Advice for a 1st year associate attorney?

[Anonymous]

Pay off the student debt. (I know there is an argument that since student loan interest rates are low, one shouldn't pay off that loan but rather use the capital to generate higher return, but this only works if you plan on being in big law forever and are guaranteed a higher return.). I was writing seriously huge checks to fannie mae every month.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Pay off the student debt. (I know there is an argument that since student loan interest rates are low, one shouldn't pay off that loan but rather use the capital to generate higher return, but this only works if you plan on being in big law forever and are guaranteed a higher return.). I was writing seriously huge checks to fannie mae every month.

6.8% isn't really that low of an interest rate. Agree re: paying off the debt though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You don't need to bill anything close to 2300 to keep the checks coming. This is DC, not NY.

Hah. My dh in dc billed over 3000 last year and feels he needs to bill over 2400 to avoid getting fired.

Your DH billed, on average, 58 hours a week? I call bullshit. Working 60+ hours a week, sure, but you can't bill every waking minute unless you're doing some serious fraudulent puffery on your billables.

Yes, over 3000 billables. He was working 18 hour days for weeks at a time and 14 to 16 otherwise. He did not bill fraudulently. He was often stuck in conference rooms at least 12 hours a day, allowed out only for bathroom breaks as meals were ordered in, and then had to continue working after the meetings were over.

He did not get enough sleep and ate horrible food ordered in practically every meal and never got to work out. It was awful for his health. Billing 2400 seemed like vacation in comparison.

He's lying to you. No client is paying for 12+ hrs a day for "weeks at a time."

Incorrect. I used to do large transactional work at a BigLaw and those deals frequently required 4-5 days a week at the client site all day, drafting at night and on weekends to prep for the next days' meetings. I would easily bill 260-280 a month, and some months were worse. My "best" month during my time in BigLaw hell was 317.

I did one deal where the closing negotiations were a week-long marathon where both teams went to the clients' offices and ran meetings around the clock, and we had rooms at the next door hotel where people would shower and nap.

It's bad for your health and I'm very glad to be out of it.

But, yes, clients do pay for 12+ hours a day for weeks at a time because the legal fees are dwarfed by the value of the deal.

This woman's husband is in litigation I'm fairly sure, so again, I call bullshit. I know corporate work is a completely different beast, but im super doubtful this happened so consistently in litigation.

This does happen in large scale litigation, and also in internal investigations. Usually the big cases that keep people busy full-time for months or years at a time. Of course it's not possible to bill these hours if you're working on several smaller cases simultaneously because the time you spend transitioning from one matter to the next alone makes it impossible to bill solid blocks of time.

[Anonymous]

PLEASE SHUT UP ABOUT THE LITIGATORS. NOBODY CARES EXCEPT YOU TWO. FOCUS, PLEASE.

Geesh.