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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I was recently chatting with a very senior Big Law partner and he told me that he thinks if you want to practice law at a high level (so basically any AmLaw 200 firm, I think was his frame of reference) you need to expect as a partner that you will be putting in about 2500 billable hours a year. And then he said that on top of that you need to be putting in the hours on business development, plus contributing to firm or practice management as is appropriate for your level. So that would come out to an average of 60 hours a week, minimum. Plus if you want vacations or holidays, that's going to push the average up for the other weeks. Client work and BD demand ebbs and flows a bit, so you might have some weeks at 40 but you will definitely have some at 80. And this is for a partner, so you need to assume the work you're doing is not some piddling little low level memo or something -- we're talking high level, difficult work, including client management and managing demands/egos/etc., plus the management aspect of the job in terms of guiding the team that sits under you.

If that is not of interest to you, do not pursue a partnership at a Big Law firm. Don't pursue a job that operates as I just described and then spend your time whining to other people about how you don't have enough free time or whatever. Either that sounds appealing to you (presumably because you actually like work, it charges you up, you'd rather be practicing law and pursuing clients than other things), or it doesn't.

[b]I don't understand why law attracts so many people who don't seem to want to do the job they signed up for. Are doctors like this? I am aware of downsides to practicing medicine (dealing with insurance, the time pressures that the corporatization of medicine put on practitioners, paperwork and document, etc.) but I have personally never heard any of the doctors I know complain about how miserable their jobs are the way so many lawyers do. They seem to have understood what they were getting into, I guess[/b].[/quote]

I have noticed this too. I wonder if some of it is that the barrier to entry to law is lower than for a doctor? The fact that you can get into law school from any major with good grades and decent LSAT score means that people who might not understand or be interested in the actual practice can do it. I am not as familiar with the path to be a doctor but you definitely have to have done an appropriate major and then get through longer training. [/quote]

I do think this is part of it. A lot of people wind up in law school kind of by default and not because they are really dying to be practicing lawyers. I know that was me, to some extent.

But I figured out early on that partner track at a Big Law firm was definitely not for me and I don't even practice law anymore (though do use my law degree). I think in addition to a lot of lawyers being sort of lukewarm on the profession, you wind up with a lot of people who get funneled into Big Law because of the high pay (and the high cost of law school -- got to pay off those loans somehow) and who are not presented with other options, nor do they really seek them up. I think the group that winds up unhappily "stuck" in Big Law gigs (while cashing the checks, of course) is a sub-group of people who are good at following rules and doing what is expected of them, but don't really know how to make decisions for themselves or evaluate options.

Also an alarming number of Big Law attorneys have no idea how to look for or get a job because they have only ever gotten jobs through formal recruitment processes or maybe applying for a listed opening and going through that formal process. They literally just don't know how to do a job search the way most other professionals do (networking, making contacts, exploring paths that involve their kills but might branch off their current trajectory, etc.). It leaves them feeling helpless because they are not offered the exact job they want. But that's a solvable problem.[/quote]

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