Explain to me like I’m five. What do “Big Law” lawyers do?
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Anonymous
Not a lawyer but I see these ads on tv in my hometown and they crack me up. Also, the billboards. |
Anonymous
| My DHs documents are so dense I can’t really get past the title pages. |
Anonymous
| most actually have referral deals with each other where you keep a portion of the fees. Most of the big advertisers are just referral services. I worked for a firm that specialized in complex medical malpractice, so we'd end up with a lot of those, but we'd refer out product liability for instance. Everyone kept auto accidents because that was the easy money that paid the bills. The malpractice cases where the ones that made the partners rich. |
Anonymous
Right, so...you don't disagree that your partners aren't in rural Alabama defending a slip-and-fall claim. Superfund litigation can easily expose tens of millions of dollars in insurance money, and the sui generis 9/11 case had literally a billion dollars at stake. A tiny bit different. |
Anonymous
Ha so yes, so “big law” means “large law firm with high salaries and attorneys with a miserable quality of life.” |
Anonymous
big law usually refers to amlaw 100 firms, so large law firms. There are plenty of midsize and boutique firms with the same miserable hours and salaries that are in the same ranges |
Anonymous
Yes, I am well aware. |
Anonymous
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OP, big law lawyers are supposed to be the most-polished, most-knowledgeable "experts" whose high fees are justified by their expertise. Why are there so many of them? Because every big corporate contract or every big corporate lawsuit is more complex than anyone outside of that "system" imagines.
The ELI5 version is basically this: suing someone gives you a right, supervised by a court and subject to rules and restrictions, to get documents and evidence from the person or company you are suing, and they from you. That's called discovery. It also gives you a right to interview people under oath (called depositions). And even a "simple" contract dispute between two big companies can involve a million pages of documents produced in discovery ("Produce to us every email any employee has ever sent relating to the underlying contract."). And dozens of depositions. Those documents have to be reviewed by lawyers or those under their supervision, and those depositions need to be prepped for and taken. Depositions can involve hundreds of exhibits, can last for a full day or more, and involve multiple big law lawyers on each side. Then you start working the case up for trial, writing motions for the judge. The motions essentially boil down to "there shouldn't even be a trial" and "if there is a trial, they shouldn't be able to say X, Y, and Z." Those motions are dozens to hundreds of pages long. Some "simple" contract disputes in federal courts have hundreds of different pre-trial filings. All written by lawyers. Then if you get to a trial, you have a bunch of witnesses, hundreds of exhibits, and more motions to write. During this whole time you or other lawyers have been advising the client about the laws of whether they have to disclose the lawsuit in their securities filings with the government, whether it will impact their insurance, whether settling will create a risk of additional lawsuits, and a whole host of other implications. |
Anonymous
| Bigger firms have bigger clients, usually companies, who have deep pockets to pay for fancier handling. That’s all. |
Anonymous
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As for what it's like to work in big law, imagine that you're paying someone $600-1,000 per hour to work for you. In other words, imagine employing someone who, every time you send them a short email, charges you a minimum of $100 (because a tenth of an hour is the minimum billable amount). Imagine your reaction if the work they do -- at that price -- has any errors, or if their advice goes wrong, or if they aren't available when you want a phone call, or if they don't respond very quickly to an email.
That, in a nutshell, is what can make it miserable to be a big law lawyer. You know you can't complain to Best Western when the carpet in the room is dirty. But at the Four Seasons? That front desk had better answer the phone on the first ring. |
Anonymous
| Dumb question: are the big 4 accounting firms BigAccounting? And MBB are bigConsulting? |
Anonymous
| My father was a big law partner until he retired recently. Although we’ll paid, it was a grueling career with long, thankless hours. What did he do all day? Revised thousands of pages of contracts and negotiations, back and forth for large corporate mergers and acquisitions on crazy deadlines and turnarounds. Supervised attorneys. Some portion of partnership is business generation. He had to travel a lot while I was growing up to see clients, and would basically be gone while a deal was closing. He (and my mom) sacrificed a lot for the job and the money- worked a ton, missed some birthdays, had to cancel vacations, had to work often even when he took a vacation, and it was soul crushing work. While many people work very hard, and for a lot less money, big law is not really a cushy career. |
Anonymous
Such a weird question. They're attorneys. They work in their field of expertise - commercial, IP, tax, bankruptcy, insurance, lit, whatever that is. They do what any other attorney does but at a bigger, massive firm. |
Anonymous
Maybe to me, might be worth it if I can retire with 15 million. Does he have that? |
Anonymous
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When large cooperations hire a law firm, how often do they penny pinch?
For example, how much thought is given to …eh, let’s go another round of patent prosecution for these 100 patent pending applications. |