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09042014

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Re: So do you NEVER take vacay in BigLaw?

Post by 09042014 » Sun May 11, 2014 9:47 pm

El Pollito wrote:
lecsa wrote:You can take vacay, but you have to make up your hours later. It's not really much of a "vacay" at that point.
Why would anyone have to make up hours? If you're cutting it that close to minimum billables a vacation isn't the best idea.
Having to build up a buffer IS making them up.

Also only vacationing when you are above billables is how you end up a 4th year who hasn't taken a day off.

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Pragmatic Gun

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Re: So do you NEVER take vacay in BigLaw?

Post by Pragmatic Gun » Tue May 13, 2014 8:48 pm

JSWright101 wrote:
dwil770 wrote:
thesealocust wrote:2nd year biglaw associate here: I take 4 weeks per year, and I've never been contacted while on vacation for any reason or seen anybody reschedule a vacation.

The only people I know who don't take 4 weeks per year are the people who take 5 because that's a perk after a certain level of seniority.

Don't know what you're on about.

Come on man if you've been following the recent big law threads it is no surprise that 0Ls think you can't take any vacays whatsoever
True. My current expectations of BigLaw are pretty much 80 hours of work per week/7days a week for 365 days a year for 3 to 5 years (if I'm lucky) whereupon I will be unceremoniously drop-kicked and forced to find a much lower paying job while I live off of cat food to assist in servicing my loans. When I get my one date night per six month window with my bf I will be on the phone the entire time. I will be fat/have lost all of my fitness gains (I'm a gym fanatic) from a very irregular sleeping/working out schedule too. I will strangely have time to post on TLS tho but that is from mysterious minutes between the soul crushing monotony. Everyone will talk down to me constantly/be generally rude individuals and all passions/hobbies I have will quickly be extinguished as my personality and habits are irreversibly altered. That's about it.
Also, you will scare 0Ls away from Big Law with your TLS poasts.

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Blindmelon

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Re: So do you NEVER take vacay in BigLaw?

Post by Blindmelon » Wed May 14, 2014 8:21 am

Desert Fox wrote:
El Pollito wrote:
lecsa wrote:You can take vacay, but you have to make up your hours later. It's not really much of a "vacay" at that point.
Why would anyone have to make up hours? If you're cutting it that close to minimum billables a vacation isn't the best idea.
Having to build up a buffer IS making them up.

Also only vacationing when you are above billables is how you end up a 4th year who hasn't taken a day off.
I pretty much lost any hope of vacation when I had a slow month at 100/hours (no sick time rocks). So thats like 80 hours I need to make up, so I will have 0 vacation. Its the best.

09042014

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Re: So do you NEVER take vacay in BigLaw?

Post by 09042014 » Wed May 14, 2014 10:43 am

Blindmelon wrote:
Desert Fox wrote:
El Pollito wrote:
lecsa wrote:You can take vacay, but you have to make up your hours later. It's not really much of a "vacay" at that point.
Why would anyone have to make up hours? If you're cutting it that close to minimum billables a vacation isn't the best idea.
Having to build up a buffer IS making them up.

Also only vacationing when you are above billables is how you end up a 4th year who hasn't taken a day off.
I pretty much lost any hope of vacation when I had a slow month at 100/hours (no sick time rocks). So thats like 80 hours I need to make up, so I will have 0 vacation. Its the best.
Take it anyway. Nobody is going to fire you.

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El Pollito

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Re: So do you NEVER take vacay in BigLaw?

Post by El Pollito » Wed May 14, 2014 10:46 am

Desert Fox wrote:
Blindmelon wrote: I pretty much lost any hope of vacation when I had a slow month at 100/hours (no sick time rocks). So thats like 80 hours I need to make up, so I will have 0 vacation. Its the best.
Take it anyway. Nobody is going to fire you.
And if they do you'll have like a year to get a new job.

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run26.2

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Re: So do you NEVER take vacay in BigLaw?

Post by run26.2 » Wed May 14, 2014 12:26 pm

Those are the times when you go on vacation.

lecsa

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Re: So do you NEVER take vacay in BigLaw?

Post by lecsa » Sat May 17, 2014 8:25 pm

Desert Fox wrote:
El Pollito wrote:
lecsa wrote:You can take vacay, but you have to make up your hours later. It's not really much of a "vacay" at that point.
Why would anyone have to make up hours? If you're cutting it that close to minimum billables a vacation isn't the best idea.
Having to build up a buffer IS making them up.

Also only vacationing when you are above billables is how you end up a 4th year who hasn't taken a day off.
People who say that kind of stuff obviously don't work in biglaw ("if you're cutting it that close...") or work for Cravath or some other ultra-sweatshop.

My department is busy but we aren't billing 2000+ on average or whatever. As long as I'm above average for billables, I'm comfortable taking vacation.

Plus last year I billed something like 2300 hours.

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phillywc

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Re: So do you NEVER take vacay in BigLaw?

Post by phillywc » Sat May 17, 2014 10:29 pm

These 0L threads always make me cringe. The lack of ability to acknowledge you lost or fucked up and to just drop it is sad and makes all 0Ls look bad.

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Re: So do you NEVER take vacay in BigLaw?

Post by SLS_AMG » Fri May 23, 2014 2:27 am

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).

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manu6926

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Post by manu6926 » Fri May 23, 2014 5:04 am

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rayiner

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Re: So do you NEVER take vacay in BigLaw?

Post by rayiner » Fri May 23, 2014 8:50 am

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.

Princetonlaw68

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Re: So do you NEVER take vacay in BigLaw?

Post by Princetonlaw68 » Fri May 23, 2014 2:53 pm

phillywc wrote:These 0L threads always make me cringe. The lack of ability to acknowledge you lost or fucked up and to just drop it is sad and makes all 0Ls look bad.

That's not a 0L thing on this site. It's an everyone thing.

(Also just wanted to add that this thread was very helpful to me, and I had the same kinds of thoughts about vacations in big law as OP before I read through this thread.)

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