Practice areas that are the least “lifestyle” friendly? Forum

[Anonymous User]

Does anybody know about antitrust, white collar, or IP?

Fields are overly broad -- at least antitrust and IP include transactional, regulatory, and litigation elements with different lifestyles.

per a good friend at Cleary DC doing antitrust: regulatory antitrust is pretty often a deal-flow practice, but DOJ/FTC/etc move at their own pace, so it's a race to submit ASAP and then dead time. Advantage though is that you're often dependent on outside experts (econ consultants, mostly) so you can reasonably often pull a 9-6 and log out for the day because you need to hear back from your experts before you can do more.

[Anonymous User]

Does anybody know about antitrust, white collar, or IP?

In my experience, white collar includes *a lot* of hours, though a fair number of “easy hours” (ie, doc review, reading things to keep up with case, random tasks). I would say the number of fire drills varies a ton depending on the matter and the client.

You also have to do interview memos, which are the single worst task I've experienced in law, especially if you have a partner who wants them to be polished memos, rather than merely a good record of what happened in the interview.

[rahulg91]

From what I've heard and seen: bankruptcy and real estate suck.

[RedPurpleBlue]

From what I've heard and seen: bankruptcy and real estate suck.

I'm curious if there is a big RE Dirt and RE Finance distinction here in terms of QOL.

[goodkarma56]

As a former M&A associate, I can say that M&A practice was not a very "lifestyle friendly" practice area. It was also very tedious work, IMHO.