Post-Biglaw Regrets? Forum

[Anonymous User]

Yeah, I think especially for KJDs who've never held a full time job and never had to try to find a professional job, and who've often succeeded academically largely through being told what to do/following the rules, it's very hard to avoid the big straightforward passive pipeline to OCI. Charting your own course is always tougher, and when you add in the money, prestige, and idea that biglaw provides training/is a stepping stone to other, more satisfying jobs, it's easy to justify it.

[nealric]

But, you know, those loans, so maybe you can give it a few years, then you can do something you actually wanted, so for now just suck it up, it'll be fine, tweet "Believe all women" on Monday and write your memo on why the CEO who molested 18 interns is actually just a great mentor to his female employees on Tuesday, put a Pan-African flag background on your Instagram picture for Black History Month on Wednesday and help your client foreclose on 43 black-owned businesses on Thursday, try not to stare in the mirror too long on Friday,

There's certainly a grain of truth to the post, but this kind melodramatic biglaw evil is extremely rare in my experience. If biglaw is getting involved in an internal investigation of sexual harassment, it's usually to build the case for firing the harasser. No lender I'm aware of would specifically target black-owned businesses. I'm sure instances like you describe have happened, but the average biglaw associate is likely never going to encounter something so clear cut.

In reality, your work in biglaw is going to be looking for misplaced commas in a credit facilty, or arguing that corporation Y breached it's contract to supply widgets to corporation X because the nickel content was 5% too high. It's not good. It's not evil. It's just the day to day stuff that happens in business.

It also ignores that moral dilemmas happen in the non-profit space too. Just because someone is working as a public defender or for some NGO doesn't automatically make them Mother Teresa. Some will shuffle paper and spend most of their time schmoozing donors. And of course there are people who will argue that even Mother Teresa wasn't exactly the Mother Teresa of popular imagination.

The real danger is not that you will fight against your beliefs in an existence of cognitive dissonance, but that you simply live a life of going with the flow and doing what is expected. Few people are going to be very fulfilled grinding from one task to another while ignoring friends and family. But biglaw needs a lot of grinders to function.

The existential dilemmas many law students face when they realize that taking that Skadden offer is a lot easier than trying to get a slot at Human Rights Watch is not so much that they feel like they will have to do evil instead of good, but that they have to come to terms with the possibility that their self image of someone who will make a huge meaningful impact in the world was probably just a story they told themselves. Most people have relatively mundane existence. Most people are never going to be written about in the history books. That's ok, but it can be hard to accept for someone who has been told their whole lives how exceptional they are (as is the case for the typical T14 grad).

[avenuem]

This thread veered off topic, but while we're at it I find it most useful to just be honest.

I don't like doing evil things, or supporting evil acts, but for the right price I will.

[Monochromatic Oeuvre]

But, you know, those loans, so maybe you can give it a few years, then you can do something you actually wanted, so for now just suck it up, it'll be fine, tweet "Believe all women" on Monday and write your memo on why the CEO who molested 18 interns is actually just a great mentor to his female employees on Tuesday, put a Pan-African flag background on your Instagram picture for Black History Month on Wednesday and help your client foreclose on 43 black-owned businesses on Thursday, try not to stare in the mirror too long on Friday,

There's certainly a grain of truth to the post, but this kind melodramatic biglaw evil is extremely rare in my experience. If biglaw is getting involved in an internal investigation of sexual harassment, it's usually to build the case for firing the harasser. No lender I'm aware of would specifically target black-owned businesses. I'm sure instances like you describe have happened, but the average biglaw associate is likely never going to encounter something so clear cut.

In reality, your work in biglaw is going to be looking for misplaced commas in a credit facilty, or arguing that corporation Y breached it's contract to supply widgets to corporation X because the nickel content was 5% too high. It's not good. It's not evil. It's just the day to day stuff that happens in business.

Come on. No, of course it's not Snidely fucking Whiplash where some in-house counsel is tying a tuberculosis orphan to railroad tracks, but yeah, I pulled the "internal investigation found nothing wrong" and "let a portfolio of Harlem leases go bankrupt" stuff from things my firm was involved in within the past couple years. I have a pretty active imagination but I really don't need to make shit up; the screenshots are more absurd than anything I sit on the couch dreaming up. "Actually the investigations normally involve terminations and settlements for misconduct!" Well yeah, whatever's best for business if bad apples are causing legal and reputational risk. "Oh they would never specifically target black-owned businesses!" No, they'd just send you a notice of default and then file to take everything that isn't nailed down regardless of who you are, and if that happens to disproportionately affect certain groups of people, then whatever, structural inequality's not *my* problem. "Oh but my firm did this and that for gay rights" Yeah, and at the same time it was helping the NFL bury evidence that football might leave you drooling and forgetting your kids' names by 45. "Oh but my firm won't represent XYZ anymore!" Refusing to do something because the optics are bad for the firm is not courage; it's just covering your ass.

Every single firm's shit stinks, up and down the AmLaw list and it really doesn't matter how removed from it you think you are on the surface. The partner you work for grinds the deal because he wants an atrium renovation in his Palm Beach winter home, servicing multimillionaires who want their yachts to be one foot more erect than the next guy at the marina, all of whom, by the way, have never once set foot in Delaware despite being the execs of a company incorporated there so it can minimize its taxes and regulations. Your retail merger makes $100M in synergies despite the fact that all the clerks make $12 an hour. You just do a 50-state survey for any regulations applicable to some component part of a missile that winds up over a Syrian village or some next-gen software headed straight for Chinese cameras. One of your underwriter clients charges $35 overdraft fees to people who by definition have no money and the other one didn't *technically* mislead investors if you really start to parse the Second Circuit's 10b-5 precedent. Your LBO is for someone who will load a company with debt and fire an entire town in the Midwest and pay themselves more in "management fees" than you and your children will ever earn in your lives. You copy-paste "doctrine of exhaustion of administrative remedies" into your motion to dismiss seven times so some class-action can recover one-tenth of what it should because they need the money now. One of your hedge funds charges the legal maximum rate under usury laws to some business trying to get off the ground because its directors have a new yield target, and the other one bought up every foreclosed home in the right suburbs in 2010. You'll finally one day leave all those assholes behind to go in-house, where you'll be asked to analyze how close you can do test flights to a playground or how much mercury is allowed to be in a nasal spray or some shit like that.

Hey, I get it. If the guy who shipped IBM's punch cards and the teenager who became a drummer boy for Ol' Virginny because his older brother was on the line didn't feel bad, then how could you? I walked by fifteen homeless guys yesterday on way to get some fucking artisanal salad and didn't lose a wink of sleep over it, so who am I to tell you you're not winning any medals? You want to tell yourself you're just a cog in the machine or that you just focus on the legal mechanics or hey, I liked how you put it, "it's just the day to day stuff that happens in business." You don't actually have to drop Mary Jane and the children's cable car over the bridge to be a major negative influence in the world, because "the day to day stuff that happens is business" is all geared toward maintaining and enhancing the wealth and power of a select few people and institutions and not giving a fuck what happens to anyone else. It's your prerogative to tell me until you're blue in the face how you can't verify if your coffee is fair-trade anyway and Susan G. Komen only spends 20% of its money on research and this housing defender's director is a TERF, but I'm gonna tell you, with no equivocation, that Biglaw associates are actively and knowingly dedicating a major portion of their lives to making the world a worse place, and the overwhelming majority are doing so for reasons that are fundamentally selfish. And plenty of them will actually think that and a subset will even make a change for the better, but most of them are just gonna move on because they're so damn tired and ha ha, look at that, Wanda has to cover for Vision when he reveals his powers at the magic show, and oh fuck, the partner's calling again.

[Anonymous User]

I don't disagree with the overall premise that large law firms primarily exist to uphold the status quo by providing sophisticated legal services to the highest bidder, but you're missing a significant (not majority, but not negligible) portion of big law associates who do actually make the world better by working in big law. This can take a variety of forms:

First-gen associate paying off loans and supporting family/marginalized community back home
Litigation associate who disproportionately does pro bono work and avoids working on the most overt big guy vs little guy type cases (e.g. products/class actions)
Frugal associate who donates large portions of her/his paycheck to NGOs or progressive political campaigns
Hell, I'd rather have a slacker/mediocre attorney work at a large law firm then at a PI gig where tons of regular people depend on them.

You can brush over any industry as perpetuating the status quo and being evil in a capitalist society. But the reality is gray, not black and white. And believe it or not there are plenty of PI attorneys that are capable of causing even greater harm than the most old white rainmaker at a firm.

If any big law attorneys are reading this and want to do more to effectuate change than working at a large firm spending most of their working hours defending corporations, check out https://runforsomething.net/

[target_corp]

ITT: Someone who didn't understand one of the major themes of The Good Place also does mental gymnastics to explain why they're not the bad guy, either.

[nealric]

I liked how you put it, "it's just the day to day stuff that happens in business." You don't actually have to drop Mary Jane and the children's cable car over the bridge to be a major negative influence in the world, because "the day to day stuff that happens is business" is all geared toward maintaining and enhancing the wealth and power of a select few people and institutions and not giving a fuck what happens to anyone else.

Call me heartless, but I've not personally experienced ethical heartburn from anything I encountered in biglaw or in-house. None of the specific examples you describe are anything like what I've experienced.

Business relationships are just one way we organize human behavior, but certainly one of the most dominant in human society. They are also the dominant mechanism by which we feed, house, and clothe 8 billion people in the world. There's no real teleology there. Humans do it for the same reasons ants form a line for candy dropped on the ground. There are of course ethical and unethical behaviors within that context, just as there are with all large scale human interactions, but it seems you are destined to live in a permanent state of moral panic if you believe business relationships are fundamentally unethical.

Anyhow, I'm not here to debate the merits of marxism. But I agree that biglaw is emphatically not a good fit for someone who feels the way you do. And I also agree that if you believe the day-to-day operations of biglaw are unethical, that doing some pro bono on the side or donating to your favorite candidate isn't going to relieve you of your misgivings.

[beepboopbeep]

I don't read mono's posts as saying he's any better. AFAIK he's a biglaw drone too, or was. This reads like particularly clear-eyed self-loathing as much as it is sharp judgment of all biglawyers.

[nealric]

I don't read mono's posts as saying he's any better. AFAIK he's a biglaw drone too, or was. This reads like particularly clear-eyed self-loathing as much as it is sharp judgment of all biglawyers.

I didn't either. I'm just saying the self loathing is unnecessary. And if working in biglaw is inherently going to generate that self loathing, then it's really not the right place for you.

[Monochromatic Oeuvre]

I don't read mono's posts as saying he's any better. AFAIK he's a biglaw drone too, or was. This reads like particularly clear-eyed self-loathing as much as it is sharp judgment of all biglawyers.

Everything I post on this website is a direct, unfair and unwarranted attack on everyone I know, including and especially me.

[Anonymous User]

My work is meaningful while working in big law defending the rich and powerful never sat well with me.

I'm surprised how rarely this reason is mentioned, especially when compared to compensation. Some of my V10 litigation colleagues are very liberal Bernie/Warren supporters and donators who don't seem to have any qualms defending Big Corp. against a class action suit from people who got cancer or flooded homes or their retirement savings taken away.

Money can paper over a lot of guilt and convince people they aren't actually doing anything wrong - I am just as responsible here as anyone - but the fact that I'm spending years of my life to actively make the world worse is weighing on me. Even when I take a big paycut to leave, I can't imagine feeling any remorse about the decision.

It's pretty easy on the transactional side. At best I'm scamming billionaires into overpaying me for my services and at worst I'm a lackey for a deal between two large financial institutions

What I've seen on the Lit side is you start with the liberal premise that: "Everyone, even the worst murderer, deserves a competent defense and their day in court." And then if you squint hard enough and don't think about it too much, you can pervert that into "Even Chevron and JP Morgan deserve a competent defense. And am I really that different than the PD that's defending murderers?" That gets you about 3/4 of the way there; you combine that with a couple pro bono hours for immigrants or whatever and some advocacy posting on twitter/facebook, and it lets you sleep good at night.

Wear a mask everybody! #TrustScience

There are few weirder people than those I know who came into school saying they want to do white-collar defense.

[polareagle]

There are few weirder people than those I know who came into school saying they want to do white-collar defense.

Eh, if they're talking about the plight of the poor, downtrodden white collar criminals, then sure. But some people just find criminal law way more interesting than civil litigation, and it's nice to get paid, hence white collar.

[Elston Gunn]

I don’t think I’ve ever met someone excited about white collar criminal defense per se. Lots of people are excited about white collar prosecution, and defense is the main path to it. Obviously you could try being an ADA instead, but that pays way less and probably is even less palatable morally to your average young liberal (since it’s not like brand new ADAs get to choose the financial fraud division and avoid drugs, guns, immigration etc).

[feminist.supporter]

My work is meaningful while working in big law defending the rich and powerful never sat well with me.

I'm surprised how rarely this reason is mentioned, especially when compared to compensation. Some of my V10 litigation colleagues are very liberal Bernie/Warren supporters and donators who don't seem to have any qualms defending Big Corp. against a class action suit from people who got cancer or flooded homes or their retirement savings taken away.

Money can paper over a lot of guilt and convince people they aren't actually doing anything wrong - I am just as responsible here as anyone - but the fact that I'm spending years of my life to actively make the world worse is weighing on me. Even when I take a big paycut to leave, I can't imagine feeling any remorse about the decision.

The bigger the soapboxer a person is, the crazier the mental gymnastics. I've heard it all by now.

"I have to do it to pay off my loans."
"Oh I don't support X, that's just what the law says. Someone really oughta change the law."
"Oh I don't support X, I just want to get experience on the best deals/for the best partners."
"I didn't decide to do the deal; I'm just a cog in the machine."
"If I don't do it, someone else will anyway."
"I mean this is all just between big corporations regardless."
"A bunch of other jobs involve being a corporate stooge too."
"I actually do X amount of pro bono."
"The plaintiff side are actually the money grubbers who file frivolous stuff all the time."
"I mean...*awkward silence*"
"Look, I'm a good person."

I've watched more than one person break into tears trying to answer this question. I used to think it was a tough but reasonable question you could discuss among friends. The cognitive dissonance on people's faces looks actually painful. I never bring it up IRL anymore. Not because I don't want you to find your answer to that question (you definitely need to); I'm just not gonna be the bad guy for making you learn the beliefs you thought were dearly held were actually for up for sale the whole time (at a pretty cheap price, really).

CLS was (and presumably still is) full of loud do-gooders who talked about how they were gonna do XYZ and check every liberal box and, lo and behold, 90%+ of the class wound up doing OCI. I'm sure there was some virtue signaling and a healthy dose of people just fully talking out of their ass, but I don't doubt that the majority of the people who said they were gonna do something good for the world legitimately intended it (at least at some point).

But, you know, those loans, so maybe you can give it a few years, then you can do something you actually wanted, so for now just suck it up, it'll be fine, tweet "Believe all women" on Monday and write your memo on why the CEO who molested 18 interns is actually just a great mentor to his female employees on Tuesday, put a Pan-African flag background on your Instagram picture for Black History Month on Wednesday and help your client foreclose on 43 black-owned businesses on Thursday, try not to stare in the mirror too long on Friday, you're making *some* progress on those loans, but you know, NYC is expensive and you have a $3200 apartment ("Not gonna live in fucking Hell's Kitchen") and when you get a break you take $29 Ubers to meet your boys for $17 craft cocktails, and you've got eight weddings and three bachelor parties this year, and you billed 260 last month so you got yourself a $400 jacket as a little "you're worth it" gift, and your one friend from study abroad does charity events for dogs with Down syndrome, and you're still trying to take that trip to Miami for a week if you can, because, you know, you work hard and you deserve to spend your money how you see fit, and why can't there be a job where you can do some good, be home by 6:30 and still get a decent pair of shoes every now and then, and whoa, now you're 31 and Colleen is really getting antsy on the kid thing and eventually you're gonna need a decent school district and Jesus, look at these Westchester property taxes, and you don't know how the math is gonna work as it is, and what on earth do you want to do in the public interest field anyway, and how would you break into it *now* and goddammit, the study abroad friend is now the Director of Sustainable Water for Burkina Faso BeneFactors, and you're just so fucking tired all the time and one day you just wake up and decide this is who you are now and that flame in your heart to genuinely do some good that you dampened year by year with every comma and every "Will do, thanks, sent from my iPhone" is really finally fully extinguished. Kamala 2024 though.

You, sir, are a fucking poet.

[feminist.supporter]

tbf, the mainstream lefts brand of woke capitalism is perfectly consistent with working in biglaw. lmao @ true lefties (bernie supporters and to a lesser extent warren supporters) who work in biglaw

I always thought of it like this through my observations at woke babies at my T14:

being woke is a hobby; 190k paycheck is a living.

[feminist.supporter]

This thread veered off topic, but while we're at it I find it most useful to just be honest.

I don't like doing evil things, or supporting evil acts, but for the right price I will.

This is a sentiment that I can get behind on. Thank you for being honest and not disingenuous. There is nothing more reprehensible than self deceit. Often times in life I've found that almost everything in mundane life is for sale, the question is just how much.

[Anonymous User]

OP here. So...okay.

[yankees12345!]

tbf, the mainstream lefts brand of woke capitalism is perfectly consistent with working in biglaw. lmao @ true lefties (bernie supporters and to a lesser extent warren supporters) who work in biglaw

As a Bernie supporter who was until recently in big law litigation, I'll bite.

Even on a big scholarship, I still walked out of law school with high five figures in student debt. It would have taken probably five - ten years to pay it off working for a non-profit, a labor union, or in an entry-level government position. In big law, it took a year and change.

Having paid that debt, I have a lot more agency to decide how to contribute productively to society. I'm not sure that working for an organization is necessarily my best way to do that. Might go the open-a-public-interest-law-firm route eventually. Maybe politics. Maybe something outside of law. Maybe just raise a family and hopefully teach them to be good people. Not having that debt will help with any of those things--not that you can't do them with the debt, but it's gonna help.

Hopefully the net pay off in terms of effect on society over a thirty-plus year legal career will be more than whatever marginal 'damage' i contributed to as a first and second year big law associate. I think it will be. As other posters have mentioned, a lot of commercial litigation is basically a wash in moral terms, cause it's two big powerful entities squaring off. Not exactly how I want to spend my life, because its not super meaningful, but the utility value was pretty high for me at the time, and hopefully it will let me make more meaningful moves in the future. Okay, you can roast me now lol.

[Anonymous User]

tbf, the mainstream lefts brand of woke capitalism is perfectly consistent with working in biglaw. lmao @ true lefties (bernie supporters and to a lesser extent warren supporters) who work in biglaw

As a Bernie supporter who was until recently in big law litigation, I'll bite.

Even on a big scholarship, I still walked out of law school with high five figures in student debt. It would have taken probably five - ten years to pay it off working for a non-profit, a labor union, or in an entry-level government position. In big law, it took a year and change.

Having paid that debt, I have a lot more agency to decide how to contribute productively to society. I'm not sure that working for an organization is necessarily my best way to do that. Might go the open-a-public-interest-law-firm route eventually. Maybe politics. Maybe something outside of law. Maybe just raise a family and hopefully teach them to be good people. Not having that debt will help with any of those things--not that you can't do them with the debt, but it's gonna help.

Hopefully the net pay off in terms of effect on society over a thirty-plus year legal career will be more than whatever marginal 'damage' i contributed to as a first and second year big law associate. I think it will be. As other posters have mentioned, a lot of commercial litigation is basically a wash in moral terms, cause it's two big powerful entities squaring off. Not exactly how I want to spend my life, because its not super meaningful, but the utility value was pretty high for me at the time, and hopefully it will let me make more meaningful moves in the future. Okay, you can roast me now lol.

I’m a conservative, and I can respect that. I don’t think it makes you hypocritical at all. Most people can’t separate their job from their values. I think being able to separate the two is important for work/life balance. In other words, when you’re just using your job to do other things in life like you said, your job is a means to an end. I think that’s the best way to not get burnt out of work.

[Anonymous User]

But, you know, those loans, so maybe you can give it a few years, then you can do something you actually wanted, so for now just suck it up, it'll be fine, tweet "Believe all women" on Monday and write your memo on why the CEO who molested 18 interns is actually just a great mentor to his female employees on Tuesday, put a Pan-African flag background on your Instagram picture for Black History Month on Wednesday and help your client foreclose on 43 black-owned businesses on Thursday, try not to stare in the mirror too long on Friday,

There's certainly a grain of truth to the post, but this kind melodramatic biglaw evil is extremely rare in my experience. If biglaw is getting involved in an internal investigation of sexual harassment, it's usually to build the case for firing the harasser.

I worked for three years in a big law L&E department and I assure you that this is completely wrong. There were a couple of partners at my firm who were the go-to attorneys for high profile/high net worth abusers who wanted to silence their victims. My colleagues went to trial and won defending a manager who had sexually assaulted a coworker at work. Coworkers routinely celebrated "favorably settling" mass wage and hour disputes (i.e., getting away with millions of dollars of wage theft). I could go on and on. We frequently defended evil, and we knew it. It sucked.

[Anonymous User]

But, you know, those loans, so maybe you can give it a few years, then you can do something you actually wanted, so for now just suck it up, it'll be fine, tweet "Believe all women" on Monday and write your memo on why the CEO who molested 18 interns is actually just a great mentor to his female employees on Tuesday, put a Pan-African flag background on your Instagram picture for Black History Month on Wednesday and help your client foreclose on 43 black-owned businesses on Thursday, try not to stare in the mirror too long on Friday,

There's certainly a grain of truth to the post, but this kind melodramatic biglaw evil is extremely rare in my experience. If biglaw is getting involved in an internal investigation of sexual harassment, it's usually to build the case for firing the harasser.

I worked for three years in a big law L&E department and I assure you that this is completely wrong. There were a couple of partners at my firm who were the go-to attorneys for high profile/high net worth abusers who wanted to silence their victims. My colleagues went to trial and won defending a manager who had sexually assaulted a coworker at work. Coworkers routinely celebrated "favorably settling" mass wage and hour disputes (i.e., getting away with millions of dollars of wage theft). I could go on and on. We frequently defended evil, and we knew it. It sucked.

That's too bad. I have a close family member in biglaw L&E and that is not their experience at all. They've never approached an investigation as a path to exonerate someone accused of a harasser. Usually, if the firm has been engaged for that purpose, it's to document the case for termination and to show diligence against claims against the company by the harassed. Not every wage and hour class action is a black and white case of wage theft- few are.

[Anonymous User]

I'll bite and be more on topic with the original question:

I left biglaw as a lower mid-level and returned as a senior. I had two in-house jobs, the first was a much better lifestyle and I was very happy at first but a very unstable business with low pay (money was just too tight and the company too erratic) and the second ended up being a place where I was not comfortable ethically or morally (it's one thing representing bad people in big law, another to be boots on the ground at a place where the tone at the top is not what you had been promised). So, I high-tailed it back to big law (at least temporarily) where I can always recommend the right course of action (at least internally to the partner) and wash my hands of it to some degree.

[Iowahawk]

But, you know, those loans, so maybe you can give it a few years, then you can do something you actually wanted, so for now just suck it up, it'll be fine, tweet "Believe all women" on Monday and write your memo on why the CEO who molested 18 interns is actually just a great mentor to his female employees on Tuesday, put a Pan-African flag background on your Instagram picture for Black History Month on Wednesday and help your client foreclose on 43 black-owned businesses on Thursday, try not to stare in the mirror too long on Friday,

There's certainly a grain of truth to the post, but this kind melodramatic biglaw evil is extremely rare in my experience. If biglaw is getting involved in an internal investigation of sexual harassment, it's usually to build the case for firing the harasser.

I worked for three years in a big law L&E department and I assure you that this is completely wrong. There were a couple of partners at my firm who were the go-to attorneys for high profile/high net worth abusers who wanted to silence their victims. My colleagues went to trial and won defending a manager who had sexually assaulted a coworker at work. Coworkers routinely celebrated "favorably settling" mass wage and hour disputes (i.e., getting away with millions of dollars of wage theft). I could go on and on. We frequently defended evil, and we knew it. It sucked.

Of the common types of complex litigation L&E, environmental, white collar, and class action defense are clearly ethically dubious, but an ethically minded lawyer can just... not do them. Aside from class actions those are fairly specialist fields that take some effort to get into and it's not like it's not obvious from the start that they're at least questionable.

White collar is a bit more unique because I agree that almost everyone I know that goes into it really wants to be a white collar AUSA, but going direct isn't possible with the current hiring practices of USAOs. I have no moral sympathy for revolving door types that cash out and go back, though.

[JusticeHarlan]

[Anonymous User]

I'll bite and be more on topic with the original question:

I left biglaw as a lower mid-level and returned as a senior. I had two in-house jobs, the first was a much better lifestyle and I was very happy at first but a very unstable business with low pay (money was just too tight and the company too erratic) and the second ended up being a place where I was not comfortable ethically or morally (it's one thing representing bad people in big law, another to be boots on the ground at a place where the tone at the top is not what you had been promised). So, I high-tailed it back to big law (at least temporarily) where I can always recommend the right course of action (at least internally to the partner) and wash my hands of it to some degree.

Interesting. How hard was it to break back into Biglaw? If I leave, it’ll likely be for gov work, so your answer may not apply to me, but I’m curious nonetheless.