ABA Journal - February 2009

which she describes as “a wonderful, empowering thing to do.”

Bean found that taking time off taught him about himself.

“I realized that I like being busy. It was the takeaway lesson. Now I can see working my whole life. I’m not geared, personalitywise, to sit and hang out. And that was interesting to find out.”

FOR GLOBE-TROTTER JUDGE, the risks of him and his wife quitting their attorney jobs were outweighed by the benefits. “The best thing was getting rid of all the pressures, the chores we have in our ordinary lives,” he says.

Cordoza adds: “I like the message we sent to our children: A job is not everything. Time with your family is No. 1.”

In between visiting the great pyramids, riding gondolas in Venice, observing tigers in India and surfing in Bali, Judge and Cordoza home-schooled their kids. They brought fourth- and fifth-grade workbooks for math and grammar, and the children had writing assignments each day.

But the real education, Cordoza explains, was off the pages.

“In Cambodia, for example, we spent a lot of time talking about communism and the Khmer Rouge. We went to the Killing Fields. We discussed why some countries were faring better than others. To us, that was their education,” she says.

“I remember teaching them long division in our Athens apartment. But what resonates with me was the conversations we had about different systems of government. They saw firsthand that communism sounds good but doesn’t really work. We talked about science, politics, history.”

The Judge-Cordozas’ worldwide trek was pricier than they’d expected but the family was able to afford the trip because, like the others, they’d always tried to live relatively modestly. Still, they will now have to work five to 10 years longer than their friends. “But we felt like that was OK,” Judge says. “This was the time to live life at its fullest.”

After about eight months on the

“It’s so easy to get sucked back into multitasking, racing around.”

—CHRISTINA CORDOZA

road, Judge and Cordoza sensed it would soon be time to return home, mostly because their kids were tired. At that point, Judge sent a half-dozen e-mails to headhunters and other legal contacts. Three weeks later, a recruiter contacted him about what he calls “a dream job.”

From a small island in Indonesia, Judge interviewed for—and landed—the general counsel position at BrightSource Energy Inc., a solar plant design company in Oakland, Calif. Soon after they returned home, Cordoza picked up overflow work for a law firm as well as temporary assignments from Axiom Legal, a contract attorney firm that provides outsourced general counsel services.

Judge says he believes that being in-house lawyers made it easier for him and Cordoza to quit and return to lawyering. “It would have been harder to leave if we were partners in a law firm and were leaving a

big client base.”

For Cordoza, the only downside of time off was that she now struggles to return to “this Zen place” that she reached while away. “It’s so easy to get sucked back into multitasking, racing around.”

Though Judge admits that he’d rather be playing, he is also “really excited to get back [to work]. My job right now is really challenging and demanding, but I can do it because my batteries are recharged.”

More importantly, Judge says, he returned to lawyering with more confidence.

“I’ve lost my paranoia about losing a job. I’m not as worried. I learned you can step away. Nothing is fatal. You can come back and land on your feet. It’s given me more perspective.”