Crazy jealous of all these big law firm salaries!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are divisions and offices at DOJ that have notoriously bad hours, and travel to boot. This is one of the reasons why you have seasoned attorneys (especially in higher level managerial positions) who leave DOJ for private practice. The hours are similar, travel is similar, pay is multiple times more and you actually have decent support services (your own secretary, efficient HR, etc.)

But a lot less job security. . . 10 years max, up and out.

At that level (high level management @ DOJ to equity partner at a firm), the concern is less about job security and more about revolving doors.

If you are a senior DOJ lawyer, it's fairly easy to land an equity partnership at a law firm, but they expect you to generate major business after your recusal period is over. If that doesn't happen, well, you'll probably be back at DOJ or applying for in-house jobs.

how does someone lateral from DOJ and generate business? seems hard.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:They're earned, to say the least.

Not really.

Not really? Lawyers at firms don't have to work hard? and a lot? Wonder what my dh is doing all the time at work and while he's up all hours of the night working in our home office. Hmmmm.....I'd better take a closer look.

I think the point is that attorneys are not the only ones working brutal hours, or working hard. I don't blame folks for taking what the market offers, but I'd love to see a bit of self-awareness.

/wife of Biglaw associate

Thanks for this. I swear people with high-paying professional degrees have their heads up their butts about what kinds of hours other people work. My parents are both MDs (and so is their social circle), and whenever I mentioned to anyone that I wasn't studying medicine the first response was, "Oh, you don't want to work as hard as your parents." Yeah, whatever. DH and I both have PhDs and work in the private sector. I won't even talk about some of the hours I worked while I was doing research, and while I have a better schedule now DH's is very grueling and involves a lot of last minute international travel as well. We earn good money because we are in the private sector, but I know a ton of people who work similar hours without anywhere near the same level of compensation.

Sure, Big Law lawyers work hard, but so do a lot of other people who don't have the financial renumeration to show for it.

I have a PhD in organic chemistry from a gruelingly competitive research lab. (My advisor was gunning for the Nobel Prize.) It didn6't even come close to being as rough as my time in Biglaw. Research is largely done at your own pace. If you make a mistake, it's yours to fix. The hours are long, but often monotonous. In BigLaw you have to account for and justify every 6 minutes. Errors are called out in a brutal fashion. You are constantly at the mercy of your email. The intensity just doesn't compare.

The other difference is that people who are working for a nonprofit or in research generally have the satisfaction of knowing that their work is making a difference to society in some way. That their work actually matters. This sounds like a minor point, but it's huge. Grinding away for 80 hours per week is hard enough, but doing it because one rich a**hole is suing another rich a**hole is just so, so demoralizing.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Former biglaw associate here who left for In-house: the quality of life is awful and the majority daydream abut getting out, so don't be jealous!

But take it in until 40, then 'retire' to some kind of lower ey career you like -- lsat tutor, whatever kind of job to get health insurance? You make 4-5x what I make as a government scientist, so you should be able to retire in at least half the time!

Don't be silly, your lifestyle ramps up because everyone around you is doing it, and law is status based so you can't lose face.

So they fire you early if you dont buy crippling mortgage, private school, and s-class?

I mean if you earn $400k, and live like we do on $200k, in a decade over 1 million and then when 'retireed' mean keep working but in a less stressful career freelance writer it LSAT tutor or something with Starbucks on the side for health ins. Save up early and coast, many Goldman Sachs refugees do this.

It's not the keeping up with the Joneses that leads you to spend way more than you need to, it's exhaustion. If you're putting all your energy into slaving away for 80 hours a week, you come to rely on the money as the only thing that makes your life easier. You don't have time to cook, so you order in dinner every night. You don't have time for a 45 minute commute, so you buy a townhouse in Dupont that's a five minute walk from work, even though it costs 3 times as much as a comparable one in Silver Spring. And when you're that worn down, you make bad money choices. If you need a car, you buy the bmw because most of your life is spent working at this soul sucking job, and if you find pleasure in driving an expensive car for those 10 minutes per day, you buy it. It's easy to say hey, tough it out for 10 years and then "retire" to an easy job. But 10 years is a long, long, long time to do that to yourself. It takes a toll on your body, on your emotions, and on your happiness.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's Saturday and I'm up at 430 am. The stock purchase agreement is coming in from Hong Kong and we are having a call at 5 am so we can review changes and assign tasks. We have to get the draft back to to opposing counsel by5 pm today.

I used to be an Ibanker. We would have meeting until 10 pm discussing commercial terms of SPA agreements with client/ lawyers etc. We would leave and arrange to meet at 8 am the next day. We expected the lawyers to turn around the documents overnight and have it ready by then! And we got paid more.

Good for you! Want a cookie?

[Anonymous]

How do you work that many hours?

I work 9-6 with a 50 minute commute each way and I have a tough time getting everything done I want to get done in my evenings

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's Saturday and I'm up at 430 am. The stock purchase agreement is coming in from Hong Kong and we are having a call at 5 am so we can review changes and assign tasks. We have to get the draft back to to opposing counsel by5 pm today.

I used to be an Ibanker. We would have meeting until 10 pm discussing commercial terms of SPA agreements with client/ lawyers etc. We would leave and arrange to meet at 8 am the next day. We expected the lawyers to turn around the documents overnight and have it ready by then! And we got paid more.

Good for you! Want a cookie?

I think these stories are somewhat apocryphal. I did similar corporate work for many years and nobody ever treated me like this. Maybe Bain, KKR, TPG are just nicer folks than their bankers? I do know of one associate in another group that quit because she had some weird asshole like you calling her all the time, but it's not that common.

Anyways I practiced out of Boston not NYC so maybe that helped. I could see doing my old job again if I lived close to work and had no kids. But family in the suburbs? No way.

Anyways I feel like a lot of lawyers dig their own grave. If you can convince folks to pay you $250 an hour (way less than your going rate) and hustle up 1000 hours a year, you can work from home with no boss and live well. But the townhouse in DuPont phenomenon is real and people get themselves stuck.

At this point with $$ in the bank and two kids, if I was fired from myuch more reasonable job, I'd sell my suburban SFH, buy a townhouse in cash (in Philly probably, but somewhere like Olney could work if I wanted to stay in DC area) and start my own shit. Why the #%^ should some other lawyer get a cut of my labor?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are divisions and offices at DOJ that have notoriously bad hours, and travel to boot. This is one of the reasons why you have seasoned attorneys (especially in higher level managerial positions) who leave DOJ for private practice. The hours are similar, travel is similar, pay is multiple times more and you actually have decent support services (your own secretary, efficient HR, etc.)

My husband is in one of these federal jobs in a supervisory role. 60-70 hours per week plus lots of work at home in the evenings and travel. The work is fascinating. However, the toll on our family is high--both because he is never around and I have to also have to work full time to be able to afford to live here.

I’m in this position too. My husband works a ton as a fed in a fascinating and powerful job. I work full time and am the default parent for everything because he’s always working. He’s gone for 12 hours a day and comes home and works 2-4 more hours in the evening. I don’t mind working (I enjoy my own job) but it’s having to do the rest solo thats ihard. It’s dofficult to be married to someone who works a ton without the big compensation. We can’t hire most things out

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:That's all. I'm not a lawyer but damn... I really should have been!

The grass is always greener.

[Anonymous]

I left biglaw as a 5th yr associate for a tenure track faculty position. 50% salary cut. Six years later I am now barely making what I did as a first-year associate. do not regret it for a second.

[Anonymous]

I’m a relatively young partner (non-equity) and in my experience the horrors of biglaw are nowhere near as bad as they’re made out to be in this thread. Part of it is practice area—I have a niche regulatory focus so the hours are more manageable. But even for general litigators and transactional lawyers, there may be times when you’re super busy but NO ONE consistently works 80 hours per week. Hell almost no one consistently works 60. Associates may have months here and there when they’re at that pace, but it’s temporary. Unless you work at Kirkland or some other sweatshop.

My average day is 10-7. I typically work 0-4 hours over the weekend, on my own schedule. I have partners who leave at 5 to eat dinner with their kids every day; I have one partner who coaches sports and frequently ducks out to do weeknight practices at 4 or 5. People do work hard, but let’s not go overboard. Also once you are more senior you get to work hard but You largely get to structure your own schedule and are accountable solely to your clients. No admin crap. That’s very freeing.

[Anonymous]

It's a trade off. Sometimes it really really sucks. My husband is in big law. He is only home before the kids go to bed about 1x per month. He has to work on the weekends very often. Sometimes hours that are equivalent to a full work day. Some nights after coming home at 10, he still works until 1am finishing things up.

But we don't have to worry about money and have a nice house zoned for great schools. But as a pp stated-the money is 100% earned.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m a relatively young partner (non-equity) and in my experience the horrors of biglaw are nowhere near as bad as they’re made out to be in this thread. Part of it is practice area—I have a niche regulatory focus so the hours are more manageable. But even for general litigators and transactional lawyers, there may be times when you’re super busy but NO ONE consistently works 80 hours per week. Hell almost no one consistently works 60. Associates may have months here and there when they’re at that pace, but it’s temporary. Unless you work at Kirkland or some other sweatshop.

My average day is 10-7. I typically work 0-4 hours over the weekend, on my own schedule. I have partners who leave at 5 to eat dinner with their kids every day; I have one partner who coaches sports and frequently ducks out to do weeknight practices at 4 or 5. People do work hard, but let’s not go overboard. Also once you are more senior you get to work hard but You largely get to structure your own schedule and are accountable solely to your clients. No admin crap. That’s very freeing.

When I was in biglaw, my problem wasn’t as much the quantity of hours but the type of work and the personalities I worked with. It was a second career, and I had never thought that so many neurotic, anxious, and downright unsocialized people could work for the same employer.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m a relatively young partner (non-equity) and in my experience the horrors of biglaw are nowhere near as bad as they’re made out to be in this thread. Part of it is practice area—I have a niche regulatory focus so the hours are more manageable. But even for general litigators and transactional lawyers, there may be times when you’re super busy but NO ONE consistently works 80 hours per week. Hell almost no one consistently works 60. Associates may have months here and there when they’re at that pace, but it’s temporary. Unless you work at Kirkland or some other sweatshop.

My average day is 10-7. I typically work 0-4 hours over the weekend, on my own schedule. I have partners who leave at 5 to eat dinner with their kids every day; I have one partner who coaches sports and frequently ducks out to do weeknight practices at 4 or 5. People do work hard, but let’s not go overboard. Also once you are more senior you get to work hard but You largely get to structure your own schedule and are accountable solely to your clients. No admin crap. That’s very freeing.

When I was in biglaw, my problem wasn’t as much the quantity of hours but the type of work and the personalities I worked with. It was a second career, and I had never thought that so many neurotic, anxious, and downright unsocialized people could work for the same employer.

I’m PP you’re responding to. This I agree with lock, stock and barrel. It’s a gremlin factory.

[Anonymous]

i'm not - it's a shitty job on top of shitty hours.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How do you work that many hours?

I work 9-6 with a 50 minute commute each way and I have a tough time getting everything done I want to get done in my evenings

Of course I don't do what I want in the evenings are you kidding

I have

1) Live in childcare
2) Laundry service
3) Maid service
4) Grocery delivery
5) Eat breakfast and lunch every day in the firm cafeteria
6) Carry out for dinner 3-4 nights a week
7) My school-aged kid doesn't get enough sleep waiting up for us to get home from work

But in exchange I max out retirement and we can help our aging parents. Plus private school.