How many hours do NYC corporate associates REALLY work at V5 firms? Forum

[JDJohnP21]

I have seen people on TLS give numbers anywhere from 60-100 hours a week. Only answer if you have actual experience.

mod edit: user has been outed for abusing anon

[zot1]

Too many.

[Anonymous User]

You're asking the wrong question. There's no set hours per week, there's no normal hours per week, nobody sweats the hours per week. Nobody thinks about it like that, that's not the way the world works. There isn't even a start time - you get to work whenever you feel like it, you just take it on the teeth if somebody important needs you and you're not there or you're not meeting deadlines.

But it still sucks. Here are some stories of the searing pain that has been my life working at an NYC V5 firm as a corporate associate:

* The week between Christmas and NYE a major financial institution and a hedge fund operated from a tropical island needed to finalize a deal with a middle eastern sovereign wealth fund. It had to be done, and done right then, before the law changed prohibiting that transaction on January 1st. Fuck you holiday, there's documents to draft and get signed!

* The Monday before Thanksgiving a huge client decided out of the blue to do a huge deal as soon as possible. Most of my team was in the office Thanksgiving day as well as the day after.

* Got an email from a partner with a subject like "CRITICAL: PLEASE READ AND RESPOND AS SOON AS POSSIBLE" halfway through a vacation

* Had strings of weeks without buying my own dinner or paying for transportation home from the firm, because I was at the office late enough to qualify for dinner and car service

* New urgent matters coming in just after, or just as, I tried to leave for the day

* "Covering" for somebody on vacation as a first year with absolutely no idea what I was doing and having the client calling every 10 minutes trying to get documents from me

* Far too many nights at the office past midnight. The only consolation was commiserating with the other junior associates still there too.

* Far too many weekends at the office. The only consolation was commiserating with the other junior associates still there too.

* Far too many mornings that start with a phone filled with new, urgent messages.

* Regularly juggling insane, impossible deadlines. If two documents have to go to the client by the end of the business day, you get to feel the white-hot pressure of getting them as un-fucked-up as possible before hitting send even if you can only work on them until a "reasonable" hour. Generally when that happened, there was a backlog of work to make sure that you weren't doing anything silly like leaving at a reasonable hour just because you had a whirlwind pressure cooker of a day.

* Staggering through an insane project, breathing a sigh of relief, and then immediately getting thrown into something else.

* Tears, substance abuse, sleep deprivation, and anxiety common occurrences in my class of lawyers

Now, that's "just" the highlight reel. There are days when you walk home at 5:00 or 5:30 sharp and nothing crazy happens. There are cool people, cool projects, and yes - shitloads of money and "prestige." It isn't always insane.

But hours per week? That's not what kills you. To borrow a quote from the West Wing:

You guys are like Butch and Sundance peering over the edge of a cliff to the boulder-filled rapids 300 feet below, thinking you better not jump 'cause there's a chance you might drown . . . It's the fall that's gonna kill ya.

If it were just about finding 80, 90, even 100 hours per week to do the job, they wouldn't have to pay $160k starting plus bonus, it wouldn't have extremely high turnover, and you wouldn't have heard the horror stories.

[A. Nony Mouse]

The above answer is extremely helpful, but I'm locking this because the OP has been warned before not to post questions in Legal Employment in a 0L, but persists in abusing anon to do so. And the conditions in big law have been discussed ad nauseam for anyone who wants to read around in this forum.