1st year biglaw lit associates--how's your experience so far Forum

[kaiser]

Well yea making binders for 160k isn't a bad deal.

The issue is that you are responsible for your development. If you doc rev for 2 years suddenly ur the third year That doesn't know shit about shit.

E'reday I'm binderin'...

[Anonymous User]

Well yea making binders for 160k isn't a bad deal.

The issue is that you are responsible for your development. If you doc rev for 2 years suddenly ur the third year That doesn't know shit about shit.

Well then good thing I'm doing all the other things I listed in my post.

[Desert Fox]

Well yea making binders for 160k isn't a bad deal.

The issue is that you are responsible for your development. If you doc rev for 2 years suddenly ur the third year That doesn't know shit about shit.

Well then good thing I'm doing all the other things I listed in my post.

I meant that as explaination for why someone would be upset at not doing substnative work.

now go home and get your binderbox.

[Dafaq]

At nearly any point I am staffed on a half dozen cases. Motions, briefs, conference calls, you name it. Can’t imagine being paid for just sitting here and doing doc review and learning nothing. I enjoy the work except (as others have noted) there is just too much of it.

[Johann]

Not gaining skills in litigation is kinda flame though. I've done pretty substantive work. It's the same as legal writing in law school essentially. If you're doing all doc review you can easily read a brief or motion in 15 minutes and learn the same thing you would learn in the 10-20 hours drafting it.
As mentioned, substantive work like being on conference calls and writing summary memos isn't a skill. You could have done that in high school. So I wouldn't really be worried about falling behind anyone or not learning skills at this point yet.

[englawyer]

I hope the associates talking about "making binders" are not referring to the physical act of printing out PDFs, 3-hole punch, putting them in the binder, adding numbered tabs, etc. That is definitely support staff work? E.g. paralegal, legal assistant, printing vendor.

[kaiser]

I hope the associates talking about "making binders" are not referring to the physical act of printing out PDFs, 3-hole punch, putting them in the binder, adding numbered tabs, etc. That is definitely support staff work? E.g. paralegal, legal assistant, printing vendor.

Mostly that is done by support staff, but the associate absolutely ends up doing it from time to time depending on the circumstances. There might be a quirk to the assignment, or certain discretionary calls, that makes you reluctant to trust others to get it right. But yes, for the most part, the manual labor is done by vendors, secretary, support staff, etc.

[hiima3L]

If you're doing all doc review you can easily read a brief or motion in 15 minutes and learn the same thing you would learn in the 10-20 hours drafting it.

This is laughably wrong.

[Cogburn87]

Mostly that is done by support staff, but the associate absolutely ends up doing it from time to time depending on the circumstances. There might be a quirk to the assignment, or certain discretionary calls, that makes you reluctant to trust others to get it right. But yes, for the most part, the manual labor is done by vendors, secretary, support staff, etc.

In any event, a junior is going to be checking the work of the support staff. So yeah. You make binders in biglaw litigation with some frequency.

[Stringer6]

If you're doing all doc review you can easily read a brief or motion in 15 minutes and learn the same thing you would learn in the 10-20 hours drafting it.

This is laughably wrong.

I agree