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I’m a third year in NYC biglaw (litigation). I think I have an okay reputation and I never drop the ball on anything critical, but I struggle with forcing myself to do work in a timely manner, which then leads to a lot of unnecessary anxiety and unpleasant work marathons. For example, here I am on TLS at 4 in the afternoon.

When I look around at work, no one else ever seems to be in my position. Some people are visibly total flakes, and the others appear to be able to just sit down and grind for hours on end. It’s certainly possible that I’m actually unknowingly the former, but I don’t think I’m there yet.

My question is: are all or many of the grinders actually all lazy bums and/or paralyzed by the unpleasantness of our assignments just like I am, or is everyone else actually incredibly disciplined? If the latter, how do I become that? I do fine in very urgent situations, but I really struggle with just sitting down in the morning and grinding out difficult unpleasant work day after day without lapsing into mindlessly reading the internet.

Despite how inane the above sounds, I actually would appreciate any advice from the self-disciplined amongst us. I think being more on top of my work would make biglaw life much more bearable, but I have so much anxiety and dread about nearly every task that I can never make it there. If it’s relevant, I’ve never been given reason to believe that my work is poor quality, although I also work at the kind of firm where people would just redo my work and not tell me if it did suck.

lateral into a job where you actually do work you care about

how are your hours?

Anonymous User wrote:lateral into a job where you actually do work you care about

This is good advice. It’s not realistic to be a top performer at a job you’re not passionate about.

Anonymous User wrote:how are your hours?

I think they're all right. I billed a little under 2100 last year. This year I'm currently on track to bill 2,500, but it's misleading because I haven't been able to take vacation yet. I'm less worried about getting canned for low hours (or even bad work, really), I just feel like shit that I add so much unnecessary stress to my life by not being able to consistently get stuff done all day every day like everyone around me seems to do. There's really no answer to this other than "grow up and accept that this is what life is," but I thought I'd put it out there in case someone who was previously in my position and did, indeed, grow up, had any advice.

As for lateraling, yes, this is TCR. Unfortunately, I have a lot of debt that I refinanced so I'm reluctant to go in-house at this point, and I would have a hard time living in NYC and making my loan payments doing public interest. I wouldn't mind going to another firm because I like the diversity of firm work, but I find it difficult to get visibility into what firms have the golden combo of (i) not full of assholes and (ii) financially stable.

This next year should be about aggressive loan paying. With the next year's bonus you should be able to put at least 75 on it

And I say this because there's really no cure for this other than doing something that you care about. Lots of people don't get that chance but if you're in big law you have the credentials to do it