Lateraling to Midlaw Forum

[Anonymous User]

I'll just caution against any poster believing biglaw does inherently "better" work, unless you're talking about just having the eyes to capture a couple more misplaced commas or misspelled words. Then, sure. Biglaw does inherently better work. If you're talking about substantive issues, guess who has more time to crack open a secondary source and learn? The associate/partner billing 1700 hours or the associate/partner billing 2200 hours? The biglaw training by volume certainly makes you very good at certain "process" elements of the job, but it's a very slow way to build broad substantive knowledge.

That's all I'll say about this, as I don't want to lead this thread down the road of endless bickering.

Oh the old misplaced comma trope. OK buddy, whatever it takes for you to be able to sleep better at night. I'm sure your 100 lawyer firm with 4 offices in the tri-state area can do a better job substantively than your counterparts at a v10 who have been eat, sleep and breathing this kind of work to the tune of 2,600+ hours a year while you decided 7 years ago to take your foot off the gas so you can enjoy your nights and weekends.

This exchange is amusing.

Yes, all associate billing 1,700 hours in midlaw are spending their extra time "cracking open a secondary source" to "build broad substantive knowledge."

Yes, all associates at v10s "eat, sleep, and breathe" the law and bill 2,600+.

[Anonymous User]

Can you name some of these MidLaw firms that offer this? It sounds like a lot of these places are a better long term deal than BigLaw, but it's not that easy to identify solid MidLaw firms from the outside.

I'd say that you need to look for midlaw shops that are stacked with biglaw lawyers and whose law school credentials look like mostly T14 with honors and well-respected regional schools with high honors (e.g., UC Hastings, Fordham). My firm hires fairly rarely, and all of our associates could be working at V10s (and many were formerly). Not all midlaw needs to be the lambasted "tri-state" law firm filled with TT grads... There are a couple firms in each major market/geographic region that would fit what I have described. Overall, though, you're talking about a dozen or so firms across the country, so it's not a ton. There are, of course, many other midlaw varieties that are perfectly valid.

[Anonymous User]

Can you name some of these MidLaw firms that offer this? It sounds like a lot of these places are a better long term deal than BigLaw, but it's not that easy to identify solid MidLaw firms from the outside.

I'd say that you need to look for midlaw shops that are stacked with biglaw lawyers and whose law school credentials look like mostly T14 with honors and well-respected regional schools with high honors (e.g., UC Hastings, Fordham). My firm hires fairly rarely, and all of our associates could be working at V10s (and many were formerly). Not all midlaw needs to be the lambasted "tri-state" law firm filled with TT grads... There are a couple firms in each major market/geographic region that would fit what I have described. Overall, though, you're talking about a dozen or so firms across the country, so it's not a ton. There are, of course, many other midlaw varieties that are perfectly valid.

Hastings/Fordham grad here. Surprised/happy to see those schools characterized as "well-respected regional schools."

[Lesion of Doom]

My sense from talking to headhunters is that QoL depends in large part on the location of the firm. NYC midlaw is not necessarily going to free up your nights and weekends (and obviously you'd feel the comp hit more severely unless fully remote), whereas at the regional shops you almost definitely attain a meaningful improvement.

I considered lateraling to midlaw at one point but ultimately opted against because I was afraid it would fuck up my exits.

[Anonymous User]

My sense from talking to headhunters is that QoL depends in large part on the location of the firm. NYC midlaw is not necessarily going to free up your nights and weekends (and obviously you'd feel the comp hit more severely unless fully remote), whereas at the regional shops you almost definitely attain a meaningful improvement.

I considered lateraling to midlaw at one point but ultimately opted against because I was afraid it would fuck up my exits.

That is definitely a risk to midlaw. I think the arguing is stupid. Big law does most areas of law better, works more, has more expertise, and makes more (sometimes a lot more) money. Mid-law offers better QOL with real work-life balance, can offer good (but not big law) money if at the right firm (with a path to partnership), and generally does less complex work on both lit and transactional. Both have merit and there is no right or wrong. I decided once I had a kid that my nights and weekends with kid is more important than the extra $$$ and work complexity. Different strokes for different folks.

[Anonymous User]

As far of the size/quality discussion, it’s worth noting that size and leverage roughly correlate inversely to quality in litigation when you restrict the set to market-ish paying firms. There are ten-lawyer firms that do better work with better quality control (because they don’t hire or keep average lawyers) than major biglaw firms. And if a relatively small firm pays comparably to biglaw it means it’s being paid a premium for skill, not scale and project management, where biglaw lit has the relative advantage. As a corollary, these firms also often compete in the types of litigation that most reward quality over quantity, which many litigators view as desirable. But the hours are often at least as bad as biglaw (though partnership prospects are often much better).

[Anonymous User]

I’m not really calling BS, but I’m struggling to understand what not working after 5:30 works like when you’re doing deals? It seems odd to me that these firms could both be doing the kind of work that allows them to pay associates 250k+ and then also have clients that aren’t more demanding in terms of responsiveness/turn arounds.

Maybe all the folks in this thread are in litigation though?

I have an alternative perspective. I did a short stint in midlaw, and it wasn't for me so I came back to biglaw. Here are my thoughts:

- I am a deal lawyer and I was still doing deals in midlaw. They were smaller and to me less interesting, but not so much that it drove me back to biglaw.
- Comp was significantly lower at my shop, but as a midlevel comp was ~$175k-$250k all in, depending whether you were homegrown or recruited out of biglaw (biglaw refugees had higher rates and higher comp)
- My raw annual hours were lower, but my work life balance was only marginally improved. For one, administrative tasks like keeping time (my midlaw firm had super dated timer software that had no timer buttons so I effectively had to keep time on paper and transfer it daily), work that would typically be passed on to a junior associate or even paralegal in biglaw, etc. all fell to me in addition to my normal substantive work, which ended up chewing up a good chunk of time.
- Also on time, I tended to have more free time during business hours because I just had less deals going at any given time, but clients still wanted answers to emails on nights and weekends because it was still deal work. So I didn't get the lifestyle improvement of like "I don't really ever work weekends and I generally signoff at 5:30pm". The partners sold it as like working til 9pm here is better than working til midnight in biglaw (but for me, both are after my kid's bedtime so I'd rather get paid double in biglaw). And I have no need for more free time from 10am-noon on a Tuesday, cause like my spouse is working then, my friends are all working then, and my kids are at school, so basically it didn't improve my WLB all that much.
- The hard part (and this is just my opinion from time time in midlaw) is that when you go from having a billable rate of $1k/hour to $350/hour, you would assume clients are more understanding. However my experience was that the midlaw clients paying $350 are generally smaller companies/funds, and $350 to them means just as much if not more than $1000 to your typical biglaw client so they expect responsiveness.

[existentialcrisis]

I’m not really calling BS, but I’m struggling to understand what not working after 5:30 works like when you’re doing deals? It seems odd to me that these firms could both be doing the kind of work that allows them to pay associates 250k+ and then also have clients that aren’t more demanding in terms of responsiveness/turn arounds.

Maybe all the folks in this thread are in litigation though?

I have an alternative perspective. I did a short stint in midlaw, and it wasn't for me so I came back to biglaw. Here are my thoughts:

- I am a deal lawyer and I was still doing deals in midlaw. They were smaller and to me less interesting, but not so much that it drove me back to biglaw.
- Comp was significantly lower at my shop, but as a midlevel comp was ~$175k-$250k all in, depending whether you were homegrown or recruited out of biglaw (biglaw refugees had higher rates and higher comp)
- My raw annual hours were lower, but my work life balance was only marginally improved. For one, administrative tasks like keeping time (my midlaw firm had super dated timer software that had no timer buttons so I effectively had to keep time on paper and transfer it daily), work that would typically be passed on to a junior associate or even paralegal in biglaw, etc. all fell to me in addition to my normal substantive work, which ended up chewing up a good chunk of time.
- Also on time, I tended to have more free time during business hours because I just had less deals going at any given time, but clients still wanted answers to emails on nights and weekends because it was still deal work. So I didn't get the lifestyle improvement of like "I don't really ever work weekends and I generally signoff at 5:30pm". The partners sold it as like working til 9pm here is better than working til midnight in biglaw (but for me, both are after my kid's bedtime so I'd rather get paid double in biglaw). And I have no need for more free time from 10am-noon on a Tuesday, cause like my spouse is working then, my friends are all working then, and my kids are at school, so basically it didn't improve my WLB all that much.
- The hard part (and this is just my opinion from time time in midlaw) is that when you go from having a billable rate of $1k/hour to $350/hour, you would assume clients are more understanding. However my experience was that the midlaw clients paying $350 are generally smaller companies/funds, and $350 to them means just as much if not more than $1000 to your typical biglaw client so they expect responsiveness.

This is a helpful perspective.

The bolded was always my main concern when thinking about moving to this type of firm and was the main point of my question re: still doing deals.

[umichman]

I’m not really calling BS, but I’m struggling to understand what not working after 5:30 works like when you’re doing deals? It seems odd to me that these firms could both be doing the kind of work that allows them to pay associates 250k+ and then also have clients that aren’t more demanding in terms of responsiveness/turn arounds.

Maybe all the folks in this thread are in litigation though?

I have an alternative perspective. I did a short stint in midlaw, and it wasn't for me so I came back to biglaw. Here are my thoughts:

- I am a deal lawyer and I was still doing deals in midlaw. They were smaller and to me less interesting, but not so much that it drove me back to biglaw.
- Comp was significantly lower at my shop, but as a midlevel comp was ~$175k-$250k all in, depending whether you were homegrown or recruited out of biglaw (biglaw refugees had higher rates and higher comp)
- My raw annual hours were lower, but my work life balance was only marginally improved. For one, administrative tasks like keeping time (my midlaw firm had super dated timer software that had no timer buttons so I effectively had to keep time on paper and transfer it daily), work that would typically be passed on to a junior associate or even paralegal in biglaw, etc. all fell to me in addition to my normal substantive work, which ended up chewing up a good chunk of time.
- Also on time, I tended to have more free time during business hours because I just had less deals going at any given time, but clients still wanted answers to emails on nights and weekends because it was still deal work. So I didn't get the lifestyle improvement of like "I don't really ever work weekends and I generally signoff at 5:30pm". The partners sold it as like working til 9pm here is better than working til midnight in biglaw (but for me, both are after my kid's bedtime so I'd rather get paid double in biglaw). And I have no need for more free time from 10am-noon on a Tuesday, cause like my spouse is working then, my friends are all working then, and my kids are at school, so basically it didn't improve my WLB all that much.
- The hard part (and this is just my opinion from time time in midlaw) is that when you go from having a billable rate of $1k/hour to $350/hour, you would assume clients are more understanding. However my experience was that the midlaw clients paying $350 are generally smaller companies/funds, and $350 to them means just as much if not more than $1000 to your typical biglaw client so they expect responsiveness.

This is a helpful perspective.

The bolded was always my main concern when thinking about moving to this type of firm and was the main point of my question re: still doing deals.

I think that is true. If you are still doing M&A work for PE funds, pe is PE.

I switched client type to one that is certainly less demanding than PE.

[OutoftheWoods]

This is entirely firm dependent. I went to a midlaw firm with an 1800 hour requirement but everyone billed around 2000 (at least) and got paid less than market. Let's just say I didn't stay there very long. Now back in BL and happy.

[Anonymous User]

I lateraled to a small/medium size firm from a large law firm. I make slightly below market and bill ~1,900 hours annually. But I'm in a super niche practice area where it is quite easy to hit your hours. I work some weird hours but overall, the work life balance is fantastic. I recognize that I'm in the outlier group.

[Anonymous User]

Can anyone talk about lateraling to midlaw from a securities/capital markets group? Most of my work consists of investment grade debt offerings by public companies and 33/34 act filings. I assume the latter may have some applicability to smaller firms, but not the former. To anyone who's made a similar jump, did you have to retool your practice? And were there any QOL benefits in doing so?