Anyone else insanely bored by their job?

[yankees12345!]

First world problem, but sometimes this job (commercial litigation) is just so goddamn boring.

[nerd1]

Me too. Being a corporate associate is insanely boring too. But all office jobs are boring. Everyone pretends that the stuff they are doing is exciting when in fact it's not. It's just something we have to deal with. I just cannot imagine any office job that is as exciting as being an athlete or a rockstar.

[Anonymous User]

Corporate first year. I fucking hate this job so much. I'm counting down the months until I can change over to my dream job (public defender).

[PeanutsNJam]

Corporate first year. I fucking hate this job so much. I'm counting down the months until I can change over to my dream job (public defender).

Why are you in corp if you want to litigate in the future? Might as well switch to lit so you're not starting from square 0 at the public defender's.

[Anonymous User]

Yeah, so I thought about that. When I was making the decision I thought corp would make it easier to go in-house (which I thought was something I wanted to keep open at the time) and being a first year lit associate sounded awful.

As much as I hate my firm it has a pretty good pro bono program, so I'm currently helping represent a defendant at the trial level (writing motions, etc). Plan is to do as much of that as possible this year before I leave. I don't think it's worth it to change practice groups as I want to leave soon after bonus hits next year.

[Anonymous User]

I hear you. I spent almost 4 years in big law and was bored almost the entire time. The first two years felt like I was doing nothing but administrative work, scheduling stuff, and mindless quasi-legal tasks. The last two were better, but still mind-numbingly boring for the most part. It seems like the majority of my job as a big law litigator was answering emails and phone calls. I really don't understand how people do it long-term as a career.

[Lacepiece23]

I hear you. I spent almost 4 years in big law and was bored almost the entire time. The first two years felt like I was doing nothing but administrative work, scheduling stuff, and mindless quasi-legal tasks. The last two were better, but still mind-numbingly boring for the most part. It seems like the majority of my job as a big law litigator was answering emails and phone calls. I really don't understand how people do it long-term as a career.

At least you got phone calls. I’m a fifth year and no one ever calls me.

[M458]

Corporate 4th year here. The reason this job is so awful is the combination of boredom and stress. I'm stressed out all the time, but the majority of tasks I do are still boring.

I could stand being bored if I wasn't stressed, and I'd also be fine being stressed if it was a result of doing exciting work or something I found interesting - but stressed AND bored is killing me.

[Anonymous User]

I'm doing patent prep/pros and I'm sick of it. The repetitive drafting of applications and responding to office actions on low fixed fee budgets gets old fast. I feel like more of an engineer than a lawyer (patent agents and tech advisors do the same work I do). Trying to move to a mixed practice or IP litigation/tech transaction role. I also hate the location I'm in so I'm trying to change that as well. Hopefully soon.

[dabigchina]

Corporate 4th year here. The reason this job is so awful is the combination of boredom and stress. I'm stressed out all the time, but the majority of tasks I do are still boring.

I could stand being bored if I wasn't stressed, and I'd also be fine being stressed if it was a result of doing exciting work or something I found interesting - but stressed AND bored is killing me.

Agreed. Biglaw transactional is the most stressful proofreading job in the world. If you don't love proofreading (I know some people do), it's also one of the most boring jobs.

[Anonymous User]

Boring work + toxic environment is way worse than just boring work. It's so bad where I work my coworker and I keep our doors shut and only leave our offices as needed (get lunch, go to bathroom) to avoid running into a certain partner.

[claptrap]

I love my job. Federal prosecutor, formerly state prosecutor.

The paychecks are no comparison to you biglaw folks, though.

[objctnyrhnr]

I’ll bite.

Midlevel biglaw litigator major city market firm. Formerly state prosecutor, fedclerk in same market.

Even though many with my creds would have gone to biglaw immediately, I went to state prosecution because I was worried about the lack of “fun” element in biglaw.

Turned out that doing the same types of trials over and over started to bore me. I found myself wanting to dive deep into topics and write about them, so I went to biglaw.

It’s really been great, no joke. Sometimes there’s too much work (maybe even often), but moment to moment I very much enjoy doing it.

As a litigator, I truly couldn’t imagine doing anything else. But if you’re a litigator who doesn’t like litigating, i would recommend getting out ASAP because it’s far too intense and adversarial a gig to do if you’re not thinking about legal issues in the shower (bit of hyperbole but almost not really).

[Anonymous User]

Bored + stressed + toxic environment is what I deal with. I lateraled to my current firm from a firm where I was just bored (not enough work).

Here, I do work that doesn’t even relate to my practice regularly because the partners seem to not have work in their actual area. Doing work that isn’t related to my field is extremely boring. I didn’t want to be a health care/health insurance fraud attorney but that’s been a majority of my practice.

Because I don’t know what I am doing, it’s really stressful. I spend hours trying to wrap my head around what I’m even supposed to do.

Lastly, I work with truly terrible people. They’re great attorneys and very well respected, but they are the most difficult people.

So I think that is the trifecta.