thesealocust wrote:2nd year associate here:
The problem is that you're plugging yourself in to the most insane service industry the world has ever produced. It's also a profession that is built on a model of churning through bright and ambitious young people. Nothing about it tries to be sustainable or reasonable - ever.
On the one hand, there ARE whiners and there ARE grinders. There are people who will have 4 hours worth of work and spend 12 hours on it and ask for more work and complain the whole way. Not every day is a crisis, even though some people manufacture them for themselves.
On the other hand, when your deal comes in, Congress votes on a rule affecting your clients, or the case is about to go to trial, shit is going to get real and you are going to get tired.
When it's your turn, believe me, it's not going to be a choice between eating dinner at the desk + perfection and leaving at 6:30 and getting an A-. It's going to be a choice between working in a frenzy until midnight and hoping you don't royally fuck it up because of how tired you are. It drives people crazy and the hours can be fucking terrible as a result.
About halfway through my first year as an associate and so far things have been great. I get plenty of sleep, the work's enjoyable, and I have more down time than I really need. If you’d like to have a similar experience, there’s exactly one thing you can do to maximize your chance:
Stay as far away from large practice groups as you can. Firms generally send most incoming associates to their biggest groups. You should avoid this. Large groups are structured in such a way that they have a lot of work for juniors to do. They also have a lot of work for midlevels and seniors, almost always with a firm hierarchy of who does what. With traditional billing this is fantastic from the standpoint of an owner. To oversimplify, the more people you can staff on a deal or a litigation, the more money you'll make. While that's great for the owner, it's usually terrible for you, the junior. The only thing left for you is what everyone up the chain finds too uninteresting and time consuming. Generally there’s less client sensitivity to bigger bills here than other practices, so you can count on as much boring, time consuming work as the client is willing to pay for. And not only will you be spending tons of time reading through boring doc review or diligence, seeing how fast you can circle numbers in SEC filings, etc. you won’t be learning much of anything, particularly compared with your peers who made it into niche groups. The structure of big groups all but guarantees that only the least interesting, lowest value work reaches your desk. But even worse than all that, the hierarchy of a big group means you’ll be dealing mostly with other associates, usually fellow juniors or midlevels who have little of value to impart to you. Working in a small group maximizes your opportunity to deal only with partners and the occasional senior. And when you report directly to a partner, there’s only so much you can really be expected to do. It’s counterintuitive, but the combination of small group work and a lack of hierarchy makes for less overall work, not more. Even with a small group, you’ll still have many of the pressures of big firm life. Assignments will still need to be done with little notice, and there will be the occasional late night (a few times a quarter rather than a few times a week). But the real benefit is you’ll spend your time learning rather than grinding away on another 200 contracts that need to be summarized in the next 24 hours.
