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Just need some inspo. 2016 grad working at boutique litigation firm. Ppl are nice, my work is completely boring and my pay is very low. So I'm just curious what do any of you do that you find interesting? Enjoyable?

BL associate. I've tried a case, and that was fun, interesting, stressful, and exciting. Also, taking depositions is fun for me. I like briefing complex procedural issues as well. I actually prefer that to substantive legal issues most time because I'm just a general litigator. I really enjoy having a good grasp of procedure, because that's something I can gain expertise in. Those are probably my three favorite areas of practice.

Anonymous User wrote:BL associate. I've tried a case, and that was fun, interesting, stressful, and exciting. Also, taking depositions is fun for me. I like briefing complex procedural issues as well. I actually prefer that to substantive legal issues most time because I'm just a general litigator. I really enjoy having a good grasp of procedure, because that's something I can gain expertise in. Those are probably my three favorite areas of practice.

Patent litigator. I agree with everything here. Legal research and briefing are fun. Depos are kinda stressful, but once you're in it, and you've adequately prepared, it's fun. Discovery responses and correspondence, however, are no bueno. Doc review is mindless, but that can sometimes be a very welcomed break from all the other more stressful stuff, and a great way to fill hours.

Litigator. Usually defense.

I just like drafting stuff and motion practice. I dislike oral presentations because I think the written presentation captures everything better. But old lawyers are the other way around because a lot of them are terrible writers.

One thing I've always been good at was digesting large quantities of information in commercial cases, so I don't mind doc review and doing discovery.

M&A deal specialist (Antitrust). I do a lot of advocacy work for the DOJ/FTC. Drafting white papers, finding documents to use to craft our advocacy strategy, and learning about new industries. It's always something new from deal to deal and actually kind of enjoyable.

No Westlaw, no motions or court filings, rarely any doc review.

Everything else unrelated to law. Music, people, experiences, conversations, hugs. Get a hobby. Whatever you love. Do as I say not as I do.

I love my job.

I'm a tax attorney at a F500 energy company. The energy industry tends to hire in cycles. The one I was hired under was the '9-14 shale boom, a large portion of those who were hired before then were '80s hires. That generation is retiring, which creates a lot of opportunities for younger folks. When I started, there were 6 tax attorneys (including the head of tax) and I was the most junior. Due to retirements and people moving within the industry, I now report directly to the head of tax, and we are looking to hire someone who will report to me.

We do business all over the world, so I'm often involved in learning about foreign tax regimes and explaining my understanding to the business units. In contrast to the internal revenue code with thousands of pages of regulations, some developing country tax codes can be a few dozen pages, so there's a lot of conjecture, reading between the lines, and political calculus involved. Sometimes the tax system is modified by contract with the government, which can add another interesting layer.

I've also had an interesting mix of controversy and planning. Right now, I'm working on a case that is in a foreign country tax court, a domestic arbitration involving an allocation of foreign tax credits with a third party, and a case currently pending before IRS appeals. I'm also involved with all the significant acquisitions and divestitures, and the planning surrounding those transactions. There's also interesting tax structure optimization opportunities that happen from time to time as our portfolio changes.

Besides strictly legal issues, I'm also picking up non-legal accounting issues and learning the business. Sometimes even engineering questions can be relevant to a tax analysis. I enjoy learning about some of the technology behind the industry.

Hours are mostly industry standard 9/80s (40 hour a week average, but with an extra hour a day and a weekday off every other week) with a few crunch time project exceptions.

I really appreciate these answers - please keep them coming! I am mostly drafting deposition reports so I feel like I'm writing book reports all day. It can be interesting to craft a report around salient issues that came out but I feel like I'm mostly not using my brain lol

My practice comprises mostly patent prosecution. The things I enjoy about my work other than learning about new technologies, is a lot of my daily caseload is looking at our client's application and comparing it to other patents that have been cited against it. Essentially, it feels like solving a complex puzzle everyday, finding the one piece of your patent that's not in the others. There are worse things you could be paid 6 figures to do all day.

nealric wrote:I love my job.

I'm a tax attorney at a F500 energy company. The energy industry tends to hire in cycles. The one I was hired under was the '9-14 shale boom, a large portion of those who were hired before then were '80s hires. That generation is retiring, which creates a lot of opportunities for younger folks. When I started, there were 6 tax attorneys (including the head of tax) and I was the most junior. Due to retirements and people moving within the industry, I now report directly to the head of tax, and we are looking to hire someone who will report to me.

We do business all over the world, so I'm often involved in learning about foreign tax regimes and explaining my understanding to the business units. In contrast to the internal revenue code with thousands of pages of regulations, some developing country tax codes can be a few dozen pages, so there's a lot of conjecture, reading between the lines, and political calculus involved. Sometimes the tax system is modified by contract with the government, which can add another interesting layer.

I've also had an interesting mix of controversy and planning. Right now, I'm working on a case that is in a foreign country tax court, a domestic arbitration involving an allocation of foreign tax credits with a third party, and a case currently pending before IRS appeals. I'm also involved with all the significant acquisitions and divestitures, and the planning surrounding those transactions. There's also interesting tax structure optimization opportunities that happen from time to time as our portfolio changes.

Besides strictly legal issues, I'm also picking up non-legal accounting issues and learning the business. Sometimes even engineering questions can be relevant to a tax analysis. I enjoy learning about some of the technology behind the industry.

Hours are mostly industry standard 9/80s (40 hour a week average, but with an extra hour a day and a weekday off every other week) with a few crunch time project exceptions.

Hire me.

glitched wrote:
Hire me.

PM me if you are a tax attorney with 2-4 years of experience.

wonderwall87 wrote:I really appreciate these answers - please keep them coming! I am mostly drafting deposition reports so I feel like I'm writing book reports all day. It can be interesting to craft a report around salient issues that came out but I feel like I'm mostly not using my brain lol

How long ago did you start? They may just be grooming you to actually take depositions. I know at a lot of smaller firms they have associates summarize the depos first, then allow them to take it after the associate has read enough transcripts.

wtf is a deposition report

nealric wrote:

glitched wrote:
Hire me.

PM me if you are a tax attorney with 2-4 years of experience.

This is off topic, but are you in Texas? I wanted to do tax coming out of law school, but I heard it would be very difficult to get out of NY, especially to somewhere like LA, if i did tax.

glitched wrote:

nealric wrote:

glitched wrote:
Hire me.

PM me if you are a tax attorney with 2-4 years of experience.

This is off topic, but are you in Texas? I wanted to do tax coming out of law school, but I heard it would be very difficult to get out of NY, especially to somewhere like LA, if i did tax.

Yes. I started in NYC, but I did have ties to TX, which helped.

M&A

Negotiations and talking to (most) clients are fun. Almost zero legal research is great. Turning the documents are not bad, except where the 8 specialty attorneys give us their markups at the last possible second and expect the corporate guys to fix the common definitions and cross-references and such.

It's really not bad when the sheer volume isn't crushing you, and when there is no BS artificial deadline. Feast-or-famine is the nature of the beast. The relief/high of signing or closing a significant deal is awesome ("yay, sleep, here we come").

glitched wrote:

nealric wrote:

glitched wrote:
Hire me.

PM me if you are a tax attorney with 2-4 years of experience.

This is off topic, but are you in Texas? I wanted to do tax coming out of law school, but I heard it would be very difficult to get out of NY, especially to somewhere like LA, if i did tax.

I personally think people overstate how hard it is to get tax jobs outside of New York out of law school. I think LA is fairly doable if you have ties and a narrative for wanting tax. There are a few large groups in SoCal. Tax groups are smaller, but not many people want to do tax.

Almost literally anything involving discovery is shit. This includes drafting discovery requests, responding to them, producing or reviewing documents, motions to compel (even though other motion work is generally fun), deposition preparation, deposition reports/summaries, and so on. Taking depositions might be fun, but that's almost always reserved for fucking senior associate/partners here.

Preparing other attorneys to do their thing also gets very old after a couple years. This includes depo prep, oral argument prep, trial prep, and so on... If I wrote the motion and then have to take time writing out an outline, discussing with you, and preparing you for the argument, why am I not being given the opportunity to argue it?!?!

Appellate & motion work is where I have the most fun because I basically get to run it. Most of the time, anyway, when people aren't trying to dictate to me what arguments to make. (But even then, it's still infinitely better than discovery and other bullshit.)

honestly, it's the all-nighters

Enjoy: drafting briefs/advocacy papers, conducting witness interviews (I do a lot of investigations - interviews are all the fun of depositions the annoying rules/opposing counsel to deal with), and case management (devising case strategy but also the nuts and bolts of putting together a team, managing the day-to-day work, etc.)

Don't enjoy: the minutiae of discovery (negotiating search terms is the worst), and writing up memos from witness interviews - very tedious

Legal research, writing briefs, legal strategy (do we appeal? do we make this argument or save it for SJ? Many decisions that are at the intersection of law and business), depositions, oral argument (have only done motion practice), settlement negotiations (i handle small cases for a big client so have settled a fair number of cases)

Writing memos (can be interesting if an interesting topic), doc review can be ok (listen to music), motions to compel can be interesting depending on the issue

I agree that most discovery work is not great. I think document collection is objectively the worst because it's a messy process, inefficient, time-consuming and the end result is a ton of documents that need to be reviewed. Dealing with the discovery vendor is also never great.

Mickfromgm wrote:M&A

Negotiations and talking to (most) clients are fun. Almost zero legal research is great. Turning the documents are not bad, except where the 8 specialty attorneys give us their markups at the last possible second and expect the corporate guys to fix the common definitions and cross-references and such.

It's really not bad when the sheer volume isn't crushing you, and when there is no BS artificial deadline. Feast-or-famine is the nature of the beast. The relief/high of signing or closing a significant deal is awesome ("yay, sleep, here we come").

All of this is shit, actually. M&A could be the worst practice group of them all.

Martin Brody wrote:
All of this is shit, actually. M&A could be the worst practice group of them all.

Worst? Don't forget bank finance / high yield work.

Martin Brody wrote:

Mickfromgm wrote:M&A

Negotiations and talking to (most) clients are fun. Almost zero legal research is great. Turning the documents are not bad, except where the 8 specialty attorneys give us their markups at the last possible second and expect the corporate guys to fix the common definitions and cross-references and such.

It's really not bad when the sheer volume isn't crushing you, and when there is no BS artificial deadline. Feast-or-famine is the nature of the beast. The relief/high of signing or closing a significant deal is awesome ("yay, sleep, here we come").

All of this is shit, actually. M&A could be the worst practice group of them all.

Well, it is not the worst because, among other things, no one spends hours fighting over the proper usage of comma or semi-colon at 3 a.m. From what I have done, corporate finance is the worst -- soul crushing hours and sheer aggravation over 150 page documents that no one even looks at. . . . your job is simply to not f**k up. Negotiating documents that do not make any difference in the real life. . . fun.

Martin Brody wrote:

Mickfromgm wrote:M&A

Negotiations and talking to (most) clients are fun. Almost zero legal research is great. Turning the documents are not bad, except where the 8 specialty attorneys give us their markups at the last possible second and expect the corporate guys to fix the common definitions and cross-references and such.

It's really not bad when the sheer volume isn't crushing you, and when there is no BS artificial deadline. Feast-or-famine is the nature of the beast. The relief/high of signing or closing a significant deal is awesome ("yay, sleep, here we come").

All of this is shit, actually. M&A could be the worst practice group of them all.

just do be a specialist bro

Only one little part of the overall deal is in our court, and it's a lot more similarity from deal to deal. Benefits, Antitrust, Tax - much easier life (thus far) than main M&A which seems stupid stressful.