Quit biglaw with no job lined up? Forum

[star fox]

lol at counting on that inheritance. What if your parents live longer than you expect?

[psu2016]

And....my sympathy for OP is gone.

[Anonymous User]

lol at counting on that inheritance. What if your parents live longer than you expect?

Doesn't matter. They have four times as much as that, plus my dad is still working for a lot of money and he's 70....even if I inherit one million that'd probably be more than I could save in law in my entire life

[duck]

And....my sympathy for OP is gone.

come on now. he made like 3/4 of a million working for a few years at a moderately stressful job and only gets a $15k/yr allowance from his miserly parents. his life is objectively terrible and law school is to blame.

[Tls2016]

And....my sympathy for OP is gone.

come on now. he made like 3/4 of a million working for a few years at a moderately stressful job and only gets a $15k/yr allowance from his miserly parents. his life is objectively terrible and law school is to blame.

Needing money is the main reason people stay in biglaw. Maybe talk to your parents and see if they will help you while you figure out what else you want to do.
I don't think I could do the just coast thing. But if you really don't care,just start saying no and see what happens.

[Tiago Splitter]

lol at counting on that inheritance. What if your parents live longer than you expect?

Edit: Scooped by fatduck

OP the rules allow each of your parents to give you 14k. You might want to talk to them about things.

[crit_racer]

This fucking thread. I don't even know where to start. OP is definitely a fuckwad and a whiny asshole. There was that pretty funny Danny/Tahiti post that was kind of slept on that almost made it a worthwhile read tho.

[Anonymous User]

And....my sympathy for OP is gone.

come on now. he made like 3/4 of a million working for a few years at a moderately stressful job and only gets a $15k/yr allowance from his miserly parents. his life is objectively terrible and law school is to blame.

Needing money is the main reason people stay in biglaw. Maybe talk to your parents and see if they will help you while you figure out what else you want to do.
I don't think I could do the just coast thing. But if you really don't care,just start saying no and see what happens.

Maybe, my parents don't like handing out cash though (at least not big amounts). (I know this sounds weird, but it's completely different when you have a trust fund - more than half of my cousins have trust funds and get tons of cash and some don't have jobs - my siblings and i don't have trust funds and parents never give us lots of cash and expect us to work serious jobs.) The money they give me now just goes to part of my rent directly.

It's hard to coast in my group - not a big group, plus no big projects like doc review to keep people busy without doing real work. If you "coast" you'd probably just be fired within a couple of weeks. It's probably more possible to coast if you're more junior in a litigation group that's big, but coasting isn't easy if you're in a smaller group and not super junior.

[Anonymous User]

OP: You are in an enviable position of now working at a job that pays you over 200k for a 40 hour week commitment. Start turning down assignments - say that you are on a big thing for partner X which might get busy at any moment. It will take them a couple weeks to figure everything out and then another couple months to officially get around to telling you to shape up and then another six months to fire you and then another three months for you to actually be out on the street.

[nealric]

lol at counting on that inheritance. What if your parents live longer than you expect?

Doesn't matter. They have four times as much as that, plus my dad is still working for a lot of money and he's 70....even if I inherit one million that'd probably be more than I could save in law in my entire life

If you can't save $1 million over the course of a legal career, there's something very wrong with your budgeting or investing.

[Anonymous User]

lol at counting on that inheritance. What if your parents live longer than you expect?

Doesn't matter. They have four times as much as that, plus my dad is still working for a lot of money and he's 70....even if I inherit one million that'd probably be more than I could save in law in my entire life

If you can't save $1 million over the course of a legal career, there's something very wrong with your budgeting or investing.

I guess, I'd only be able to save probably that much though and not be a multi millionaire...law doesn't pay that well. None of my rich relatives are lawyers or doctors or some other wage slave working for someone rich - they made their money being entrepreneurs/business owners.

[totesTheGoat]

even if I inherit one million that'd probably be more than I could save in law in my entire life

Maybe if you spend your entire salary on hookers and blow that's true, but I know multi-millionaires who never made a salary of more than $60k. Getting to $1M isn't that hard if you know how to say "no" to yourself when you're in your 20s.

I guess, I'd only be able to save probably that much though and not be a multi millionaire...law doesn't pay that well.

Keep 'em coming! Gosh that's funny!

Here's some back of the napkin math for you. Let's assume that you go to biglaw and never get a pay raise for your entire career ($160k x 40 years). Let's also assume that you don't get stuck in the lifestyle inflation loop and just spend $80k on taxes and living expenses each year. If you just stick your extra income under a mattress, you'll have $3.2M dollars when you retire at age 65. Assuming that you invest that money and it averages 8%, you're sitting pretty at $22.3M when you retire.

Heck, let's say that you spend $100k every year... that's a pretty nice life, even in an expensive city. You would have $2.4M under the mattress money, or $16.8M if you invest at 8%.

But law just doesn't pay, does it?

[Anonymous User]

Math's a bit off here because of taxes, but the point is generally true. With a tax deferred savings plan (IRA/401k), decent investing and over time you can accumulate plenty in law (play with savings calculators online to confirm). It helps to live in a low cost area and find a type of practice that is sustainable to you in the long term. In any event, I wouldn't go into law for the money if you don't think you'll find the actual day to day (in the aggregate) interesting and/or fulfilling.

[Anonymous User]

Here's some back of the napkin math for you. Let's assume that you go to biglaw and never get a pay raise for your entire career ($160k x 40 years). Let's also assume that you don't get stuck in the lifestyle inflation loop and just spend $80k on taxes and living expenses each year. If you just stick your extra income under a mattress, you'll have $3.2M dollars when you retire at age 65. Assuming that you invest that money and it averages 8%, you're sitting pretty at $22.3M when you retire.

This math is a bit off........you're underestimating taxes and living expenses by a ton. If you spend 80k on taxes and living expenses each year, you'd have to only spend like 15k on living expenses each year. Here's the math broken down based on your first example:

160,000(0.60)(40)=3,840,000 post taxes
3,840,000-(II'm assuming 60,000 for living)(40)=1,440,000 for investments total,but the more accurate way is the following:

Investments:
160,000(0.6)-60,000=36,000 annual for investments
36,000/12=3000 per month
at 8% interest compounded annually for 40 years (but invested monthly) = ~$8,662,229.85

The big issues about this are:
- The COL is likely a huge underestimate, unless you're going to be a spinster for life.
- This doesn't take into account COL and inflation adjustments - COL has actually gone up a ton over the past 40 years in most of the parts of the US. Just to give you an idea of how bad inflation is, $8,662,229.85 in 2015 had the same buying power as $2,047,398.59 in 1976. So $8 million in 40 years isn't nearly as great as it looks now once you discount the value.
- 8% interest is overly optimistic - the market hasn't averaged that except for a couple of anomalies
- You're likely not going to have that salary for life
- 40 years is also longer than the average lifespan of the average JD.

[Anonymous User]

Bump - how do you find jobs outside of biglaw/law that aren't fund work or something similar to biglaw? I'm not interested in moving to another job just like biglaw even if it's not technically biglaw. I feel like the JD and biglaw experience are confining me to very specific jobs.