.

The conversation moves from there into the parts of the job nobody puts in a recruiting brochure: why business development is a fear problem rather than a tactics problem, why she hid both of her pregnancies and helped other women hide theirs, how Corduroy came to be, and what changes—and what doesn’t—when the person you’re overworking for is finally you.

Owen has been on the other side of the same trap, and neither of them pretends they’ve solved it.

Brad Miller is a solo practice attorney and franchise law specialist who formerly co-hosted Walking a Spiritual Path with Jason Medford. He started his firm out of necessity after graduating law school during the housing crisis, and has since shaped it — along with a move to rural hill country — into something that fits his life rather than the other way around.

Owen and Brad talk about why the legal profession is failing younger lawyers, what happens when the promise of the gold watch no longer fills the cup, and why so many attorneys find themselves running on empty despite doing everything they were told to do. The conversation moves into Brad's growing spiritual practice, the fear of stepping into the unknown without a clear destination, and what it looks like to just stop chasing more. Recorded in August, released fashionably late.

Amy lost Roy two weeks before we recorded this. Roy was her cat for seventeen years—what she calls her "heart animal." If you've ever had one, you know what that means. If you haven't, you probably think we're being dramatic about a pet, and you can go to hell.

We talked about grief, but also about mortality and meaning and why our culture is so fucking terrible at dealing with death. Amy's been wrestling with the big questions lately—what happens when we die, how to build a coherent worldview without traditional religion, why some people treat relationships like transactions.

She's also gotten really good at telling people no. There's a story in here about someone who kept pestering her for career advice while she was dealing with Roy's death, and her response is pretty much perfect.

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Amy Volas is the founder of Avenue Talent Partners and one of the most authentic voices on LinkedIn about leadership, relationships, and what it means to show up as a whole human in professional spaces. She's currently finishing her first book and believes in calling people on their bullshit—not to be mean, but to hold them to the standards they set for themselves.

Connect with Amy: LinkedIn Profile

Learn more: Avenue Talent Partners