Reply to How to change Big Law culture?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Op, if you enjoy any of the following, please make sure you are willing to sacrifice all of them:

— expensive cars
— $2 million plus house
— vacation house
— regular dinners with a $300+ tab
— expensive event tickets on a regular basis
— constant wardrobe updates with designer clothes
— multiple vacations per year at 5 star hotels

Plenty of people are OK without these things. But the golden handcuffs are real. Having a spouse making $750k at a law firm versus $190k per year in govt is the difference between being able to afford these things and not being able to afford them. [/quote]

Op - I don’t know why I am defending myself but we don’t do any of the things you listed above.

We bought our house for $700,000 10 years ago. We drive a mini van and a sedan. No vacation house or expensive vacations multiple times a year. I don’t even do stitch fix (mostly because I don’t care about clothes).

Our money has all gone towards paying off school loans, daycare for our kids, saving for retirement and college for our kids.

Our biggest splurges are every other year trips to somewhere nice and a fancy dinner out every other month if we can find time and a babysitter. [/quote]

Okay so why is DH still in biglaw? You don't have golden handcuffs from a super fancy lifestyle.

Everyone is saying that the best option is to leave. Culture change is slow. He should ask fellow colleagues how they set boundaries. But I am in-house and a lot of us are making the point that with extremely high billing rates, we have certain expectations of biglaw attorneys who make much more than we do. And our own deadlines, internal and external, are coming from our leadership or external forces. The real "fix" is to do biglaw for a certain period, make the $$$, and then move on - apart from the small # of people who forge some balance or who really enjoy the work of the $.[/quote]

Not op but I wonder how people move on. What jobs do they get? I know many attorneys but no big law ones. None make over 300k. And they work very hard, long hours, have billable hours too...So where do former big law people go and get jobs that still pay well and are low pressure?[/quote]

In-house at banks and tech companies[/quote]

Neither of those options hire many mid-tier litigation partners. It's much harder for a run of the mill big law litigator to land those sorts of exit options. [/quote]

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