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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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. [/quote]

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.  [/quote]

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