She Finally Earned Work-Life Balance at the Firm — Then Quit for an AI Startup
She ground her way to work-life balance by year five at one of China’s top law firms — a great team, a good vibe — and then she quit. Not laid off, not burned out. She jumped on purpose.
What made her decide was an “elevator theory”: it’s not about how many floors you’ve climbed inside the elevator, it’s about whether the elevator itself is still going up.
In her mind, industry > company > role. She didn’t want to tinker with her job. She wanted to change elevators.
For her undergrad, she pursued two degrees at once: law at China University of Political Science and Law, and economics at Peking University. Two campuses, four round trips a week, three hours each way.
Just how brutal were those years? Later she joined a Red Circle firm — widely regarded as the most punishing place in the industry, on call 7×24, every message answered within 20 minutes. Her verdict: “The intensity was fine. Honestly, less than my undergrad years.”
For grad school she studied law at Northwestern in the U.S. She’d even taken the LSAT — scored 160, good enough for UCLA — but she didn’t go, because she never intended to stay at a U.S. firm anyway. Heading home to a Red Circle firm was plenty.
The Red Circle is the eight most prestigious, largest, and most profitable top-tier law firms in China. What you do in year one, what you do in year two, all the way up to partner — every level’s duties are crystal clear. For people who love certainty, it’s heaven. Some of her classmates found even this not stable enough and went into the civil service, the courts and procuratorate, or in-house legal roles at state-owned enterprises. Among that crowd, a Red Circle firm already counted as “just a tiny bit uncertain.”
She quit in her fifth year at the firm — right when she’d finally ground her way to work-life balance, with a team whose atmosphere was genuinely great.
Not laid off. Not unable to take it. She just wanted to leave.
Today, Grace heads up European market and client relations for an open-source AI company, based in London.
So why leave?
“It wasn’t because I was tired,” she made a point of stressing to me. By her third year she already had work-life balance; her team respected one another, and the vibe was good. So this had nothing to do with escape. She jumped, deliberately, from a perfectly comfortable position.
For the real reason, Grace told me an “elevator theory.” When it comes to a career, you can’t just look at how many floors you’ve risen inside the elevator — you also have to look at whether the elevator itself is going up. Get promoted in a stagnant industry and your floor may not actually change; in a rising industry, even if your title stays put, your market value, the resources you can reach, the ceiling on your opportunities — all of it gets lifted along with the elevator.
The lawyers’ elevator has stalled into a zero-sum scramble. China has 700,000 lawyers, but only so many big clients. Real estate and finance, which once carried the trade, are receding; foreign companies are pulling out; new businesses haven’t filled the gap. The Red Circle firms were founded in ‘93. The first thirty years were the boom: firms growing, foreign companies arriving, legal talent scarce — that generation even produced members of the CPPCC, the national political advisory body. Now the boom is spent, and which client goes to which firm was settled long ago.
More immediately, she looked up at her boss. What her boss looked like now was, more or less, what she’d look like in ten years. You’ve probably had a moment like this. In some meeting, you look at someone who joined ten years before you, sitting in the seat that will one day be yours, and it’s as if you’re seeing yourself a decade out.
Grace first felt the urge to leave at the company’s 2023 annual party.
She’d had an excellent performance year and was already using ChatGPT to work faster, so she mentioned to her boss: this tool should be rolled out across the whole firm. He praised her, saying she was the first person to bring it to him. In an entire firm, among all the people more senior than her, she was the first to speak up.
What she thought in that moment was: “This is a steam-engine-level thing.” Something like this, she didn’t want to wait for others to use first. She wanted to be the first to jump in and watch, with her own eyes, how it would change people’s lives. Later, when Sora came out, it dazzled her all over again.
I asked her: “Then why not just stay at the firm and use AI to gradually make your own work easier? Why change jobs at all?”
She said: “Because I don’t want to passively accept it. I want to drive the whole process myself.”
In her mind, industry > company > role. She didn’t want to tinker at the edges of her job. She wanted to change elevators.
From 2024, Grace started looking seriously. She listened to tech podcasts, combed through LLM newsletters, and asked everyone in her social circle she could reach. At first she wanted to break in through familiar territory — law. She surveyed the legal-AI companies and quickly realized it wasn’t a good business: domestic SaaS has weak willingness to pay, so the ecosystem can’t take off; and foreign-invested law firms had long since adopted American-made products. Classmates pointed her to pure legal-counsel roles at the likes of DeepSeek and GLM, but pure legal work wasn’t what she’d set out for in the first place.
Landing at this company, in the end, was serendipity. A classmate pulled her into a tech group chat where someone had posted a job opening. In April 2024 she talked with the team for the first time; seeing how far her background was from tech, they hesitated. In July, in Beijing, she spoke with the company’s co-founder again. This time they didn’t talk much about AI — they talked about other things. What won him over was her resolve, her execution, her ability to communicate, and her English.
On the English, a note about her undergrad years is in order. On exchange in the U.S., she lived with a host family. The couple sat down together every evening and talked — for four hours, right up until bed — and they pulled her in every time. Too polite to refuse, she had to grit her teeth and join in. Talk enough, and small talk becomes second nature.
Taking this step came at a cost, too.
The certainty was gone. From Beijing to London, from a track where every rung was visible into a startup, the hours got longer. Her income, for now, is on par with before. The upside is higher — and so is the risk.
It helps that she has a floor to stand on: five years of experience in the legal industry. Even if it fails, going back to practicing law to support herself should be no problem.
Looking back, what truly made her commit to this step was a line from the founder of Moonshot AI, which went roughly: “Even if it fails in the end, I won’t regret it, because this thing has already changed my life.”
Back home, I found myself thinking again about Grace’s elevator metaphor.
When most of us agonize over whether to switch jobs, the question we ask is “Can I climb one more rung here?” Grace asked a different question: “Is my elevator, on the whole, still going up, or has it already stopped?” Those two questions carry you to completely different places.
I also remembered how, near the end of our talk, I asked her what she planned to do going forward. She smiled and said:
“The future is hard to call. The only thing I’m certain of right now is this: my love for the work I’m doing now > the firm.”