When did you start to hate big law? Forum

[Anonymous User]

Unironically agreed that this type of debate is emblematic of biglaw culture. "just try to be kind to others". "why should I?"

This post describes TLS so well

[Anonymous User]

Midlevels and seniors also insulate juniors from a lot of the partner craziness, and since juniors can't see that happening most of the time, they often don't know. I know that I have personally done that, whether by pushing back on deadlines or talking the partner out of a pointless, difficult, and time-intensive exercise, much of which would fall on the juniors to accomplish. That a partner is pleasant to you on a call does not mean that they are reasonable w/r/t work and that midlevels and seniors have not saved you from unknown shit work.

[Anonymous User]

However I envision myself in an office in the best city in the world.

Did it ever occur to you that on a personal level, it won't really matter where you are if you spend every waking moment in a skyscraper?

I had a lot of coworkers who moved to NYC thinking they'd leave the office and head straight to Knicks games and the opera and Paraguayan-Armenian fusion restaurants. Most nights, they're so physically and mentally exhausted that all they wanted to do was lie on the couch and put some background Netflix on while they passed out praying for a meteor or First Republic to go bankrupt. They paid a premium for apartments on Broadway and they might as well have been in some farmhouse in a cornfield.

This is overly dramatic. I'm married with a kid now, but when I was a young associate in NYC I went out almost every Friday and Saturday night and enjoyed (and still enjoy, but it's different now) the crap out of the city. It is a hard and sometimes shitty job but it's not 100 hours a week and rarely even 70 hours a week - there's absolutely plenty of time to do stuff besides work and veg. If you feel like you can't enjoy your down time because you're always nervous and looking at your phone, then just stop looking at your phone so much when you're off the clock.

[Anonymous User]

However I envision myself in an office in the best city in the world.

Did it ever occur to you that on a personal level, it won't really matter where you are if you spend every waking moment in a skyscraper?

I had a lot of coworkers who moved to NYC thinking they'd leave the office and head straight to Knicks games and the opera and Paraguayan-Armenian fusion restaurants. Most nights, they're so physically and mentally exhausted that all they wanted to do was lie on the couch and put some background Netflix on while they passed out praying for a meteor or First Republic to go bankrupt. They paid a premium for apartments on Broadway and they might as well have been in some farmhouse in a cornfield.

This is overly dramatic. I'm married with a kid now, but when I was a young associate in NYC I went out almost every Friday and Saturday night and enjoyed (and still enjoy, but it's different now) the crap out of the city. It is a hard and sometimes shitty job but it's not 100 hours a week and rarely even 70 hours a week - there's absolutely plenty of time to do stuff besides work and veg. If you feel like you can't enjoy your down time because you're always nervous and looking at your phone, then just stop looking at your phone so much when you're off the clock.

My biglaw experience improved a lot when I established some pretty dramatic but fair boundaries on my availability. Like if there is no reason for me to think otherwise, I don’t think twice about putting the phone down at 6:30 on Friday and not responding other than “Will do” whenever I happen to glance at it. The same on Saturday. Sometimes things blow up, sometimes there are fire drills, but especially now you aren’t going to get fired for doing that routine thing on Monday morning instead of Saturday night.

[Anonymous User]

For me the big revelation in biglaw is when you realize how much worse the hours are than they look. I billed around 2400 hours last year, which sounds bad-ish, but it's so much worse in actual reality than 48 hours a week on average. Case in point: you pull two all nighters in a row, and so then you have no motivation and do nothing but fuck around on the internet for the next week and bill next to nothing. Those weeks don't really recharge you (you're still at your desk and available), but they significantly reduce what would be a 3000+ hour year.

[Sackboy]

For me the big revelation in biglaw is when you realize how much worse the hours are than they look. I billed around 2400 hours last year, which sounds bad-ish, but it's so much worse in actual reality than 48 hours a week on average. Case in point: you pull two all nighters in a row, and so then you have no motivation and do nothing but fuck around on the internet for the next week and bill next to nothing. Those weeks don't really recharge you (you're still at your desk and available), but they significantly reduce what would be a 3000+ hour year.

Yep, this was it for me. Finding a place where you can bill 1800-1900 and not only survive but advance is the sweet spot. I found it at a boutique, but maybe you can find it in biglaw if you're a certain type of practitioner. I just wasn't cut out for the 2XXX hours which seemed to just take all of the energy out of my life. Now, I enjoy my weekends and most every night past ~6:30 PM.

[Anonymous User]

Getting a notification that I'm on the naughty list for forgetting to post a filler time entry to have 7 hours of time clocked daily. Just so silly and petty.

[Anonymous User]

For me the big revelation in biglaw is when you realize how much worse the hours are than they look. I billed around 2400 hours last year, which sounds bad-ish, but it's so much worse in actual reality than 48 hours a week on average. Case in point: you pull two all nighters in a row, and so then you have no motivation and do nothing but fuck around on the internet for the next week and bill next to nothing. Those weeks don't really recharge you (you're still at your desk and available), but they significantly reduce what would be a 3000+ hour year.

This is why WFH is a godsend. You don't have to be at your desk anymore. I spent all of last week running all nighters. The last few days? I'm having a great time doing whatever I want to do.

[giggaman1228]

However I envision myself in an office in the best city in the world.

Did it ever occur to you that on a personal level, it won't really matter where you are if you spend every waking moment in a skyscraper?

I had a lot of coworkers who moved to NYC thinking they'd leave the office and head straight to Knicks games and the opera and Paraguayan-Armenian fusion restaurants. Most nights, they're so physically and mentally exhausted that all they wanted to do was lie on the couch and put some background Netflix on while they passed out praying for a meteor or First Republic to go bankrupt.

Your coworkers destroyed first republic

[futuresuccessstory]

I hate how micro managed we are and the level of bureaucracy. Everyone needs everything right away and everything is an emergency when it really isn’t.

Most lawyers I know didn’t go to a firm and I feel like they got a chance to be a lawyer quicker and deal with actual legal issues and strategy.

[Monochromatic Oeuvre]

However I envision myself in an office in the best city in the world.

Did it ever occur to you that on a personal level, it won't really matter where you are if you spend every waking moment in a skyscraper?

I had a lot of coworkers who moved to NYC thinking they'd leave the office and head straight to Knicks games and the opera and Paraguayan-Armenian fusion restaurants. Most nights, they're so physically and mentally exhausted that all they wanted to do was lie on the couch and put some background Netflix on while they passed out praying for a meteor or First Republic to go bankrupt.

Your coworkers destroyed first republic

Those dipshits finally had something go their way.

[Anonymous User]

I hate how micro managed we are and the level of bureaucracy. Everyone needs everything right away and everything is an emergency when it really isn’t.

Most lawyers I know didn’t go to a firm and I feel like they got a chance to be a lawyer quicker and deal with actual legal issues and strategy.

Agree that false deadline and micromanaging suck. I'm always honest with juniors about why a deadline is what it is, and am willing to go to bat for those juniors when something needs to shift. I often shuffle work around (and even take work on myself) to accommodate.

But some juniors see deadlines as false that are anything but, and I started hating the job when I began having to micromanage these associates. One junior recently asked if an important client deadline could be moved because the junior (one of many on the team doing the exact same work) thought they couldn't finish their portion by the end of 2023. As if we're going to tell an important client to modify their business strategy because one of many juniors got busy. This junior constantly blows "false" deadlines that are actually set up so that I (and the partner) can review the junior's (sloppy) work before we promised it to the client.

Anyway, I dealt with my fair share of false deadlines and micromanaging seniors, but there is truly nothing worse than managing a late, sloppy junior who takes no responsibility for preparing polished/final work product. And those juniors are the ones that make me paranoid, and thus more likely to micromanage and set up false deadlines along the way as a buffer for my own sanity.

[Anonymous User]

I hate how micro managed we are and the level of bureaucracy. Everyone needs everything right away and everything is an emergency when it really isn’t.

Most lawyers I know didn’t go to a firm and I feel like they got a chance to be a lawyer quicker and deal with actual legal issues and strategy.

Agree that false deadline and micromanaging suck. I'm always honest with juniors about why a deadline is what it is, and am willing to go to bat for those juniors when something needs to shift. I often shuffle work around (and even take work on myself) to accommodate.

But some juniors see deadlines as false that are anything but, and I started hating the job when I began having to micromanage these associates. One junior recently asked if an important client deadline could be moved because the junior (one of many on the team doing the exact same work) thought they couldn't finish their portion by the end of 2023. As if we're going to tell an important client to modify their business strategy because one of many juniors got busy. This junior constantly blows "false" deadlines that are actually set up so that I (and the partner) can review the junior's (sloppy) work before we promised it to the client.

Anyway, I dealt with my fair share of false deadlines and micromanaging seniors, but there is truly nothing worse than managing a late, sloppy junior who takes no responsibility for preparing polished/final work product. And those juniors are the ones that make me paranoid, and thus more likely to micromanage and set up false deadlines along the way as a buffer for my own sanity.

What was the assignment you gave to the junior that made them feel they couldnt complete by EOY?

[Anonymous User]

What was the assignment you gave to the junior that made them feel they couldnt complete by EOY?

I can't say without giving too much away, but let's just say it's a lengthy litigation or regulatory filing that technically doesn't have an official deadline set by a court or government agency. Does that help?

If I see where you're going with this, the other juniors doing this assignment in parallel are at this associate's seniority or below. I did my first of these start to finish as a second year (more junior than this associate is now) on the scale of days/weeks, not months.

[Anonymous User]

What was the assignment you gave to the junior that made them feel they couldnt complete by EOY?

I can't say without giving too much away, but let's just say it's a lengthy litigation or regulatory filing that technically doesn't have an official deadline set by a court or government agency. Does that help?

If I see where you're going with this, the other juniors doing this assignment in parallel are at this associate's seniority or below. I did my first of these start to finish as a second year (more junior than this associate is now) on the scale of days/weeks, not months.

Got it. I'm a corporate associate and have never encountered an assignment with that long of a deadline. I figured it was some sort of long-term research project rather than a client-facing deliverable. I guess the longest task I had was an S-1 filing for an IPO but that was a fairly collaborative and incremental process.

[Anonymous User]

I hated biglaw on the fourth week of my four-week-long Summer 2020 summer associate position. It was pro bono week and a partner screamed at me because she got the wrong dial-in info (not from me, but from someone else) for a meeting between us and a pro bono client. I already knew I wasn't ever going to do biglaw beyond the summer, but that was a pretty validating experience.

Anyways, the only law school friends I still speak with are those doing public interest work, so I hadn't really thought about biglaw until recently when I was in a friend's wedding party. Someone else in the party was a partner in a real estate practice at a firm, and the dude was a total buzzkill during the entire weekend. During every event, he was constantly on his phone. We'd be trying to do things like play pool during the bachelor's party, and he'd insist on playing, but then we'd have to wait like 10 minutes whenever it was his turn because he had to answer an email or a call. So that experience made me hate biglaw again.

[heavylaw]

When someone joins the firm after you

And they are partner

but you're not

and you ride up in the elevator with them at 7am

[Bramwell]

When someone joins the firm after you

And they are partner

but you're not

and you ride up in the elevator with them at 7am

the 7am elevator ride would be enough to make me hate it. I can’t remember the last time I went into the office that early (or before 10am for that matter).

[Anonymous User]

When the micromanaging partner sent non-urgent work/markup with multiple hours of work on thanksgiving morning with the note that it had to be in client’s inbox by Friday morning. No thank you, no acknowledgement that it’s a holiday. Just deplorable.

[Anonymous User]

Gotta say, these are all awful.

I don't hate big law yet. Yesterday morning (Thanksgiving), I accidentally started a FaceTime with two partners, because I was trying to call my parents and pressed the wrong "recent call." I hung up right away, and texted them saying it was an accident.

One texted back saying, "So, are we doing this?" The other one: "I'm disappointed--I wanted to talk about my blackberry pie!"

So we had a quick FaceTime and talked about pie and wine pairings and said hi to pets and children. It was great. And I billed 0 hours.

[Anonymous User]

Gotta say, these are all awful.

I don't hate big law yet. Yesterday morning (Thanksgiving), I accidentally started a FaceTime with two partners, because I was trying to call my parents and pressed the wrong "recent call." I hung up right away, and texted them saying it was an accident.

One texted back saying, "So, are we doing this?" The other one: "I'm disappointed--I wanted to talk about my blackberry pie!"

So we had a quick FaceTime and talked about pie and wine pairings and said hi to pets and children. It was great. And I billed 0 hours.

God, I would kill for the kind of partner who responded to an accidental facetime like that.

[emc91]

When the micromanaging partner sent non-urgent work/markup with multiple hours of work on thanksgiving morning with the note that it had to be in client’s inbox by Friday morning. No thank you, no acknowledgement that it’s a holiday. Just deplorable.

I’d say I couldn’t get to it until Friday. What are they gonna do, fire you

[heavylaw]

Gotta say, these are all awful.

I don't hate big law yet. Yesterday morning (Thanksgiving), I accidentally started a FaceTime with two partners, because I was trying to call my parents and pressed the wrong "recent call." I hung up right away, and texted them saying it was an accident.

One texted back saying, "So, are we doing this?" The other one: "I'm disappointed--I wanted to talk about my blackberry pie!"

So we had a quick FaceTime and talked about pie and wine pairings and said hi to pets and children. It was great. And I billed 0 hours.

Thank you for this since I didn't know it was even possible to do pie and wine pairings