2011 Death of Associate at Skadden Forum

[underdawg]

Different groups within firms and different firms have different norms about how much you work. It is universal at every firm to be on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week in case something comes up. Last-minute emergencies happen much more often for corporate work than litigation of course. You definitely don't have to work 100 hour weeks all the time. There is also a wide range of acceptable behavior among attorneys within those practice group norms. The range is from doing the bare minimum acceptable to maintain employment for 3 years until I switch jobs to "gunning for partnership" which involves doing the maximum possible amount of work even at the expense of regular sleep hours. Also, everything in between. Everyone generally finds a comfortable work-life balance that works for them.

incredible exaggeration at my firm. lit, but nothing has ever come up that late. short of calling your cell phone, how would they even wake you up.

[Julio_El_Chavo]

Different groups within firms and different firms have different norms about how much you work. It is universal at every firm to be on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week in case something comes up. Last-minute emergencies happen much more often for corporate work than litigation of course. You definitely don't have to work 100 hour weeks all the time. There is also a wide range of acceptable behavior among attorneys within those practice group norms. The range is from doing the bare minimum acceptable to maintain employment for 3 years until I switch jobs to "gunning for partnership" which involves doing the maximum possible amount of work even at the expense of regular sleep hours. Also, everything in between. Everyone generally finds a comfortable work-life balance that works for them.

incredible exaggeration at my firm. lit, but nothing has ever come up that late. short of calling your cell phone, how would they even wake you up.

They wire your house up like a fire station with alarm bells and a pole from your 2nd-floor bedroom to your car.

[attractive_NUisance]

incredible exaggeration at my firm. lit, but nothing has ever come up that late. short of calling your cell phone, how would they even wake you up.

If you don't have a blackberry and coworkers that expect you to check it at all hours then that is great and you should consider yourself lucky

[underdawg]

do e-mails really wake ppl up??

[Jessep]

I've never spoken to an associate who was expected to wake-up to answer an email in the middle of the night. From my experience, you might be expected to answer emails late at night if you were trying to meet a filing deadline or close a deal but you'd know this ahead of time and you'd probably be expected to be at the office helping push things over the finish line. Partners aren't going to send out surprise emails at 3am to see if you can wake-up and answer instantaneously - they are sleeping. I suppose this scenario is possible, but it would be really rare and the partner would have to be particularly insane. Unless a deadline is approaching, no one is really expected to be fielding emails during normal sleep hours in my experience.