SLS_AMG wrote:rayiner wrote:Your exaggerated post suggests you think we're not being serious. You're welcome to believe what you want to believe, but blaming us for offering the kind of insight we never had when we were in your position strikes me as ungrateful.
Every 0L says that they know big law will be trying. But they say that because they know they have to say that. What they don't realize is that even one of those aspects of your exaggerated post being true can make doing the job for years miserable. When you're crying in your office because a senior associate threw you under the bus to a partner, it won't really help that the vacation policy turned out better than expected or that some of the people you work with are really cool.
It's like law exams. Every 0L regurgitates Getting to Maybe and says "I know that law exams are about arguing both sides." But until hey actually take an exam, they don't know what it really means. At the end of the day, lots of people who "know what they're getting into" do badly on exams. And nobody I know, people who were mostly folks who had work experience before law school, has ever said to me "this isn't as bad as I expected."
I can't speak to being a big law associate, but I can say that the difficulty of 1L year (and law school in general) is greatly, greatly exaggerated on this board (IMO).
I haven't read the 0L boards lately, but when I was a 0L, there were lots of posts along the lines of "you don't need to do the reading, just read the supplements and do a lot of practice tests." I don't think TLS makes 1L out to be hard, it just stresses that it's hard to figure out how to write a good exam. Which is true. I know lots of very smart people who read GTM, who worked hard on the material, etc, who got median or below.
I read GTM, etc, but I didn't know exactly what a law school exam would be like until I took my Torts midterm. I had a general idea that you had to argue both sides and point out ambiguities in the law and the facts, but it wasn't until I knew some law and applied it in the context of a fact pattern that I really got what all that meant. I found big law to be the same way. I knew generally it would involve long hours, etc, but it wasn't until I was doing a mindless doc review at 2 am, where every interesting document I found had already been seen but we were all still working just to be able to say we'd covered all the documents we collected, it wasn't until I did it that I really
felt the full weight of the job.
I know a number of people who thought 1L was easier than expected. I don't know anybody who has said, or has even suggested, that big law is easier/better than they expected. Even my super-energetic hyper gunner friend who loved everything about her firm as an SA has been ground down over the last year. A number like their job on the whole, but the margin between "it's worth it" and "it's not worth it" is a lot thinner than they thought it would be.