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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Lol Biglaw lawyers complaining about 80 hours a week making 300+. [b]You do know that there are bunch of jobs with similar hours but much less pay[/b]? Accountants for example? Ceiling 100k if you lucky, 4 months a year you forget you have home! Working till 2am with no weekends. And yeah you can't take "work home" as it is illegal actually to take anything home. 
Think about it next time you complain.[/quote]

THANK YOU.
I think lawyers forget that other people work a lot of hours, too. Those of us who work the same but for nonprofits, government, etc. (and yes we exist) make almost nothing comparatively. It's not that I want to be big law or any law, it sounds totally soul-sucking, but I think that many many lawyers in this town are myopic about the fact that not everyone is balancing their hours with the same salary.[/quote]

I've never heard of a non-profit/government position that consistently runs at big law hours (short of being at the absolute top of the food chain). Sure, some of those positions may occasionally run as busy as big law, but not on a daily basis.

I worked full time in a real career that was paying me six figures while doing law school part time. I graduated in the top 10% of my class, made law review, etc.... I likened it to having two full time jobs and I was operating on about 5 hours of sleep per night.

I eventually left big law for investment banking.

Those four years in law school were a total cake walk compared to my time in big law and I've found investment banking to be less stressful than big law, though the hours can get up there.

The things that are tough to appreciate about big law until you do it:

1.  Big law is perfectly positioned. The only bad thing for big law is the status quo. As long as general economic conditions are improving or deteriorating, big law firms will have work to do. The vast majority of industries and service providers are much more sensitive to economic conditions, but it also means those industries can build into down time into their economic models.

2.  Big law firms sell the delivery of perfection on a substantive and procedural basis with the promise of a quick turn around. A few weeks ago, I was under a time crunch and called my outside counsel in a Friday morning. I asked counsel to deliver work product in final form to me by the following Tuesday morning. Ordinarily, it would take four weeks to do what I was asking for.

3.  There is virtually nothing gained from getting better at your job. Because you bill by the hour, efficiencies that come with experience accrue no gains to the individual lawyer. In the vast majority of professional fields, getting good at your job means your life gets better in some form or fashion.  Want to leave early on Ftiday to get a head start on a vacation or the holiday weekend?  In many jobs that just means working harder during the week. In big law, especially at junior levels, it's almost impossible to pull this off.

4.  Vacations: Even in banking, when I go on vacation, my boss expects me to be offline. In fact, I'm now willing vacation in remote places. In big law, at a junior level going on vacation means taking your laptop, being available and regularely checking in. As you become more senior it really means taking your family on vacation while you work from the hotel/office in your vacation home. This of course assumes that you didn't decide at the last second that your family would go on the big family vacation without you.

5.  The proof is in the pudding:  big law people age badly. As collective groups, I've been around engineers, doctors, accountants, investment bankers and commercial bankers. Nobody looks as worn out as the big law folks and it's the only profession I know of where grey hairs regularly show up for people in their late 20s and full heads of grey hair by late 30s are not a rare occurrence. [/quote]

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