Jennifer Murray

Starting over early

While some workers arrive at the career crossroads by choice or through following their curiosity, many are driven there by job dissatisfaction. Jennifer Murray (’94 B.S., ’98 J.D.) sensed that dissatisfaction so early in her career that she started planning for her second career before she had started practicing her first.

Despite finishing her law degree and practicing for a year as a domestic relations lawyer, Murray said that she began applying to library science graduate programs before the end of law school. Her year of practice affirmed what she had already discovered as a law student— she enjoyed helping families solve problems, but she never enjoyed the tension associated with legal battles.

"In this area of law you see good people at their worst,” she said. “People get very vindictive and angry during a divorce, and that was hard for me.”

Murray attributed her need to retool so early to the fact that she had equated her lifelong interest in the law with the field being a good match for her. She ignored concerns expressed by family members that her low-key personality might not be suited to the intense conflict of courtroom drama, and went directly from her bachelor’s degree to her law degree, something she says meant her career decision wasn’t tested by life experiences until it was too late. Once she accepted her discontent, differentiating interest from aptitude was essential for her to find a second career that didn’t repeat the mismatch of the first.

While searching for a new line of work, Murray looked back at her undergraduate and law school employment and found a clue: stints at Hayden Library, followed by work for Westlaw (a vendor to the ASU law library) as a law student. She spent three years training to be a librarian at the University of Arizona while also working full time in the university’s libraries. The new profession sprang from previous interests; and, perhaps ironically, Murray realized during library school that she wanted to use her training as an attorney to work as a law librarian.

"I still wanted to use that knowledge base I had,” she said.

After finishing her Master of Library Science degree and working as a law librarian for the University of Southern California and ASU, Murray was hired in 2005 by the law firm of Greenberg Traurig in Phoenix. She relishes the freedom from the long hours that are part of many attorneys’ lives, and the respect her law degree brings her with the lawyers she assists at the firm. Most of all, she says, she feels free of the burden of working in a system that didn’t work for her.

"My best day practicing (law) was worse than my worst day at the library,” she said.

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Photo: Dave Tevis