Positives of working as a lawyer Forum

[Stanford4Me]

OMG, an ATL SURVEY! How SCIENTIFIC.

Better than your conjecture. Just saying.

How is my survey of associates in any way inferior to ATLs? Did they have a statistically significant sample size and a proper sampling methodology? Lol, Elie.

You're arguing that his information is flawed/unreliable while at the same time relying on your few, insignificant interviews with associates (unless I'm missing something).

[keg411]

I don't think it's necessarily 80 hours every week, but there will be some insane weeks, especially in corporate. My family member is a first year associate in a NYC and does corporate and actually had a week of billing 80 hours (and worked about 100). However, this person's firm and corporate practice is particularly busy and is probably not the norm.

Still, I'd feel a lot safer in my job if I were working crazy hours and the firm was busy to having more free time. If the firms aren't busy, then layoffs will happen again or firms will cut SA programs back again (or cut them altogether). And no one here wants that .

[XxSpyKEx]

Personally, I don't believe in stories of 80+ hours a week of work. I have been part of an organization where everyone promised that type of environment; those promises never materialized in the end. IMO, nobody can work 80+ hours a week for more than few month and not burn out and still be productive.

My dad has been doing it for about 30 years. You get used to it.

The 9-11 number isn't that unbelievable if you think about it. That's about 14 hours. Subtract at least 2 for lunch and dinner, and 1 for goofing off during the day. That's 11 hours. Say 70% of your time is billable. That's 7-8 hours per day. Then let's say you get into the office at 10 on a weekend day and leave at 4. That's 6 hours, but you take an hour for lunch and an hour goofing off and you're at 4 hours. Say on average you work 75% of weekend days - that leaves you with about 6 hours worked each weekend, or about 4 hours billed. Adding it up, that's about 42-44 hours a week billed or about 2200-2300 hours a year.

If it seems unrealistic that you'd spend hours a day eating and goofing off, you've never worked an intense, intellectually-demanding job. You'd think that 42 hours a week billed with 70% efficiency = 60 hours a week worked means 9-9 5 days a week with the weekends off. You'll never manage that! You can't sit with your head down and work for 12 hours a day, every day. You need to talk to your office mate, zone out, check reddit.com, etc. That time quickly adds up and you have to factor it in.

This.

Actually, everything in this post is pretty consistent to with what actual practicing NYC v10 attorneys told me when I spoke with them, and it actually seems pretty accurate from my last summer experience. I personally wasn’t required to bill a certain number of hours each week, but it’s really hard to even sit there and work for even 4 hours straight through without getting up and just talking to other people in the office to just take your mind off work. Legal work isn’t physically demanding, but it’s definitely mentally exhausting after so much time, and I found the pace of everything to be a shitload quicker than anything you do in law school (e.g. you write literally one 20 page brief in LRW across an entire semester… in practice sometimes you have to do that within a couple days; pretty big difference). And I think that 0Ls and 1Ls that are posting on here thinking they are going to be able to hack the billable hours requirement in something like 10 hours a day are going to be in for a surprise when they get out there.

[Veyron]

OMG, an ATL SURVEY! How SCIENTIFIC.

Better than your conjecture. Just saying.

How is my survey of associates in any way inferior to ATLs? Did they have a statistically significant sample size and a proper sampling methodology? Lol, Elie.

You're arguing that his information is flawed/unreliable while at the same time relying on your few, insignificant interviews with associates (unless I'm missing something).

No, I'm arguing that our information is equally unreliable.

[sighsigh]

Personally, I don't believe in stories of 80+ hours a week of work. I have been part of an organization where everyone promised that type of environment; those promises never materialized in the end. IMO, nobody can work 80+ hours a week for more than few month and not burn out and still be productive.

My dad has been doing it for about 30 years. You get used to it.

The 9-11 number isn't that unbelievable if you think about it. That's about 14 hours. Subtract at least 2 for lunch and dinner, and 1 for goofing off during the day. That's 11 hours. Say 70% of your time is billable. That's 7-8 hours per day. Then let's say you get into the office at 10 on a weekend day and leave at 4. That's 6 hours, but you take an hour for lunch and an hour goofing off and you're at 4 hours. Say on average you work 75% of weekend days - that leaves you with about 6 hours worked each weekend, or about 4 hours billed. Adding it up, that's about 42-44 hours a week billed or about 2200-2300 hours a year.

If it seems unrealistic that you'd spend hours a day eating and goofing off, you've never worked an intense, intellectually-demanding job. You'd think that 42 hours a week billed with 70% efficiency = 60 hours a week worked means 9-9 5 days a week with the weekends off. You'll never manage that! You can't sit with your head down and work for 12 hours a day, every day. You need to talk to your office mate, zone out, check reddit.com, etc. That time quickly adds up and you have to factor it in.

Most people (including the hypothetical scenario that YLS ran) say that the percentage of hours billed is between 2/3 and 3/4. This already takes into account eating time and other inefficiencies. What you actually have there is 55% of hours billed.

[Renzo]

Personally, I don't believe in stories of 80+ hours a week of work. I have been part of an organization where everyone promised that type of environment; those promises never materialized in the end. IMO, nobody can work 80+ hours a week for more than few month and not burn out and still be productive.

My dad has been doing it for about 30 years. You get used to it.

The 9-11 number isn't that unbelievable if you think about it. That's about 14 hours. Subtract at least 2 for lunch and dinner, and 1 for goofing off during the day. That's 11 hours. Say 70% of your time is billable. That's 7-8 hours per day. Then let's say you get into the office at 10 on a weekend day and leave at 4. That's 6 hours, but you take an hour for lunch and an hour goofing off and you're at 4 hours. Say on average you work 75% of weekend days - that leaves you with about 6 hours worked each weekend, or about 4 hours billed. Adding it up, that's about 42-44 hours a week billed or about 2200-2300 hours a year.

If it seems unrealistic that you'd spend hours a day eating and goofing off, you've never worked an intense, intellectually-demanding job. You'd think that 42 hours a week billed with 70% efficiency = 60 hours a week worked means 9-9 5 days a week with the weekends off. You'll never manage that! You can't sit with your head down and work for 12 hours a day, every day. You need to talk to your office mate, zone out, check reddit.com, etc. That time quickly adds up and you have to factor it in.

Most people (including the hypothetical scenario that YLS ran) say that the percentage of hours billed is between 2/3 and 3/4. This already takes into account eating time and other inefficiencies. What you actually have there is 55% of hours billed.

Eating and "inefficiencies" like goofing off, shopping, or exercising aren't included in that YLS hypo, nor in most people's calculation of billing efficiency rates. That extra 1/4 to 1/3 of your time is attending department meetings, CLEs and other trainings, sitting at your desk waiting for work to drop, checking/responding to non-billable email, etc.

[sighsigh]

Personally, I don't believe in stories of 80+ hours a week of work. I have been part of an organization where everyone promised that type of environment; those promises never materialized in the end. IMO, nobody can work 80+ hours a week for more than few month and not burn out and still be productive.

My dad has been doing it for about 30 years. You get used to it.

The 9-11 number isn't that unbelievable if you think about it. That's about 14 hours. Subtract at least 2 for lunch and dinner, and 1 for goofing off during the day. That's 11 hours. Say 70% of your time is billable. That's 7-8 hours per day. Then let's say you get into the office at 10 on a weekend day and leave at 4. That's 6 hours, but you take an hour for lunch and an hour goofing off and you're at 4 hours. Say on average you work 75% of weekend days - that leaves you with about 6 hours worked each weekend, or about 4 hours billed. Adding it up, that's about 42-44 hours a week billed or about 2200-2300 hours a year.

If it seems unrealistic that you'd spend hours a day eating and goofing off, you've never worked an intense, intellectually-demanding job. You'd think that 42 hours a week billed with 70% efficiency = 60 hours a week worked means 9-9 5 days a week with the weekends off. You'll never manage that! You can't sit with your head down and work for 12 hours a day, every day. You need to talk to your office mate, zone out, check reddit.com, etc. That time quickly adds up and you have to factor it in.

Most people (including the hypothetical scenario that YLS ran) say that the percentage of hours billed is between 2/3 and 3/4. This already takes into account eating time and other inefficiencies. What you actually have there is 55% of hours billed.

Eating and "inefficiencies" like goofing off, shopping, or exercising aren't included in that YLS hypo, nor in most people's calculation of billing efficiency rates. That extra 1/4 to 1/3 of your time is attending department meetings, CLEs and other trainings, sitting at your desk waiting for work to drop, checking/responding to non-billable email, etc.

?? Yes it is. 1 hour for lunch, 1 hour for dinner, and 4 15-minute coffee breaks. In fact, that's exactly the amount of time the quoted poster allocated for this sort of thing.

http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/C ... e_hour.pdf

I don't think I've ever heard anybody say they only bill half their time. I think most lawyers would look at that as extremely inefficient.

[shepdawg]

From everything I've heard, the first couple years or so are rough as a biglaw associate at a top firm in NYC. Typical hours in seem to be from 9-9:30 to 11-11:30PM Monday through Friday, plus long days on saturday and sunday, and that's when you aren't that busy. When things ramp up, they work even more hours.

Let's do some basic math. 9am-11pm (or 9:30-11:30) is a 14 hour day. Five of those = 70 hours. Not sure how long you are estimating for "long days" on S/Su, but let's say 1/2 the time of one of your regular days (so ~7 hours/day). That's 14 hours on a weekend, making it an 84 hour work week. That is, over the course of a year, 4368 hours, say 4200 if you take 2 weeks off for vacation, sickness, other stuff. Even assuming that only 2/3 of those hours are billable (which is low, considering you wouldn't be working this much unless it was for a client matter), that's still 2800 billable hours. And according to your facts, that's only "typical hours" -- I guess you figure the average attorney bills 3000+ hours/year.

Main point, please think before you post stuff like this. While I agree with the general premise that Biglaw hours suck, especially as a junior associate, this is just clearly not accurate. You mention that you've "heard" this. I think what you heard is that occasionally hours can be this brutal (yes, you may have a week every so ofter where you're working non-stop), but this is not the norm.

Edit: As some further proof, check out ATL's survey on how many billable hours people logged last year, when the economy was improving and 73% of associates hit their hours requirement (http://abovethelaw.com/2011/01/career-c ... able-year/):

Less than 1,900 hours: 21%
1,900 – 2,099 hours: 22%
2,100 – 2,299 hours: 23%
2,300 – 2,499 hours: 17%
2,500 hours and above: 17%

You can't bill every hour you work.

[Stanford4Me]

You can't bill every hour you work.

[Stanford4Me]

And Veron, I misread what you were saying. My bad.

[Renzo]

Eating and "inefficiencies" like goofing off, shopping, or exercising aren't included in that YLS hypo, nor in most people's calculation of billing efficiency rates. That extra 1/4 to 1/3 of your time is attending department meetings, CLEs and other trainings, sitting at your desk waiting for work to drop, checking/responding to non-billable email, etc.

?? Yes it is. 1 hour for lunch, 1 hour for dinner, and 4 15-minute coffee breaks. In fact, that's exactly the amount of time the quoted poster allocated for this sort of thing.

http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/C ... e_hour.pdf

I don't think I've ever heard anybody say they only bill half their time. I think most lawyers would look at that as extremely inefficient.

You're right about the meals, but I was referring to this:

These schedules do not account for any personal calls at work, training/observing, talking with coworkers, a longer lunch, ... any pro bono work (if not treated as billable hours), serving on a Bar committee, writing an article for the bar journal, or interviewing an applicant.

That hypo also assumes that billable work is available every minute you are "at work." This isn't true; there's some time lost waiting for, searching out, being assigned, discussing, and handing in billable assignments.

[Alex-Trof]

Personally, I don't believe in stories of 80+ hours a week of work. I have been part of an organization where everyone promised that type of environment; those promises never materialized in the end. IMO, nobody can work 80+ hours a week for more than few month and not burn out and still be productive.

My dad has been doing it for about 30 years. You get used to it.

The 9-11 number isn't that unbelievable if you think about it. That's about 14 hours. Subtract at least 2 for lunch and dinner, and 1 for goofing off during the day. That's 11 hours. Say 70% of your time is billable. That's 7-8 hours per day. Then let's say you get into the office at 10 on a weekend day and leave at 4. That's 6 hours, but you take an hour for lunch and an hour goofing off and you're at 4 hours. Say on average you work 75% of weekend days - that leaves you with about 6 hours worked each weekend, or about 4 hours billed. Adding it up, that's about 42-44 hours a week billed or about 2200-2300 hours a year.

If it seems unrealistic that you'd spend hours a day eating and goofing off, you've never worked an intense, intellectually-demanding job. You'd think that 42 hours a week billed with 70% efficiency = 60 hours a week worked means 9-9 5 days a week with the weekends off. You'll never manage that! You can't sit with your head down and work for 12 hours a day, every day. You need to talk to your office mate, zone out, check reddit.com, etc. That time quickly adds up and you have to factor it in.

This.

Actually, everything in this post is pretty consistent to with what actual practicing NYC v10 attorneys told me when I spoke with them, and it actually seems pretty accurate from my last summer experience. I personally wasn’t required to bill a certain number of hours each week, but it’s really hard to even sit there and work for even 4 hours straight through without getting up and just talking to other people in the office to just take your mind off work. Legal work isn’t physically demanding, but it’s definitely mentally exhausting after so much time, and I found the pace of everything to be a shitload quicker than anything you do in law school (e.g. you write literally one 20 page brief in LRW across an entire semester… in practice sometimes you have to do that within a couple days; pretty big difference). And I think that 0Ls and 1Ls that are posting on here thinking they are going to be able to hack the billable hours requirement in something like 10 hours a day are going to be in for a surprise when they get out there.

Your stories remind me of people in college that are always busy studying in the library but in reality are just dicking around half of the time. How long on average does an associate does actual work? If you add all the meals, breaks, work outs, etc.... It will all basically be how my entire day is spent anyway. I will repeat myself, it is humanly impossible to work 80+ hours a week for long periods of time.

[SteelReserve]

Hey OP,

The best way to learn whether or not being a lawyer is for you is to work for one year as a paralegal.

Second hand reports from lawyer friends or from message boards are useful but cannot possibly be as useful as actually working in a firm. The paralegal market is in much better shape than the attorney market and it should be no problem getting a para job.

The benefits are 1) You will know whether or not lawyering is for you and; 2) You will have a major advantage in OCI or in getting any other job should you choose to go to law school because you will have legal experience.


If I could do it all over again, that is absolutely what I would have done. I do not know if I would have gone to law school had I done that or not. And again it will give you a major recruiting advantage. No better way to get insight into what lawyers do on a day to day than by being a para.

[Veyron]

Hey OP,

The best way to learn whether or not being a lawyer is for you is to work for one year as a paralegal.

Second hand reports from lawyer friends or from message boards are useful but cannot possibly be as useful as actually working in a firm. The paralegal market is in much better shape than the attorney market and it should be no problem getting a para job.

The benefits are 1) You will know whether or not lawyering is for you and; 2) You will have a major advantage in OCI or in getting any other job should you choose to go to law school because you will have legal experience.


If I could do it all over again, that is absolutely what I would have done. I do not know if I would have gone to law school had I done that or not. And again it will give you a major recruiting advantage. No better way to get insight into what lawyers do on a day to day than by being a para.

So much fail in this post. Major advantage in OCI, lol no. At least, no more advantage than having any work experience gives. Paralegal market in better shape than the attorney market. Also lol no.

[Jessep]

There are quite a few things I enjoy about being a lawyer (1st year biglaw specialty group):

1) My job is very intellectually demanding
2) My co-workers are uniformly intelligent
3) Even though I work long hours, I also have a good deal of autonomy. I'm not forced to take lunch at a certain hour or punch in and out every day
4) I enjoy solving problems- and there are plenty of those to solve
5) I'm learning new things every day- useful things - not BS some prof decided should be on the syllabus
6) I feel very respected, even by my superiors. I am often sincerely thanked for the work I do.
7) My office has a nice view

I like your answer better than mine.

In terms of the hours pissing contest, if you are efficient and really busy, you bill most of your day, you eat dinner and lunch in 10 minutes combined, and you don't screw around with coffee breaks. I never take a lunch break for more than 10 minutes unless I'm meeting someone for lunch, which happens maybe once a week at most. With all that said, I haven't met many people who bill 2500+ hours, and almost none outside of NYC. To bill 2500, you are probably working roughly 70 hour weeks if you are genuinely busy, maybe slightly less. If you are not or your firm is inefficient, you may work more hours. How many more hours is anyone's guess. It's not hard to bill 50 hours in a week if you're working 70 hours though, if you have work. If I have work to do I often bill my entire day minus an hour or two (taking out time for bathroom, grabbing 10 minute meals and about 30 min for time entry, etc. and maybe reading the news).

[XxSpyKEx]

In terms of the hours pissing contest, if you are efficient and really busy, you bill most of your day, you eat dinner and lunch in 10 minutes combined, and you don't screw around with coffee breaks. I never take a lunch break for more than 10 minutes

Do you talk to anyone in your office about anything that isn't work related? lol. This has to be miserable -- 5 minutes for lunch, 5 minutes for dinner and not talking to anyone all day, except for work related shit. Fuck that. I couldn't do that shit, especially if I was working biglaw hours. I don't recall any attorneys at the firm I was at last summer that did this either. It just sounds terrible.

[firemed]

Most law students hate being lawyers because they never really wanted to be lawyers in the first place.

The above is what many attorneys I know have made very clear to me.

[firemed]

As well as never seeing your family, sleeping in the office 5 nights a week (at least!) and doing lines of cocaine off of your briefs.

There is cocaine.... maybe I should reconsider biglaw

[Jessep]

In terms of the hours pissing contest, if you are efficient and really busy, you bill most of your day, you eat dinner and lunch in 10 minutes combined, and you don't screw around with coffee breaks. I never take a lunch break for more than 10 minutes

I don't recall any attorneys at the firm I was at last summer that did this either. It just sounds terrible.

Working at a firm over the summer is not practice. That is fun time.

There are passing niceties but when I'm truly busy there is just no time. You need to get everything done 30 minutes ago. If you expect to spend more than 15 minutes a day shooting the shit with associates/partners, you are going to be really disappointed. You'll have firm social events or practice area events for that kind of stuff, but it will not be regular. Then again, maybe your firm is insanely laid back. I've just never experienced that and I consider my firm fairly laid back as far as big firms go, and compared to my friend's firms. The hours are long. People want to get this shit done so they can go home to their families/significant others/bed.

[rayiner]

Personally, I don't believe in stories of 80+ hours a week of work. I have been part of an organization where everyone promised that type of environment; those promises never materialized in the end. IMO, nobody can work 80+ hours a week for more than few month and not burn out and still be productive.

My dad has been doing it for about 30 years. You get used to it.

The 9-11 number isn't that unbelievable if you think about it. That's about 14 hours. Subtract at least 2 for lunch and dinner, and 1 for goofing off during the day. That's 11 hours. Say 70% of your time is billable. That's 7-8 hours per day. Then let's say you get into the office at 10 on a weekend day and leave at 4. That's 6 hours, but you take an hour for lunch and an hour goofing off and you're at 4 hours. Say on average you work 75% of weekend days - that leaves you with about 6 hours worked each weekend, or about 4 hours billed. Adding it up, that's about 42-44 hours a week billed or about 2200-2300 hours a year.

If it seems unrealistic that you'd spend hours a day eating and goofing off, you've never worked an intense, intellectually-demanding job. You'd think that 42 hours a week billed with 70% efficiency = 60 hours a week worked means 9-9 5 days a week with the weekends off. You'll never manage that! You can't sit with your head down and work for 12 hours a day, every day. You need to talk to your office mate, zone out, check reddit.com, etc. That time quickly adds up and you have to factor it in.

This.

Actually, everything in this post is pretty consistent to with what actual practicing NYC v10 attorneys told me when I spoke with them, and it actually seems pretty accurate from my last summer experience. I personally wasn’t required to bill a certain number of hours each week, but it’s really hard to even sit there and work for even 4 hours straight through without getting up and just talking to other people in the office to just take your mind off work. Legal work isn’t physically demanding, but it’s definitely mentally exhausting after so much time, and I found the pace of everything to be a shitload quicker than anything you do in law school (e.g. you write literally one 20 page brief in LRW across an entire semester… in practice sometimes you have to do that within a couple days; pretty big difference). And I think that 0Ls and 1Ls that are posting on here thinking they are going to be able to hack the billable hours requirement in something like 10 hours a day are going to be in for a surprise when they get out there.

Your stories remind me of people in college that are always busy studying in the library but in reality are just dicking around half of the time. How long on average does an associate does actual work? If you add all the meals, breaks, work outs, etc.... It will all basically be how my entire day is spent anyway. I will repeat myself, it is humanly impossible to work 80+ hours a week for long periods of time.

That's the point. It is extremely difficult to work consistently 12 hours a day for 5 days a week. That's why you need meals, breaks, workouts, etc, and when you factor that in it becomes 14 hours a day 6 days a week.

I used to work 80+ hour weeks at my old job, and that's exactly what would happen. To go from 40 hours of actual work to 50 hours of actual work, I might only be at work 60 hours a week. But to go from 50 hours of actual work to 60 hours of actual work, I would be at work 80 hours a week. Your efficiency goes down as your hours worked goes up.

[nealric]

Not sure how people are kicking in in the V5, but at my V100 firm (NYC office), actually working 80 hour weeks on a consistent basis would make you the top billing junior associate at the firm.

I usually work 50-60 hours a week. My billing efficiency is usually about 80%. That said, people in other departments spend a lot more time than I do waiting for work. I'm in an insanely low leverage practice group, so any time I spend working is time spent billing.

[pppokerface]

I had a 40 hour a week job, no vacas really (long temping job), didn't mind the hours, but the office and everything just blew (can't give too many details, but it was really really bad). We had to take 1/2 hour unpaid lunch, so it ended up being 42.5 hours at the office, plus commute time, so 30 min on the train to and from at least. Just wanted to give perspective if anyone wanted to compare typical hours w/ law firm typical hours hehe-a typical 40 hour a week job isn't bad at all, and a lot of times I stayed overtime, because I was paid hourly. If the job itself was something that I wanted to do, then sure, I would have been fine with staying even longer. My roomie works from 9-6 sometimes and he's cool with it. Idk about being in the office 24/7 though! lol

[Patriot1208]

I know this is older and the response rates are sort of low for some firms, but this still seemed relevant
http://www.averyindex.com/longest_hours.php

Also, 50 to 60 hour weeks are basically required in most high paying careers, it's a trade off people have to make across many different industries.

[Veyron]

I know this is older and the response rates are sort of low for some firms, but this still seemed relevant
http://www.averyindex.com/longest_hours.php

Also, 50 to 60 60-90 hour weeks are basically required in most high paying careers, it's a trade off people have to make across many different industries.

FTFY

[Patriot1208]

I know this is older and the response rates are sort of low for some firms, but this still seemed relevant
http://www.averyindex.com/longest_hours.php

Also, 50 to 60 60-90 hour weeks are basically required in most high paying careers, it's a trade off people have to make across many different industries.

FTFY

Did you look at the survey? The highest average hours reported was 69