Psychology of leaving big law Forum

[AaronCarter]

Holy shit, from the non-biglaw perspective, having goals of cutoff at 9PM and every other weekend off is an insanely low bar. That's wild that's aspirational. Your goal would be unacceptably awful to most people and you should interrogate your perspective on work life balance.

Different jr associate V10 M&A here. I just went back through my timer to look at weekends from May-October (had time off on either side so it was a good barometer). Of those 26 weekends, I billed fewer than 5 hours six times. of those 21 weekends where I worked at least five hours, during 15 of them I billed more than ten hours.

I get that it's unhealthy and I'm not arguing that I'm not fucked in the head for doing this (really need the money to support family etc.) My question is, are there market-paying gigs in TX (my market) where people have job security while working fewer weekends? I've been told that this is just how it is pretty much everyhwere in this job. I know I'm not long for it, but I do want to survive into year 4 or so where I can get a decent in house job. Should I be looking for something better? I kinda just figured everybody in M&A is doing this.

I do M&A at a West Coast V30 and I have been pretty successful with protecting weekends. I think I’ve only had one weekend this year where I felt like I worked the whole time. I don’t work at all probably 70% of weekends. 20% of weekends I bill like 1-2 hours. 10% or so I bill between 4 and 8 hours. Pretty rare for me to bill more than that. I will say that I work longer weekdays intentionally to avoid weekend work so weekend work is solely *random client demand* or *Monday closing* rather than just working to catch up or something.

I hit 2000 hours last year and have a fantastic reputation. This job is still hard and unpredictable and I don’t want to do it much longer, but I definitely have it pretty good for biglaw compared to friends. My point is not all firms are the same, I guess I just got lucky.

Which firm?