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I'd like to do corporate work, preferable M&A, and I'm quite flexible (i.e. indecisive) in terms of which market I'd like to end up in. I'm from the Western US suburbs, and would've never thought of working in NYC, but as I've gotten serious about M&A, and realized I might have the credentials to qualify for it, I'm looking into making my big push for NYC BigLaw.
My question is whether the benefits of NYC Corporate Law outweigh the downsides, relative to similar work in large secondary markets.
To explain, I know NYC Corp. M&A is going to be higher-profile, higher-volume, more sophisticated, and will carry some marketable prestige for the exit. But at the same time, to me that sounds like you're working on a huge, highly-leveraged team, with a small, niche role (not of your choice), with no client interaction and little partner interaction. Does not sound like awesome career experience.
On the other hand, in a secondary market, such as, say Dallas or DC, you're going to have smaller, lower-profile deals, but you're going to be working on a smaller team and hopefully having a more substantive role in transactions earlier in your career.
Setting aside the notable COL and hours difference, what is the advantage of working in NYC, from a career standpoint?

I had similar concerns as you when I decided I wanted to do M&A. I thought I would be a part of a big team and relegated to small area of the deal for the first 6-7 years. After talking with many junior associates, it turns out that's just not true. Even the big name v-10s have a lot of small/mid sized deals going on all the time. I have spoken with some second/third years who are running small deals by themselves. Some even enlist the help of a single summer in these deals (such that the "deal team" is a junior associate and a summer only). Of course, if you're working on the GM IPO at DPW as a second year, you're probably not doing it for the experience of being in the big chair. However, as firms seek to save costs and clients buck at high legal bills, excessively large teams are becoming rarer.

swc65 wrote:I had similar concerns as you when I decided I wanted to do M&A. I thought I would be a part of a big team and relegated to small area of the deal for the first 6-7 years. After talking with many junior associates, it turns out that's just not true. Even the big name v-10s have a lot of small/mid sized deals going on all the time. I have spoken with some second/third years who are running small deals by themselves. Some even enlist the help of a single summer in these deals (such that the "deal team" is a junior associate and a summer only). Of course, if you're working on the GM IPO at DPW as a second year, you're probably not doing it for the experience of being in the big chair. However, as firms seek to save costs and client buck at high legal bills excessively large teams are becoming rarer.

Thanks. This is the substantive response of my TLS-dreams.

Agree with SWC. Pretty common to have 1 partner/1 associate or 1 partner/2 associate deals at the NY V20 I was at. Even the multi-billion dollar mega deals had 4-5 M&A associates max (though there were also tax and employee benefits folks).