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I'm a junior associate, and I was wondering if any of you knew folks who went business side at their biglaw firms and found success in advancement. While I'm still figuring out if legal work is for me in the long-term, I do like the firm environment, and I think it could be pretty interesting to go business side. Any success or horror stories around? Would mind grabbing a part-time MBA during the transition (all the better if firm-sponsored, of course).

Anonymous User wrote:I'm a junior associate, and I was wondering if any of you knew folks who went business side at their biglaw firms and found success in advancement. While I'm still figuring out if legal work is for me in the long-term, I do like the firm environment, and I think it could be pretty interesting to go business side. Any success or horror stories around? Would mind grabbing a part-time MBA during the transition (all the better if firm-sponsored, of course).

What do you mean by "Business side in the firm"? Most firms are managed by fairly senior partners and even sometimes those people will be in charge of the finances to a large extent, and the "business side" often consists of marketing folks, HR, some accounting, etc. There aren't (to my knowledge) really many of the traditional business roles that you'd think of at a large company.

My V40 has a highly regarded COO who sits on high up committees and manages the firm's business, financial and admin ops. However I feel like outside of that role, there’s really not too much beneath him besides the various functions he manages (HR, accounting, business development, etc).

Anonymous User wrote:My V40 has a highly regarded COO who sits on high up committees and manages the firm's business, financial and admin ops. However I feel like outside of that role, there’s really not too much beneath him besides the various functions he manages (HR, accounting, business development, etc).

Yeah, my old firm was similar. There was a COO, CFO and the corp department had a COO type. The rest were your typical functions that were either managed by them or the managing partner. At the end of the day though, the lawyers are responsible for most of the business decisions. I think even at large law firms there are no more than 3 or 4 biz type roles and if you're already a lawyer, I'd be surprised if the firm would pay for you to get an MBA and move up the latter in a non-billable role. The guys that had these roles at my firm were just MBAs and had experience before coming to the firm. You might be able to switch to biz dev, but those are really just support roles, not making business decisions.