If you are married to a big law partner, how involved are they in your family's home life?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Well, since your husband is sitting right next to you, you can tell him from me that I know many lawyers who would say the same thing that he is saying to you right now, and all I can say in response is that he may very well truly believe that but it’s only because that’s all he knows.

I also have a deeper definition of “friendship” than you and I guess him. I “keep in touch” with a lot of people. “Friendship” to me isn’t a word that I throw around so lightly, though.

Oh, and one more thing: we also vacationed with law partners and their families. We don’t see them anymore either. When the ties that bind are law, business, careers, etc., those ties are fleeting.

I’m sure you think everything you have going is genuine, though. Enjoy your rose-colored glasses.

You know how I can tell you might have actually been a BigLaw partner? You think you are always right. Unbelievable that you are trying to deny someone else’s lived experience. I bet your DW regrets the day you retired - she is stuck listening to you mansplain all day.

When ever a nerve is stricken or one senses they are losing the argument, they resort to getting nasty and personal and playing the misogyny card. any card and otherwise getting nasty.

It’s not “mansplaining” to report my experience as a partner at a major law firm. I lived it. You haven’t. Only one of us is truly in a position to have a knowledgeable opinion on this. Yours is second hand.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m the biglaw partner, DW is sahm. We have a nanny/housekeeper in 3-4 days per week.

I’m with the kids in the morning, having breakfast/coffee before school. I greet them when they get home (wfh at least 3 days a week, usually 4 or 5). We all eat dinner together. I very rarely work weekends and when I do it’s either a quick call or two, or mindless admin work I can do in front of the TV (entering time). I’ve never once missed or cut short a vacation; I’ve worked some on vacations but never enough where it’s noticeable.

This is not achievable in all practices or at all firms. I’ve been fortunate. But I was also strategic about what I wanted. I’ll probably never get to that 4-6MM range, but I’m 40 and just crossed the 1MM threshold which is fine for me.

If your schedule is so cozy, and your wife is a SAHM, then why the nanny? Seems excessive.

DP. No, it doesn’t. Kids is plural. So if one kid needs to be at soccer and one is supposed to be at cello and there’s one parent home, are they supposed to teleport? Does dinner appear from replicators now? Should the SAHM be scrubbing toilets just so Internet Dude doesn’t feel inferior?

I can understand having a cleaner, sure - we always did - but a nanny for a SAHM? Somehow we managed to raise four kids without one, and they were all involved in many activities.

Are you suggesting that when both parents work full time they need to employ TWO nannies if they have more than one kid? One nanny per kid?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m the biglaw partner, DW is sahm. We have a nanny/housekeeper in 3-4 days per week.

I’m with the kids in the morning, having breakfast/coffee before school. I greet them when they get home (wfh at least 3 days a week, usually 4 or 5). We all eat dinner together. I very rarely work weekends and when I do it’s either a quick call or two, or mindless admin work I can do in front of the TV (entering time). I’ve never once missed or cut short a vacation; I’ve worked some on vacations but never enough where it’s noticeable.

This is not achievable in all practices or at all firms. I’ve been fortunate. But I was also strategic about what I wanted. I’ll probably never get to that 4-6MM range, but I’m 40 and just crossed the 1MM threshold which is fine for me.

If your schedule is so cozy, and your wife is a SAHM, then why the nanny? Seems excessive.

Because he makes $1M/year, can easily afford it, and it makes his and his wife's life easier. I left biglaw and don't have a nanny, but this seems obvious.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I met my DH in law school and we both started out as newleyweds in BigLaw. After a time working as an attorney and then consulting, I ended up a SAHM. We've been married 24 years, and now have one in college and one senior in HS.

No, he's not very involved in the home life--even though he's been working at home since March 2020. He's working all the time. Although I left my firm before I was senior enough to become a partner, I remember it well and as a result I don't give my DH much crap about it/am not resentful.

But I will say that I wouldn't really do this again, because after decades here, the work-comes-first patterns are entrenched. He's not really too clear about what's going on in our DC's lives. Our older DC is resentful of that and she says she has "Daddy issues." I have to say, if I were to give him a grade on fatherhood (AFTER you take out the really horrible fathers like absent or abusive ones)--just looking at a subset of stereotypical good fathers--I'd give him a B- which is a big disappointment for me to think, or say.

He got a huge health scare last year, and still made his hours even while in chemo. Then after he was "cured," he went away for a month to visit his elderly mom and his sister and her family. All the while, working. I don't begrudge him that at all, it wasn't like he went to Vegas; he was overdue to see his family. But, here is my point--the household ran just fine without him. I can't even imagine leaving for a few days, let alone a month, and not having the household fall apart. It just underscored his disconnect with the rest of the family. Our remaining DC said it was sort of relaxing not having him around.

ugh. This was really sad to type. And at the same time, he is a wonderful guy in so many ways. These situations are never black and white.

This is really insightful. I think helping out at home and with kids makes you feel like you have a stake in your family life since you expended effort in those spheres of life. How do these men feel that connection to their family/kids life if they aren’t engaged in their life?

Top PP here. I agree with you. Two more quick examples. To celebrate that DH was home after this month-long absence where he saw family (while still working like crazy), we were going to dinner last night. He had a call with a client until 6:30 so we made reservations for 7pm. At 6:50 I'm like, hello...and he's typing away furiously trying to get done. He says "pull the car out of the driveway and I'll hop in."
Okay, seriously, think about this. I have do do everything else...take out the dog, close the curtains, etc and when the kids were little, get them all ready etc etc. I have to literally pull out the car and wait for him to go from computer to car. There is just NO effort by him expended on the family, the house, or even arranging this date. Then at dinner his watch is buzzing him. ugh.

Second example. Our senior in high school DC is (like a recruited athlete) and now is not the time for DC to get injured, but DC got injured. I took DC to the doctor today and the short story is all is well and DC can continue to do their sport. DH walks out of his office at 7:15pm and wonders why the car is gone. I said that DC went to their sport and flips out, furious. "DC is going to get more injured WTF is DC doing going to their sport?" etc. I explain that we went to the doctor, got an x-ray, what the diagnosis was, etc etc and DC is fine to continue their sport. DH says "that's BS, that doctor must be used to giving patients what they want."

I said nicely, "Look, you weren't there. If you were there, you could discuss it with the doctor, but...you weren't there, so you can have your opinion but it's not going to change the outcome. If you wanted something different, you would have had to have come."

And I'm sick of that because the format is that he just parachutes in, has a HUGE opinion, and then says something along the lines of "Fine. Don't listen to me." and retreats back to his work.

That wasn't the case when the kids were little because they were little kid problems. But when the kids are older and have their own opinions and ideas, and issues are more complicated, he just doesn't have any credibility. It's then a vicious circle, because then he retreats.

Since OP was asking about her DH, I'll say this: It really is an unusual man that can successfully navigate the pressures of big law firm culture and family life. It's not really set up to have eggs in more than one basket, and the $$ compensation for eggs all in the BigLaw basket often psychologically justifies keeping eggs out of the family basket.

I would have said, “we are following the doctors advice. But if you’d like you can try to call the doctor, or take your son to a second opinion, but you need to be the one to do all the work on that - find the doctor, take him to the appointment, etc. I’m not doing that.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m the biglaw partner, DW is sahm. We have a nanny/housekeeper in 3-4 days per week.

I’m with the kids in the morning, having breakfast/coffee before school. I greet them when they get home (wfh at least 3 days a week, usually 4 or 5). We all eat dinner together. I very rarely work weekends and when I do it’s either a quick call or two, or mindless admin work I can do in front of the TV (entering time). I’ve never once missed or cut short a vacation; I’ve worked some on vacations but never enough where it’s noticeable.

This is not achievable in all practices or at all firms. I’ve been fortunate. But I was also strategic about what I wanted. I’ll probably never get to that 4-6MM range, but I’m 40 and just crossed the 1MM threshold which is fine for me.

If your schedule is so cozy, and your wife is a SAHM, then why the nanny? Seems excessive.

DP. No, it doesn’t. Kids is plural. So if one kid needs to be at soccer and one is supposed to be at cello and there’s one parent home, are they supposed to teleport? Does dinner appear from replicators now? Should the SAHM be scrubbing toilets just so Internet Dude doesn’t feel inferior?

I can understand having a cleaner, sure - we always did - but a nanny for a SAHM? Somehow we managed to raise four kids without one, and they were all involved in many activities.

Are you suggesting that when both parents work full time they need to employ TWO nannies if they have more than one kid? One nanny per kid?

This isn't about "need"-people obviously get by without nannies in far rougher circumstances. But, it is also not hurting anyone, is clearly what works best for this person's family, and I'm not sure why anyone on the internet would feel that their opinion on whether this is "needed" is relevant.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I met my DH in law school and we both started out as newleyweds in BigLaw. After a time working as an attorney and then consulting, I ended up a SAHM. We've been married 24 years, and now have one in college and one senior in HS.

No, he's not very involved in the home life--even though he's been working at home since March 2020. He's working all the time. Although I left my firm before I was senior enough to become a partner, I remember it well and as a result I don't give my DH much crap about it/am not resentful.

But I will say that I wouldn't really do this again, because after decades here, the work-comes-first patterns are entrenched. He's not really too clear about what's going on in our DC's lives. Our older DC is resentful of that and she says she has "Daddy issues." I have to say, if I were to give him a grade on fatherhood (AFTER you take out the really horrible fathers like absent or abusive ones)--just looking at a subset of stereotypical good fathers--I'd give him a B- which is a big disappointment for me to think, or say.

He got a huge health scare last year, and still made his hours even while in chemo. Then after he was "cured," he went away for a month to visit his elderly mom and his sister and her family. All the while, working. I don't begrudge him that at all, it wasn't like he went to Vegas; he was overdue to see his family. But, here is my point--the household ran just fine without him. I can't even imagine leaving for a few days, let alone a month, and not having the household fall apart. It just underscored his disconnect with the rest of the family. Our remaining DC said it was sort of relaxing not having him around.

ugh. This was really sad to type. And at the same time, he is a wonderful guy in so many ways. These situations are never black and white.

This is really insightful. I think helping out at home and with kids makes you feel like you have a stake in your family life since you expended effort in those spheres of life. How do these men feel that connection to their family/kids life if they aren’t engaged in their life?

Top PP here. I agree with you. Two more quick examples. To celebrate that DH was home after this month-long absence where he saw family (while still working like crazy), we were going to dinner last night. He had a call with a client until 6:30 so we made reservations for 7pm. At 6:50 I'm like, hello...and he's typing away furiously trying to get done. He says "pull the car out of the driveway and I'll hop in."
Okay, seriously, think about this. I have do do everything else...take out the dog, close the curtains, etc and when the kids were little, get them all ready etc etc. I have to literally pull out the car and wait for him to go from computer to car. There is just NO effort by him expended on the family, the house, or even arranging this date. Then at dinner his watch is buzzing him. ugh.

Second example. Our senior in high school DC is (like a recruited athlete) and now is not the time for DC to get injured, but DC got injured. I took DC to the doctor today and the short story is all is well and DC can continue to do their sport. DH walks out of his office at 7:15pm and wonders why the car is gone. I said that DC went to their sport and flips out, furious. "DC is going to get more injured WTF is DC doing going to their sport?" etc. I explain that we went to the doctor, got an x-ray, what the diagnosis was, etc etc and DC is fine to continue their sport. DH says "that's BS, that doctor must be used to giving patients what they want."

I said nicely, "Look, you weren't there. If you were there, you could discuss it with the doctor, but...you weren't there, so you can have your opinion but it's not going to change the outcome. If you wanted something different, you would have had to have come."

And I'm sick of that because the format is that he just parachutes in, has a HUGE opinion, and then says something along the lines of "Fine. Don't listen to me." and retreats back to his work.

That wasn't the case when the kids were little because they were little kid problems. But when the kids are older and have their own opinions and ideas, and issues are more complicated, he just doesn't have any credibility. It's then a vicious circle, because then he retreats.

Since OP was asking about her DH, I'll say this: It really is an unusual man that can successfully navigate the pressures of big law firm culture and family life. It's not really set up to have eggs in more than one basket, and the $$ compensation for eggs all in the BigLaw basket often psychologically justifies keeping eggs out of the family basket.

If it makes you feel any better, my DH does stuff like this sometimes, but he is also not in biglaw and makes no money.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m the biglaw partner, DW is sahm. We have a nanny/housekeeper in 3-4 days per week.

I’m with the kids in the morning, having breakfast/coffee before school. I greet them when they get home (wfh at least 3 days a week, usually 4 or 5). We all eat dinner together. I very rarely work weekends and when I do it’s either a quick call or two, or mindless admin work I can do in front of the TV (entering time). I’ve never once missed or cut short a vacation; I’ve worked some on vacations but never enough where it’s noticeable.

This is not achievable in all practices or at all firms. I’ve been fortunate. But I was also strategic about what I wanted. I’ll probably never get to that 4-6MM range, but I’m 40 and just crossed the 1MM threshold which is fine for me.

I'm another biglaw partner (one who already posted up thread) and my set up is very similar. Though I'm the DW and my DH works full time. I was extremely strategic about my path even when I was a summer associate - I looked at the mid-career partners at my firm and what their lives were like. Some of the practice areas I was interested in had zero women partners at the time (18 years ago). That was a huge red flag for me. The practice area I picked had a lot of women partners, a lot of whom worked part time. I recognized at the time that (1) the pay would never be as high as some other practice areas and (2) if the schedule was that much easier, my biggest challenge was likely making hours every year. But I figured I would rather get pushed out as a midyear associate for only billing 1600 hours a year, than quit as a midyear associate because I was burned out from billing 2500 hours a year. I observed even as a summer associate that by 5th year associate year, only around 20-30% of associates at my firm were still around. So if the odds were that I wouldn't be there in 5 years, I might as well try and make those years more bearable.

Anyhow, the strategy worked well; I'm the only person I know from my summer associate class who is still in biglaw (I changed firms at one point). I work primarily from home in a practice group with tons of flexibility, and where my partners (men and women mixed) mostly have working spouses, kids and want a lot of flexibility too. Several of the male partners with working spouses handle the daily school pick up at 4pm or whatever else. No one cares anymore if you're doing client calls from the soccer field at 4pm. I work an intense but predictable daily schedule from 9-6 or 7 every day. I do pick up and drop off daily (but DH handles maybe once a week if I have an important conflict). We always have dinner together every night. Maybe once a week after dinner I do 3 hours of work. I almost never work weekends. I don't have much of my own book of business so no non-billable admin work. So when I work those hours, I'm typically able to bill 9-10 hours 5 days a week. I don't take tons of vacation, but when I do I have to check email (like any white collar professional these days) but rarely have to do actually "work". So it's not that hard to hit 1900 hours a year - which is what my firm wants. I don't waste time on any nonbillable stuff other than client pitches. I haven't quite hit $1m, but I probably will in the next 3 years; but I took a few years off when my son was born, so my comp is slightly behind. Like the PP above, I'll never be a huge rainmaker, and it's even possible in five years that I'm told I'm not driven enough to get promoted - so that I get pushed out in an up-or-out model. But at that point, I'd have been working almost 25 years on this run, which I feel like is a success in any metric.

In short, *some* biglaw partners have totally manageable lives and make excellent comp for what they do. It's all about strategy, plus luck and timing. But I'd say any success in big law is about those things - so might as well choose the easier path than the harder one and enjoy the ride.

This is a great post. I am a guy Biglaw partner and wife is SAHM. Been like that since the kids came although I was not a partner when the first came but was for the rest. The practice area is important. I am a litigator but white collar. Was in government. A lot of the time I am in total control of my schedule. I might work and bill a lot of hours but you can create gaps. I do take kids to sports or pick them up. Have to with multiple kids. From time to time we have used older neighborhood kids to drive our kids but not a lot. I really value that time with them. Also I make breakfast and get the kids out the door almost every morning. I rarely miss kid events sporting or otherwise. We take a fair number of vacations and I work from our beach house a bit. Do I check emails on vacation. Of course. I have clients with real issues and it is not possible to turn it off. Do I bill on vacations? Yes. Often a couple of hours a day. I have done pitches from beaches and a board meeting from Alaska. But I still go and can still be present. I miss very little. Does my wife do way more -- yes. That is our unspoken deal --- she keeps things going and I make a small fortune. Is it a fair trade? Probably not. More is on her. But it is how we manage things. I oversee homework on a regular basis. Pre-covid I was pretty involved. With Covid I was extremely involved working from home. Actually hard for me to get back to the office because of that. Are there times when I just can't be there -- of course. I have had month long and multi month long trials out of town. Several over the years but certainly not every year or even every other year on average. I have conducted global internal investigations that have kept me on the road. I do very little during these times but I view them as exceptions and not the norm. Some partners might not be able to organize their lives this way but a hell of a lot that don't could if they wanted to and if they trusted themselves. To be clear -- major client issue comes first. FBI search warrant or SEC subpoena gets first priority. But I try to judge what is important enough that I can't make my kids breakfast and what is simply not and will wait an hour. Might a client need to speak now -- sure and I will. But I do have the advantage that if you are talking to me you have a bet the company problem and you kind of have to do what I want when I want to do it at least most of the time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m the biglaw partner, DW is sahm. We have a nanny/housekeeper in 3-4 days per week.

I’m with the kids in the morning, having breakfast/coffee before school. I greet them when they get home (wfh at least 3 days a week, usually 4 or 5). We all eat dinner together. I very rarely work weekends and when I do it’s either a quick call or two, or mindless admin work I can do in front of the TV (entering time). I’ve never once missed or cut short a vacation; I’ve worked some on vacations but never enough where it’s noticeable.

This is not achievable in all practices or at all firms. I’ve been fortunate. But I was also strategic about what I wanted. I’ll probably never get to that 4-6MM range, but I’m 40 and just crossed the 1MM threshold which is fine for me.

If your schedule is so cozy, and your wife is a SAHM, then why the nanny? Seems excessive.

DP. No, it doesn’t. Kids is plural. So if one kid needs to be at soccer and one is supposed to be at cello and there’s one parent home, are they supposed to teleport? Does dinner appear from replicators now? Should the SAHM be scrubbing toilets just so Internet Dude doesn’t feel inferior?

I can understand having a cleaner, sure - we always did - but a nanny for a SAHM? Somehow we managed to raise four kids without one, and they were all involved in many activities.

Are you suggesting that when both parents work full time they need to employ TWO nannies if they have more than one kid? One nanny per kid?

Everyone that I know that has two parents in jobs working 60+ hours a week has two nannies or a housekeeper AND a nanny.

Yes. If you have two people working big law hours, you will most likely employ TWO people to run stuff at home.

[Anonymous]

This thread is enlightening and devastating in equal measure. Thank you for all these honests posts. I feel like I'm truly reading a chapter in my future life in a "choose your own adventure" kind of way.

My DH is a new-ish Big Law partner in a field he finds rewarding and at a firm he feels is a good fit though he has sacrificed compensation by choosing to be there. There are weeks that are just insane where I swear he's working 20 out of 24 hours. Or months where it's all travel all the time. Honestly, the former is actually harder since as other PPs mentioned, he tends to parachute in to family affairs and gives his unwanted two cents. When he's away, things run like clockwork.

But at least 75 percent of the year is what I call a super schedule. He wakes up an hour early to squeeze in emails, helps a little with morning kid stuff then it's incommunicado for the next 11 hours until we see him home around 8pm. Then quick dinner while I do bedtime routine and then he reads stories, plays a quick game, etc. Then more work until 11pm or so. Some weeks he can actually chill. Weekends are at minimum 2 hours of emails and vacations always include a little work.

That said, he does find time to throw in the odd load of laundry, clean dishes/sweep a couple times a week, take out trash, and yes, makes the coffee regularly. Everything else, and I mean everything, falls on me. Social schedules, cooking, shopping, school stuff, travel, medical, financial, house, yard, clothing, even his, is on my plate. Not to mention all the other things women typically take on to raise good kids in a warm environment.

I'm at WAHM but work in a creative space so it's easy to just push my projects to the side. I'm getting better about being ok with a little more mess and chaos in order to carve out more work time. But I don't love outsourcing things so just have my house cleaned once a month.

I will add that my husband and I have been together for decades so we have a rock solid relationship. If we didn't, I'm not sure we could have weathered some of the storms that him being physically and emotionally unavailable has brought on. I'll also add that lawyers, especially litigators, are trained to duel intellectually and thrive on it which means they don't often turn it off at home. I keep reminding him that it's better to be married then to be right all the time.

Anyway, so many nuggets of wisdom on this thread.i do consider myself extremely privileged to live the Lifestyle his career affords (private schools, expensive vacations, buying what we want when we want it) but like any high-powered job, it has a dark side. I will also add that as we get older, I truly do see the toll this job is taking on his health. So much so, I'm considering putting other career ambitions aside and starting a business to help get him into an early retirement track.

[Anonymous]

Slightly off topic but do we just not have enough lawyers? Why the rush to work so much each week? Do things fall apart if they only work 40 hours? From my experience working with lawyers, I just think they are overpaid. Do they work this many hours just to justify their high-paying jobs? I still don't really understand the need for such high paying lawyers. It increases the cost of everything. Every time I'm involved I just think about how they are just documenting what other people are saying and doing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This thread is enlightening and devastating in equal measure. Thank you for all these honests posts. I feel like I'm truly reading a chapter in my future life in a "choose your own adventure" kind of way.

My DH is a new-ish Big Law partner in a field he finds rewarding and at a firm he feels is a good fit though he has sacrificed compensation by choosing to be there. There are weeks that are just insane where I swear he's working 20 out of 24 hours. Or months where it's all travel all the time. Honestly, the former is actually harder since as other PPs mentioned, he tends to parachute in to family affairs and gives his unwanted two cents. When he's away, things run like clockwork.

But at least 75 percent of the year is what I call a super schedule. He wakes up an hour early to squeeze in emails, helps a little with morning kid stuff then it's incommunicado for the next 11 hours until we see him home around 8pm. Then quick dinner while I do bedtime routine and then he reads stories, plays a quick game, etc. Then more work until 11pm or so. Some weeks he can actually chill. Weekends are at minimum 2 hours of emails and vacations always include a little work.

That said, he does find time to throw in the odd load of laundry, clean dishes/sweep a couple times a week, take out trash, and yes, makes the coffee regularly. Everything else, and I mean everything, falls on me. Social schedules, cooking, shopping, school stuff, travel, medical, financial, house, yard, clothing, even his, is on my plate. Not to mention all the other things women typically take on to raise good kids in a warm environment.

I'm at WAHM but work in a creative space so it's easy to just push my projects to the side. I'm getting better about being ok with a little more mess and chaos in order to carve out more work time. But I don't love outsourcing things so just have my house cleaned once a month.

I will add that my husband and I have been together for decades so we have a rock solid relationship. If we didn't, I'm not sure we could have weathered some of the storms that him being physically and emotionally unavailable has brought on. I'll also add that lawyers, especially litigators, are trained to duel intellectually and thrive on it which means they don't often turn it off at home. I keep reminding him that it's better to be married then to be right all the time.

Anyway, so many nuggets of wisdom on this thread.i do consider myself extremely privileged to live the Lifestyle his career affords (private schools, expensive vacations, buying what we want when we want it) but like any high-powered job, it has a dark side. I will also add that as we get older, I truly do see the toll this job is taking on his health. So much so, I'm considering putting other career ambitions aside and starting a business to help get him into an early retirement track.

It’s good you are a spouse aware of the health toll. BigLaw male lawyers get so many devastating health problems in their 50s and 60s. I’ve received a shocking number of death announcements.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Slightly off topic but do we just not have enough lawyers? Why the rush to work so much each week? Do things fall apart if they only work 40 hours? From my experience working with lawyers, I just think they are overpaid. Do they work this many hours just to justify their high-paying jobs? I still don't really understand the need for such high paying lawyers. It increases the cost of everything. Every time I'm involved I just think about how they are just documenting what other people are saying and doing.

So the legal market is not one thing. Even people that talk about Biglaw --- biglaw is not one thing. At the top of the market partners charge up to and beyond $2000 an hour. But that is just the start. Company gets a DOJ or SEC subpoena and there are likely 20-30 lawyers fully engaged with the issue as it is bet the company. Same for a company that get a merger offer. The fees could be 500k a month to millions a month. Why? Expertise and judgment. The view, rightly or wrongly, is that some people or firms have it. The view, rightly or wrongly, is that there is a limited number of places to go for this stuff. So the prices are high. Things scale down from there for lawyers until you get to the barely employed ones.

As for hours, those huge matters require tons of work. Thousands of hours per week. Why? No stone is unturned. Every angle is run down. Nothing can even be a little wrong. Not sure what you are familiar with where people are just documenting. If I am sending a document to DOJ telling them why there is no criminal violation after they have conducted an investigation, the work behind what is said could be millions of dollars of fees. The document itself, just preparing it could have cost a million dollars. As the Visa ad says -- it is priceless to a company when the document works or greatly reduces the case.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Slightly off topic but do we just not have enough lawyers? Why the rush to work so much each week? Do things fall apart if they only work 40 hours? From my experience working with lawyers, I just think they are overpaid. Do they work this many hours just to justify their high-paying jobs? I still don't really understand the need for such high paying lawyers. It increases the cost of everything. Every time I'm involved I just think about how they are just documenting what other people are saying and doing.

Lawyer here, and you can't paint with a broad brush here. There are tons of lawyers. Most of them don't make that much money or work more hours than a normal white collar job. I do big, complex commercial litigation, which is really a small but highly paid subset of the lawyers out there. I actually do not work in "BigLaw" -- I work in a boutique that does a lot of plaintiff-side litigation and work against BigLaw firms all the time. You have two sides with enormous amounts of money at stake, and the resources to fight for years and years. The cases are so complex that there is essentially an unending pile of work, and much of that work requires a constant attention to strategy and detail. The other highly paid lawyers are transactional (e.g., M&A) who are working on deals of mind-boggling complexity that must be completed without mistakes on a fixed timeline, and white collar criminal defense lawyers, who also have complex cases and often much shorter timelines than commercial litigation. Unless you work in one of these fields, you just can't get your mind around how much work there is.

Whether all of these lawyers are overpaid is a separate question -- but there are plenty of very sophisticated payers who think it is worth the money to hire these overworked and highly paid lawyers.

But again, that is a very small subset of the lawyers out there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This thread is enlightening and devastating in equal measure. Thank you for all these honests posts. I feel like I'm truly reading a chapter in my future life in a "choose your own adventure" kind of way.

My DH is a new-ish Big Law partner in a field he finds rewarding and at a firm he feels is a good fit though he has sacrificed compensation by choosing to be there. There are weeks that are just insane where I swear he's working 20 out of 24 hours. Or months where it's all travel all the time. Honestly, the former is actually harder since as other PPs mentioned, he tends to parachute in to family affairs and gives his unwanted two cents. When he's away, things run like clockwork.

But at least 75 percent of the year is what I call a super schedule. He wakes up an hour early to squeeze in emails, helps a little with morning kid stuff then it's incommunicado for the next 11 hours until we see him home around 8pm. Then quick dinner while I do bedtime routine and then he reads stories, plays a quick game, etc. Then more work until 11pm or so. Some weeks he can actually chill. Weekends are at minimum 2 hours of emails and vacations always include a little work.

That said, he does find time to throw in the odd load of laundry, clean dishes/sweep a couple times a week, take out trash, and yes, makes the coffee regularly. Everything else, and I mean everything, falls on me. Social schedules, cooking, shopping, school stuff, travel, medical, financial, house, yard, clothing, even his, is on my plate. Not to mention all the other things women typically take on to raise good kids in a warm environment.

I'm at WAHM but work in a creative space so it's easy to just push my projects to the side. I'm getting better about being ok with a little more mess and chaos in order to carve out more work time. But I don't love outsourcing things so just have my house cleaned once a month.

I will add that my husband and I have been together for decades so we have a rock solid relationship. If we didn't, I'm not sure we could have weathered some of the storms that him being physically and emotionally unavailable has brought on. I'll also add that lawyers, especially litigators, are trained to duel intellectually and thrive on it which means they don't often turn it off at home. I keep reminding him that it's better to be married then to be right all the time.

Anyway, so many nuggets of wisdom on this thread.i do consider myself extremely privileged to live the Lifestyle his career affords (private schools, expensive vacations, buying what we want when we want it) but like any high-powered job, it has a dark side. I will also add that as we get older, I truly do see the toll this job is taking on his health. So much so, I'm considering putting other career ambitions aside and starting a business to help get him into an early retirement track.

I’m the early retired Biglaw poster. Thanks for sharing this. It’s honest and enlightening and in many ways I can relate.

The one thing that we did when I was working was avoid lifestyle creep at all costs. Part of this was strategic, but mostly it was organic. My wife was (is) Midwest raised with parents who had lots of money but didn’t spend it or show it off. My wife is the same way. No private schools for our kids; no expensive colleges when UVA will do; no keeping up with the Joneses in terms of cars and houses etc. We only splurged on vacations. That’s it.

Because of that, and because we married and had kids early, we were well positioned to walk away from work very early with a nice nest egg and without worrying that our lifestyle would suffer without all of that money - we never lived a moneyed lifestyle in the first place, so there was no adjustments required.

Previous posters who (or whose spouses) have remained in Biglaw, especially the one who accused me of mansplaining, have rightfully noted that I “hated” my job. In fact, I did. I never adjusted to the arrogance, the elitism, the way lawyers looked down on staff - or anybody without their education or income stream, honestly - the uptightedness, the boring social events, the private schooling for the kids, the often tedious work, clients who you’d have nothing to do with were it high school but who you have to suck up to, etc etc etc. The whole thing was just so awful and contrived and sterile and fake.

It’s funny. We no longer have to worry about making more and more money to do and buy more and more things to feel good about ourselves and feel like we’re better parents. Instead, to reach a goal (say, another trip abroad) we just cut back on eating out for a little while. It’s so liberating being out of the Biglaw rat race. I really don’t think that most of the folks who are still caught up in it realize just how terrible it is.

[Anonymous]

Retired BigLaw PP, everything you say about is mirrored in my experience.

It’s a uniquely toxic environment. Sure there may be the occasional specialty practice areas that aren’t, but those are rare. Most of it is exactly as you describe.