Reply to If you could do Biglaw all over again...

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[quote=Anonymous]NP here.  I actually really enjoyed my work at my mid-sized firm (400 lawyers, at the time) and consider it to have been a fantastic training ground for later jobs.  However, I left voluntarily after 4 years because I wasn't making my hours and that stressed me out, even though my work was excellent and no one had given me too much trouble about my billables.  Although leaving was absolutely the right decision -- I love working for the Federal government! -- in hindsight, part of me wishes I had forced myself to care less / worry less about the hours and just stick around collecting that paycheck until they actually made me leave.  I had co-workers who did less work, less well, and stayed longer because law firms are pretty chicken about actually firing people; one of my peers even made partner despite his terrible billable hours.

So in that sense I left money on the table by leaving early.  I don't know if my personality is the sort that would have allowed me to not care, though, and the hours I was putting in were pretty grueling and put pressure on my home life.

FWIW, the reason for my low hours was that I was doing a lot of work on partners' business development projects, so I was working my ass off but not actually billing that much of my time.  I'm undecided as to whether I should have shut down the bus-dev work to focus on billables: it was "more senior" work and led to my being successful later in my subsequent jobs.  But it sucked to not get credit for it.  YMMV.[/quote]

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