Wardaddy anon here. I'm not responding to Intolerable Tyrannical Midlevel ("ITM"), since the mods have kindly asked us to stop (which of course she ignored because she wanted to "clarify," but that's another issue), and the conversation should die anyway.A. Nony Mouse wrote:I mean, this is overall a really stupid debate, but I'm baffled that people ITT find it strange that someone would find representing exclusively capital defendants more stressful than biglaw. That's not really bizarre at all (nor is it saying people shouldn't find biglaw stressful, either).
But to respond to this, I don't think the issue is that a person finds doing criminal defense work to be more stressful than biglaw. The issue is probably more that the person attempted to draw a patronizing connection between the criminal defense experience to imply that biglaw is objectively less stressful. See these quotes from ITM's first post:
If she had said that she finds the work less stressful in biglaw, without all the extracurricular high horse bullshit, I doubt anyone would find her intolerable. But there's nothing objectively less stressful about working all of the time just to make a quick buck than having a full-time job that works with criminal defendants and, peripherally at least, victims of tragic occurrences. Surely people can disagree (like I do) on which is more stressful, but ITM's post didn't leave a lot of room for disagreement.I have never cried in biglaw and, with the benefit of my PD experience, frankly have a perspective where I might not ever end up crying because the stakes feel so manageable in biglaw. ... But frankly, when you've worked capital cases it puts the biglaw stress in perspective. ... Coming off that work...it's just easy not to get fazed by BigLaw.
When I confronted her with the fact that my opinion was based on doing similar work involving heinous cases, including murder and kidnapping, she said it's not similar because the defendants in my cases can't get the death penalty. Then I questioned whether it's really remarkably stressful to work with cases where the worst outcome is that a terrible person gets punished, to which she responded that the punishment part isn't the tough part, to which my head exploded because logic + her earlier statements. So there's a recap of why people aren't picking up what ITM is dropping.