Top Law Schools

Anonymous User wrote:

No, because people in their 30s are more likely to have issues with the lifestyle

First, my bona fides: I'm in my mid 30s, and have been a lawyer for around a decade, split roughly 50-50 between litigating at a V20 firm and doing appellate work for the government, with an AIII clerkship thrown in as well. I'm also married to a non-lawyer prestige professional (think doctor or professor) and have three kids -- we wanted to stop at two, but sometimes there's two blobs on the ultrasound.

Second, the bias against older entry-levels is not a myth. My dad is a senior partner at a 30ish attorney satellite office of a mid-tier firm, and has done a couple of stints as hiring partner. He flat-out told me that they wouldn't hire a first-year over thirty unless they were sure that family wasn't going to be an issue (e.g., someone who is divorced or gay without children). Similarly, he also said that while they are happy to hire younger married women, it's generally assumed that those associates will only be able to work 4-6 years until the second kid comes, with a six month break for the first kid. Of course, my dad is a late 50s/early 60s male who was raised in the south, so his views may not be representative of law firm management as a whole.

Third, and most importantly for this thread, I think that the idea that one cannot balance a biglaw career and a family is wrongheaded, with two caveats. Yes, you work a ton of hours. But you also make a ton of money that you can use to pay someone to watch your children, and once they're in school, you're probably only missing a couple of hours a day compared to a 9-5. If that -- one thing that people forget is that most biglaw attorneys have the mornings with their kids, which is something that someone who has to be at his desk by 8:00 AM doesn't. So yes, you're missing the 6:00-8:00 PM hours that other parents get, but you're also there from 6:30 to 8:30 in the morning when most non-lawyers are commuting.

Caveat 1: If your spouse is a stay-at-home parent, you're probably going to get divorced if you have young children. I almost got divorced when I was billing 2400 a year, and that was pre-kids. My spouse wouldn't last nine months now that we have the gremlins. At some point, when they are taking care of the children and cleaning the house during all waking hours, and their sole "adult" time is basically sitting in front of the TV with you from 9:00-11:00 PM as you scarf down some greasy leftovers or takeaway and try to vege out (read: ignore them) after a twelve hour day, they're going to realize that divorce means one night a week and every other weekend free, and a boyfriend/girlfriend whom they actually get to talk to. Either that, or they go batsh!t crazy, and you're the one who initiates the divorce proceedings. The fact of the matter is that biglaw associate spouses tend to be relatively young and well-educated and have had a career of their own prior to kids -- in other words, probably the least-suited people imaginable to be stuck at home with kids and nothing else from 8:30 AM until bedtime.

Caveat 2: If you both work and have young children, you have a much better chance, but accept it up front that your kids will be raised by nannies/pre-schools. That's not so bad for the kids if you have a quality nanny/pre-school (for our first, we found a great Waldorf school, and for our twins, we hired a wonderful woman whom they now call "second mother"), but the idea that your kids are getting raised by someone else takes some getting used to. Especially for the moms.

dingbat wrote:

Anonymous User wrote:

No, because people in their 30s are more likely to have issues with the lifestyle

First, my bona fides: I'm in my mid 30s, and have been a lawyer for around a decade, split roughly 50-50 between litigating at a V20 firm and doing appellate work for the government, with an AIII clerkship thrown in as well. I'm also married to a non-lawyer prestige professional (think doctor or professor) and have three kids -- we wanted to stop at two, but sometimes there's two blobs on the ultrasound.

Second, the bias against older entry-levels is not a myth. My dad is a senior partner at a 30ish attorney satellite office of a mid-tier firm, and has done a couple of stints as hiring partner. He flat-out told me that they wouldn't hire a first-year over thirty unless they were sure that family wasn't going to be an issue (e.g., someone who is divorced or gay without children). Similarly, he also said that while they are happy to hire younger married women, it's generally assumed that those associates will only be able to work 4-6 years until the second kid comes, with a six month break for the first kid. Of course, my dad is a late 50s/early 60s male who was raised in the south, so his views may not be representative of law firm management as a whole.

Third, and most importantly for this thread, I think that the idea that one cannot balance a biglaw career and a family is wrongheaded, with two caveats. Yes, you work a ton of hours. But you also make a ton of money that you can use to pay someone to watch your children, and once they're in school, you're probably only missing a couple of hours a day compared to a 9-5. If that -- one thing that people forget is that most biglaw attorneys have the mornings with their kids, which is something that someone who has to be at his desk by 8:00 AM doesn't. So yes, you're missing the 6:00-8:00 PM hours that other parents get, but you're also there from 6:30 to 8:30 in the morning when most non-lawyers are commuting.

Caveat 1: If your spouse is a stay-at-home parent, you're probably going to get divorced if you have young children. I almost got divorced when I was billing 2400 a year, and that was pre-kids. My spouse wouldn't last nine months now that we have the gremlins. At some point, when they are taking care of the children and cleaning the house during all waking hours, and their sole "adult" time is basically sitting in front of the TV with you from 9:00-11:00 PM as you scarf down some greasy leftovers or takeaway and try to vege out (read: ignore them) after a twelve hour day, they're going to realize that divorce means one night a week and every other weekend free, and a boyfriend/girlfriend whom they actually get to talk to. Either that, or they go batsh!t crazy, and you're the one who initiates the divorce proceedings. The fact of the matter is that biglaw associate spouses tend to be relatively young and well-educated and have had a career of their own prior to kids -- in other words, probably the least-suited people imaginable to be stuck at home with kids and nothing else from 8:30 AM until bedtime.

Caveat 2: If you both work and have young children, you have a much better chance, but accept it up front that your kids will be raised by nannies/pre-schools. That's not so bad for the kids if you have a quality nanny/pre-school (for our first, we found a great Waldorf school, and for our twins, we hired a wonderful woman whom they now call "second mother"), but the idea that your kids are getting raised by someone else takes some getting used to. Especially for the moms.

This explains it beautifully and more eloquently than I can.

Anonymous User wrote:

No, because people in their 30s are more likely to have issues with the lifestyle

Second, the bias against older entry-levels is not a myth. My dad is a senior partner at a 30ish attorney satellite office of a mid-tier firm, and has done a couple of stints as hiring partner. He flat-out told me that they wouldn't hire a first-year over thirty unless they were sure that family wasn't going to be an issue (e.g., someone who is divorced or gay without children). Similarly, he also said that while they are happy to hire younger married women, it's generally assumed that those associates will only be able to work 4-6 years until the second kid comes, with a six month break for the first kid. Of course, my dad is a late 50s/early 60s male who was raised in the south, so his views may not be representative of law firm management as a whole.

Anonymous User wrote:

Fresh Prince wrote:I feel like everyone here is asking some variation of the same question: what are my chances, and what's your grade cut off for my school?

Give it a rest,

you can be a real douche sometimes. this is a very helpful thread. And people's chances are a very real concern, as they should be.

fatduck wrote:

Anonymous User wrote:

Fresh Prince wrote:I feel like everyone here is asking some variation of the same question: what are my chances, and what's your grade cut off for my school?

Give it a rest,

you can be a real douche sometimes. this is a very helpful thread. And people's chances are a very real concern, as they should be.

douche or not, a lot of the questions (at least recently) are either unanswerable or easily answerable with simple research. i'm honestly surprised OP hasn't given up already.

Anonymous User wrote:

fatduck wrote:

Anonymous User wrote:

Fresh Prince wrote:I feel like everyone here is asking some variation of the same question: what are my chances, and what's your grade cut off for my school?

Give it a rest,

you can be a real douche sometimes. this is a very helpful thread. And people's chances are a very real concern, as they should be.

douche or not, a lot of the questions (at least recently) are either unanswerable or easily answerable with simple research. i'm honestly surprised OP hasn't given up already.

kindness? patience? not that difficult if you are not a douche.

itbdvorm wrote:

Anonymous User wrote:

fatduck wrote:

Anonymous User wrote: douche or not, a lot of the questions (at least recently) are either unanswerable or easily answerable with simple research. i'm honestly surprised OP hasn't given up already.

kindness? patience? not that difficult if you are not a douche.

FWIW, douche or not, I appreciated it

Fresh Prince wrote:
Thx. GTL Law Rev left for basically the same reasons. You shouldn't have to write these guys resumes for them or really answering more questions. I'm almost positive that 9/10 questions can be answered by reading only this thread in its entirety.

Fresh Prince wrote:I could identify him after the first month of his posting here. A huge reason for his leaving, which he states himself, is the amount of BS questions and repitition.

OP here is offering advice in his spare time. He isn't a career counselor and sure as hell won't divulge his firm's cutoffs (as he explicitly states very early in this thread), so asking these same questions are a waste of everyone's time.

Use OP wisely, or he'll go the way of GTL Law Rev, and TLS will lose yet another valuable poster.

Anonymous User wrote:

Fresh Prince wrote:I could identify him after the first month of his posting here. A huge reason for his leaving, which he states himself, is the amount of BS questions and repitition.

OP here is offering advice in his spare time. He isn't a career counselor and sure as hell won't divulge his firm's cutoffs (as he explicitly states very early in this thread), so asking these same questions are a waste of everyone's time.

Use OP wisely, or he'll go the way of GTL Law Rev, and TLS will lose yet another valuable poster.

The sad thing is that if you created a "biglaw" sticky and a "clerkship" sticky with the basic information for both, you would eliminate 95% of the posts in this subforum.

On one hand, it's great that TLS has significantly improved over the past couple years. I remember back when the c/o '12 was going through OGI (and when they were going through clerkship apps), there was a dearth of information. Now, answers to almost every question are available through searching and, when people are too lazy to search, someone can usually give a pretty informed answer.

On the other hand, people have become incredibly lazy and have abused good resources. As someone who tries to answer clerkship questions, it's become really tiring answering myriad permutations of the same questions. I can't imagine how bad it must have been for GTL since people could PM him their questions as well.

It seems that TLS should strive to actually institutionalize some of this knowledge, and <shock> more strongly encourage people to search for their answer before asking. The value of TLS certainly took quite a hit when GTL left.

ajax adonis wrote:Why don't you just let him decide for himself?

Anonymous User wrote:

Anonymous User wrote:

Fresh Prince wrote:I could identify him after the first month of his posting here. A huge reason for his leaving, which he states himself, is the amount of BS questions and repitition.

OP here is offering advice in his spare time. He isn't a career counselor and sure as hell won't divulge his firm's cutoffs (as he explicitly states very early in this thread), so asking these same questions are a waste of everyone's time.

Use OP wisely, or he'll go the way of GTL Law Rev, and TLS will lose yet another valuable poster.

The sad thing is that if you created a "biglaw" sticky and a "clerkship" sticky with the basic information for both, you would eliminate 95% of the posts in this subforum.

On one hand, it's great that TLS has significantly improved over the past couple years. I remember back when the c/o '12 was going through OGI (and when they were going through clerkship apps), there was a dearth of information. Now, answers to almost every question are available through searching and, when people are too lazy to search, someone can usually give a pretty informed answer.

On the other hand, people have become incredibly lazy and have abused good resources. As someone who tries to answer clerkship questions, it's become really tiring answering myriad permutations of the same questions. I can't imagine how bad it must have been for GTL since people could PM him their questions as well.

It seems that TLS should strive to actually institutionalize some of this knowledge, and <shock> more strongly encourage people to search for their answer before asking. The value of TLS certainly took quite a hit when GTL left.

This is wildly over-dramatic. I think OP is a big boy/girl and has clearly been answering the questions that they are interested in answering.
What degrades the TLS community more than repetitive questions are these random rules suggested by crusty old posters who already know the answers to questions. It's nothing but bullying. Sometimes people find a thread that is current and want to join with a question that is on their mind. Who cares if its been asked before? This is a thread in some corner of the vast internet, not the national dialogue.
Just relax and let OP determine the rules of his/her thread. You guys seem to know the answer to all these questions, so what are you doing in here anyway?

ajaxconstructions wrote:Prince, stop shitting up this thread.

Anonymous User wrote:The value of TLS certainly took quite a hit when GTL left.

uchi12 wrote:Let's all stop the posts that aren't Q/A. This conversation is degrading a very valuable thread and a great service done by the OP.

What started as someone trying to improve the thread's quality quickly turned counterproductive. Enough.


That being said,

What are the benefits usually associated with being an interviewer? How does one apply to be one?

Basically, I want to understand more about my interviewer than what I can find on google (it's just easier to be comfortable when you know where the person on the other side of the table is coming from).

Kring345 wrote:I follow this thread pretty closely and don't think this was asked (but I asked it in a similar thread):

Everyone always says that business development is key to making partner. What exactly does that mean? Being close with and maintaining current clients? Bringing in new clients? Do they need to be huge companies? I'd imagine most companies that can afford biglaw rates already have representation.

Similarly, should 1st/2nd year associates already be thinking of this? What about students? Obviously grades should be focus, but does it deserve any attention in your eyes?

One of the biggest lessons I've learned in the Marine Corps has been the importance if making oneself relevant/indispensable. I'd business development to be a large part of that process. Agree?