Biglaw hours less enough to justify lower comp than Banking? Forum

[Anonymous User]

Title says all.

How many hours do Biglaw associates put in on average per week? I did back of the envelope calculation - lawyers say if you bill 2800 hours that’s a lot even in biglaw standard. So I assume your actual working hours is 10% more than the billing hours = ~3100. Assuming you’re on vacation for 4 weeks a year, you work 48 weeks per year. That gives me ~65 hours per week.

Since IB associates are said to work normally 80+ hours per week, we can say biglaw attorneys work at least 15 hours less on a weekly basis. (~20% less)

For the first 6 years of career (for banking it’s Associate 3 yrs + VP 3 yrs) biglaw associates make about 30% less money (assuming special bonus pay out all 6 years).

So given the presumably higher job security and higher portion of base salary in total comps, I believe biglaw compensation is fairly priced at the moment. What do you guys think?

[RX_distressed]

Largely fair assessment but hours in banking goes down as you move up the ladder but it goes backward in law.

[Anonymous User]

This topic comes up a lot and it never makes any sense.

Biglaw and banking are different job, with different day to day activities, utilizing different skill sets, recruiting from different applicant pools, on different timelines, with different career trajectories, different cultures, and different people want to do them. The number of people actively making this decision is vanishingly small. Who is this actually describing, some hypothetical college senior Econ major from HYP who is weighing an HYS admission against going back to their ibank summer gig? Are they doing a detailed discounted cash flow analysis, or are they figuring out whether they want to go to work right after school versus three more years of school (and accompanying debt load)? Do the actual substantive differences of those two professions not come into play? Do they even know what biglaw compensation will be in three years when they’ll actually start as an associate, and what hiring will be like when they do OCI? How do they price the odds of making partner against the odds of making MD? How many people actually stay in biglaw or ibanking for six years, and which exit options pay better, and for what hours? Why just compare biglaw and banking, why not include consulting or medicine or dentistry or sales? Oh, and entry level ibankers are usually analysts, not associates, unless you’re talking about post-MBA hiring, in which case that person will typically have pre-MBA job experience and that throws the analysis even further off.

[gregfootball2001]

Title says all.

How many hours do Biglaw associates put in on average per week? I did back of the envelope calculation - lawyers say if you bill 2800 hours that’s a lot even in biglaw standard. So I assume your actual working hours is 10% more than the billing hours = ~3100. Assuming you’re on vacation for 4 weeks a year, you work 48 weeks per year. That gives me ~65 hours per week.

Since IB associates are said to work normally 80+ hours per week, we can say biglaw attorneys work at least 15 hours less on a weekly basis. (~20% less)

For the first 6 years of career (for banking it’s Associate 3 yrs + VP 3 yrs) biglaw associates make about 30% less money (assuming special bonus pay out all 6 years).

So given the presumably higher job security and higher portion of base salary in total comps, I believe biglaw compensation is fairly priced at the moment. What do you guys think?

I've never heard of anyone billing 2800 and taking 4 weeks of vacation. If you're billing that much, from a practical standpoint, you're not taking anywhere close to that much vacation. So the calculations above are likely off.

[M458]

Title says all.

How many hours do Biglaw associates put in on average per week? I did back of the envelope calculation - lawyers say if you bill 2800 hours that’s a lot even in biglaw standard. So I assume your actual working hours is 10% more than the billing hours = ~3100. Assuming you’re on vacation for 4 weeks a year, you work 48 weeks per year. That gives me ~65 hours per week.

Since IB associates are said to work normally 80+ hours per week, we can say biglaw attorneys work at least 15 hours less on a weekly basis. (~20% less)

For the first 6 years of career (for banking it’s Associate 3 yrs + VP 3 yrs) biglaw associates make about 30% less money (assuming special bonus pay out all 6 years).

So given the presumably higher job security and higher portion of base salary in total comps, I believe biglaw compensation is fairly priced at the moment. What do you guys think?

I've never heard of anyone billing 2800 and taking 4 weeks of vacation. If you're billing that much, from a practical standpoint, you're not taking anywhere close to that much vacation. So the calculations above are likely off.

The calculations are certainly off due to a number of factors, the largest one being how you get from hours billed to hours worked. OP's assumption is that to bill 9 hours, you have to be working 9.9 hours - the reality is much closer to having to work 10 hours just to bill 8 hours, and that's honestly on a fairly efficient day. You have to eat, interview lateral/summer associate candidates, go to a CLE training, take a call with a client that's business development, participate in an affinity group planning session, sit at your desk and zone out unable to focus on a specific matter because you are TIRED, etc.

[Anonymous User]

I did IB before law school so I know better how the comp works.

The comps of An, Asso, and VPs are lower than what you think. You would think the bonus is 100% of the base but that's not the case everywhere and every year. Some places only offer 100% or even 110% to the top buckets, and a good chunk of each associate and analyst class get less than 100%. At a place like MS that's known for being cheap, you might even end up with only 60% of the base, especially if you're in their Capital Markets group, not their investment banking division.

[Anonymous User]

(Back) in banking now

The hours are not necessarily worse in banking. There is more variance week to week but overall I don't think bankers work more than junior associates in biglaw transactional groups.

Pay in banking isn't necessarily higher. The base is significantly lower and the bonus is very much tied to...luck. I really want to say performance but honestly, the link isn't that strong. You can be a super star but if your group/firm isn't doing well, you probably aren't getting a big bonus. Conversely, you can be mediocre and still end up with a big bonus if your group/firm did well.

For reference, last week I worked probably about 50-60 hours per week on average but had months where I was clocking 100+ hours per week and I knew I was getting near 100% base as bonus well before the end of the year because my group just crushed it last year on a seemingly unending stream of M&A deals that are just a bit too small for WSJ front page.

Just like in Biglaw, a lot of it is really just learning to say no and getting your work done. A big thing, for me at least, is in banking, you can get your work done very quickly and reward yourself with some free time without feeling the pressure to acquire more work just to clock billable hours.

[publius365]

This topic comes up a lot and it never makes any sense.

Biglaw and banking are different job, with different day to day activities, utilizing different skill sets, recruiting from different applicant pools, on different timelines, with different career trajectories, different cultures, and different people want to do them. The number of people actively making this decision is vanishingly small. Who is this actually describing, some hypothetical college senior Econ major from HYP who is weighing an HYS admission against going back to their ibank summer gig? Are they doing a detailed discounted cash flow analysis, or are they figuring out whether they want to go to work right after school versus three more years of school (and accompanying debt load)? Do the actual substantive differences of those two professions not come into play? Do they even know what biglaw compensation will be in three years when they’ll actually start as an associate, and what hiring will be like when they do OCI? How do they price the odds of making partner against the odds of making MD? How many people actually stay in biglaw or ibanking for six years, and which exit options pay better, and for what hours? Why just compare biglaw and banking, why not include consulting or medicine or dentistry or sales? Oh, and entry level ibankers are usually analysts, not associates, unless you’re talking about post-MBA hiring, in which case that person will typically have pre-MBA job experience and that throws the analysis even further off.

This.

[jotarokujo]

This topic comes up a lot and it never makes any sense.

Biglaw and banking are different job, with different day to day activities, utilizing different skill sets, recruiting from different applicant pools, on different timelines, with different career trajectories, different cultures, and different people want to do them. The number of people actively making this decision is vanishingly small. Who is this actually describing, some hypothetical college senior Econ major from HYP who is weighing an HYS admission against going back to their ibank summer gig? Are they doing a detailed discounted cash flow analysis, or are they figuring out whether they want to go to work right after school versus three more years of school (and accompanying debt load)? Do the actual substantive differences of those two professions not come into play? Do they even know what biglaw compensation will be in three years when they’ll actually start as an associate, and what hiring will be like when they do OCI? How do they price the odds of making partner against the odds of making MD? How many people actually stay in biglaw or ibanking for six years, and which exit options pay better, and for what hours? Why just compare biglaw and banking, why not include consulting or medicine or dentistry or sales? Oh, and entry level ibankers are usually analysts, not associates, unless you’re talking about post-MBA hiring, in which case that person will typically have pre-MBA job experience and that throws the analysis even further off.

This.

you're underestimating the amount of people who go to T14 law schools with no reasoning other than "it's lucrative", in other words no substantive interest and therefore would potentially enjoy ibanking just as much as law

[2013]

A lot of T-14 K-JDs could not have gotten a lucrative IB job with their English or political science degrees, which always makes this comparison seem kind of pointless.

One thing I’ll add is that a lot of people I know in IB left at the associate level or one year into their VP to go to boutique banks or random companies (and I know some of them took significant pay cuts). From what I’ve heard, this is very common partly because IB is only a thing in a handful of cities. Not everyone wants to be in NY forever. The benefits of biglaw are that you can realistically work in Orlando or Richmond and make Cravath money now.

[Barrred]

This topic comes up a lot and it never makes any sense.

Biglaw and banking are different job, with different day to day activities, utilizing different skill sets, recruiting from different applicant pools, on different timelines, with different career trajectories, different cultures, and different people want to do them. The number of people actively making this decision is vanishingly small. Who is this actually describing, some hypothetical college senior Econ major from HYP who is weighing an HYS admission against going back to their ibank summer gig? Are they doing a detailed discounted cash flow analysis, or are they figuring out whether they want to go to work right after school versus three more years of school (and accompanying debt load)? Do the actual substantive differences of those two professions not come into play? Do they even know what biglaw compensation will be in three years when they’ll actually start as an associate, and what hiring will be like when they do OCI? How do they price the odds of making partner against the odds of making MD? How many people actually stay in biglaw or ibanking for six years, and which exit options pay better, and for what hours? Why just compare biglaw and banking, why not include consulting or medicine or dentistry or sales? Oh, and entry level ibankers are usually analysts, not associates, unless you’re talking about post-MBA hiring, in which case that person will typically have pre-MBA job experience and that throws the analysis even further off.

This.

This post misses the point. This thread isn't about helping people decide between IB and Biglaw, its about comparing the compensation between two intense, and relatively similar, white collar jobs. It would be an interesting exercise to compare compensation between high-powered Doctors and Lawyers, or between NFL players and NBA players, to see how compensation matches relative intensity/hours worked/effort, regardless of whether many people are ever realistically in the position of choosing between those careers.

[nixy]

All the comparisons I’ve ever seen between doctors and lawyers devolve into really pointless bickering, largely because it’s entirely subjective, and for the reasons that the anon gave for why this topic doesn’t make sense.

[Anonymous User]

This topic comes up a lot and it never makes any sense.

Biglaw and banking are different job, with different day to day activities, utilizing different skill sets, recruiting from different applicant pools, on different timelines, with different career trajectories, different cultures, and different people want to do them. The number of people actively making this decision is vanishingly small. Who is this actually describing, some hypothetical college senior Econ major from HYP who is weighing an HYS admission against going back to their ibank summer gig? Are they doing a detailed discounted cash flow analysis, or are they figuring out whether they want to go to work right after school versus three more years of school (and accompanying debt load)? Do the actual substantive differences of those two professions not come into play? Do they even know what biglaw compensation will be in three years when they’ll actually start as an associate, and what hiring will be like when they do OCI? How do they price the odds of making partner against the odds of making MD? How many people actually stay in biglaw or ibanking for six years, and which exit options pay better, and for what hours? Why just compare biglaw and banking, why not include consulting or medicine or dentistry or sales? Oh, and entry level ibankers are usually analysts, not associates, unless you’re talking about post-MBA hiring, in which case that person will typically have pre-MBA job experience and that throws the analysis even further off.

I was that hypothetical college senior from HYP (not Econ though, liberal arts), who was weighing HYS against my offer from a finance summer. You're completely right - I don't know anyone who would do a DCF to figure this out. It's at least a little about what you want out of life. I missed reading and thinking about something other than numbers in finance (to be fair, not IB, quant trading). I wanted at least the option of going to government or PI and doing something good or whatnot after a few years.

For what it's worth, from what I can tell biglaw hours have been much much worse than in trading, but a good deal better than what I remember my friends who were IB analysts/associates were pulling. You can kinda see from the policies NYC banks are putting in now that facetime matters that much more in banking.

[Anonymous User]

This topic comes up a lot and it never makes any sense.

Biglaw and banking are different job, with different day to day activities, utilizing different skill sets, recruiting from different applicant pools, on different timelines, with different career trajectories, different cultures, and different people want to do them. The number of people actively making this decision is vanishingly small. Who is this actually describing, some hypothetical college senior Econ major from HYP who is weighing an HYS admission against going back to their ibank summer gig? Are they doing a detailed discounted cash flow analysis, or are they figuring out whether they want to go to work right after school versus three more years of school (and accompanying debt load)? Do the actual substantive differences of those two professions not come into play? Do they even know what biglaw compensation will be in three years when they’ll actually start as an associate, and what hiring will be like when they do OCI? How do they price the odds of making partner against the odds of making MD? How many people actually stay in biglaw or ibanking for six years, and which exit options pay better, and for what hours? Why just compare biglaw and banking, why not include consulting or medicine or dentistry or sales? Oh, and entry level ibankers are usually analysts, not associates, unless you’re talking about post-MBA hiring, in which case that person will typically have pre-MBA job experience and that throws the analysis even further off.

This.

This post misses the point. This thread isn't about helping people decide between IB and Biglaw, its about comparing the compensation between two intense, and relatively similar, white collar jobs. It would be an interesting exercise to compare compensation between high-powered Doctors and Lawyers, or between NFL players and NBA players, to see how compensation matches relative intensity/hours worked/effort, regardless of whether many people are ever realistically in the position of choosing between those careers.

They are not "relatively" similar though, that was my entire point. They are very, very different.

If the goal isn't to actively compare or help someone decide, why is in the legal employment forum instead of the lounge, and why is it framed as whether one hours/compensation scheme is "less enough to justify" and is "fairly priced," as if one "price" is dependent on the other in order to be "fair" when, again, they have very little to do with one another from a competitive labor perspective.

And if the point is just a navel gazing exercise around the relative compensation models of various unrelated white collar jobs, the data needs to be a lot better than the wishy-washy OP and the OP should probably be written by someone who has working knowledge of at least one of biglaw or ibanking, instead of this OP who clearly doesn't know about either (no one who has actually worked biglaw is actually just dividing annual hours by the number of weeks worked to talk about the nature of the workload, that's simply not how it works).

[Anonymous User]

This topic comes up a lot and it never makes any sense.

Biglaw and banking are different job, with different day to day activities, utilizing different skill sets, recruiting from different applicant pools, on different timelines, with different career trajectories, different cultures, and different people want to do them. The number of people actively making this decision is vanishingly small. Who is this actually describing, some hypothetical college senior Econ major from HYP who is weighing an HYS admission against going back to their ibank summer gig? Are they doing a detailed discounted cash flow analysis, or are they figuring out whether they want to go to work right after school versus three more years of school (and accompanying debt load)? Do the actual substantive differences of those two professions not come into play? Do they even know what biglaw compensation will be in three years when they’ll actually start as an associate, and what hiring will be like when they do OCI? How do they price the odds of making partner against the odds of making MD? How many people actually stay in biglaw or ibanking for six years, and which exit options pay better, and for what hours? Why just compare biglaw and banking, why not include consulting or medicine or dentistry or sales? Oh, and entry level ibankers are usually analysts, not associates, unless you’re talking about post-MBA hiring, in which case that person will typically have pre-MBA job experience and that throws the analysis even further off.

This.

you're underestimating the amount of people who go to T14 law schools with no reasoning other than "it's lucrative", in other words no substantive interest and therefore would potentially enjoy ibanking just as much as law

No one is underestimating that, we're just saying that the vast majority of those people couldn't get a job in investment banking, so who cares if all they're interested in is a lucrative job, they're still not comparison actually shopping between biglaw and ibanking, except perhaps in their minds.

[RX_distressed]

This topic comes up a lot and it never makes any sense.

Biglaw and banking are different job, with different day to day activities, utilizing different skill sets, recruiting from different applicant pools, on different timelines, with different career trajectories, different cultures, and different people want to do them. The number of people actively making this decision is vanishingly small. Who is this actually describing, some hypothetical college senior Econ major from HYP who is weighing an HYS admission against going back to their ibank summer gig? Are they doing a detailed discounted cash flow analysis, or are they figuring out whether they want to go to work right after school versus three more years of school (and accompanying debt load)? Do the actual substantive differences of those two professions not come into play? Do they even know what biglaw compensation will be in three years when they’ll actually start as an associate, and what hiring will be like when they do OCI? How do they price the odds of making partner against the odds of making MD? How many people actually stay in biglaw or ibanking for six years, and which exit options pay better, and for what hours? Why just compare biglaw and banking, why not include consulting or medicine or dentistry or sales? Oh, and entry level ibankers are usually analysts, not associates, unless you’re talking about post-MBA hiring, in which case that person will typically have pre-MBA job experience and that throws the analysis even further off.

Dude. Chill out lol. I think OP just tried to calculate comps/hours comparison between biglaw and banking? there was no value judgement in the posting. So much wrong/irrelevant rant in your post.

And like the other poster mentioned above, I saw tons of law students who're going in transactional biglaw not knowing the "substantive" difference but just for money.

ADD:
Just going back to the fact/numbers, I did a quick calc as well (I worked at BB IBD before law school) and it looks like banking comp in OP's calc is skewed upward. At least from what I saw from associate-level, mid-tier bonus bucket was more like 70~80% of base, making AS1/AS2/AS3 total comps at 260/305/350. I believe the comps for the first 3 years in biglaw is 225/250/320 including special bonuses. So the total comps difference for 3 years is not meaningful, 12~13%?

Got bored so I did the hours calc as well. In Biglaw, let's say 2500 billables a year; 50 working weeks. It's 50 billable hours per week. If you assume actual working hours'd be 25% more than billable, it's 62.5 hours/week. At first glance, it's meaningfully less than banking hours which is ~80 hours/week. But in banking, you spend some portion of your "working" hours in just screwing with colleagues, going out for coffee, and chatting at bullpen, while waiting for senior bankers' comments or just in the downtimes. So my guess is the difference in real working hours would be pretty much in the similar range with comps 10~15% difference?

My take is, purely from comps/hours perspective, there is no meaningful difference between biglaw and banking.

[jotarokujo]

This topic comes up a lot and it never makes any sense.

Biglaw and banking are different job, with different day to day activities, utilizing different skill sets, recruiting from different applicant pools, on different timelines, with different career trajectories, different cultures, and different people want to do them. The number of people actively making this decision is vanishingly small. Who is this actually describing, some hypothetical college senior Econ major from HYP who is weighing an HYS admission against going back to their ibank summer gig? Are they doing a detailed discounted cash flow analysis, or are they figuring out whether they want to go to work right after school versus three more years of school (and accompanying debt load)? Do the actual substantive differences of those two professions not come into play? Do they even know what biglaw compensation will be in three years when they’ll actually start as an associate, and what hiring will be like when they do OCI? How do they price the odds of making partner against the odds of making MD? How many people actually stay in biglaw or ibanking for six years, and which exit options pay better, and for what hours? Why just compare biglaw and banking, why not include consulting or medicine or dentistry or sales? Oh, and entry level ibankers are usually analysts, not associates, unless you’re talking about post-MBA hiring, in which case that person will typically have pre-MBA job experience and that throws the analysis even further off.

This.

you're underestimating the amount of people who go to T14 law schools with no reasoning other than "it's lucrative", in other words no substantive interest and therefore would potentially enjoy ibanking just as much as law

No one is underestimating that, we're just saying that the vast majority of those people couldn't get a job in investment banking, so who cares if all they're interested in is a lucrative job, they're still not comparison actually shopping between biglaw and ibanking, except perhaps in their minds.

doesn't require studying econ at HYP to go into banking lol. having a t14 gpa at a top 20 undergrad in a huge range of majors will suffice. obviously most t14 students dont go straight to law school so the people who think "law is lucrative" probably weren't thinking about maximizing money while they were undergrad, they only thought to maximize money a few years out of college so in that sense you're right.

[Barrred]

This topic comes up a lot and it never makes any sense.

Biglaw and banking are different job, with different day to day activities, utilizing different skill sets, recruiting from different applicant pools, on different timelines, with different career trajectories, different cultures, and different people want to do them. The number of people actively making this decision is vanishingly small. Who is this actually describing, some hypothetical college senior Econ major from HYP who is weighing an HYS admission against going back to their ibank summer gig? Are they doing a detailed discounted cash flow analysis, or are they figuring out whether they want to go to work right after school versus three more years of school (and accompanying debt load)? Do the actual substantive differences of those two professions not come into play? Do they even know what biglaw compensation will be in three years when they’ll actually start as an associate, and what hiring will be like when they do OCI? How do they price the odds of making partner against the odds of making MD? How many people actually stay in biglaw or ibanking for six years, and which exit options pay better, and for what hours? Why just compare biglaw and banking, why not include consulting or medicine or dentistry or sales? Oh, and entry level ibankers are usually analysts, not associates, unless you’re talking about post-MBA hiring, in which case that person will typically have pre-MBA job experience and that throws the analysis even further off.

This.

This post misses the point. This thread isn't about helping people decide between IB and Biglaw, its about comparing the compensation between two intense, and relatively similar, white collar jobs. It would be an interesting exercise to compare compensation between high-powered Doctors and Lawyers, or between NFL players and NBA players, to see how compensation matches relative intensity/hours worked/effort, regardless of whether many people are ever realistically in the position of choosing between those careers.

They are not "relatively" similar though, that was my entire point. They are very, very different.

If the goal isn't to actively compare or help someone decide, why is in the legal employment forum instead of the lounge, and why is it framed as whether one hours/compensation scheme is "less enough to justify" and is "fairly priced," as if one "price" is dependent on the other in order to be "fair" when, again, they have very little to do with one another from a competitive labor perspective.

And if the point is just a navel gazing exercise around the relative compensation models of various unrelated white collar jobs, the data needs to be a lot better than the wishy-washy OP and the OP should probably be written by someone who has working knowledge of at least one of biglaw or ibanking, instead of this OP who clearly doesn't know about either (no one who has actually worked biglaw is actually just dividing annual hours by the number of weeks worked to talk about the nature of the workload, that's simply not how it works).

Its in the Legal Employment section because it relates to whether, by a metric that OP is proposing, biglaw lawyers are fairly compensated. It would be relevant to a discussion of NBA employment/compensation to compare them with other types of professional athletes (e.g., NFL, PGA), even though basketball is "very, very different" than football and golf.

I don't know which idle TLS post hurt you in the past, brave anon, but I hope you are able to find peace.

[Anonymous User]

This topic comes up a lot and it never makes any sense.

Biglaw and banking are different job, with different day to day activities, utilizing different skill sets, recruiting from different applicant pools, on different timelines, with different career trajectories, different cultures, and different people want to do them. The number of people actively making this decision is vanishingly small. Who is this actually describing, some hypothetical college senior Econ major from HYP who is weighing an HYS admission against going back to their ibank summer gig? Are they doing a detailed discounted cash flow analysis, or are they figuring out whether they want to go to work right after school versus three more years of school (and accompanying debt load)? Do the actual substantive differences of those two professions not come into play? Do they even know what biglaw compensation will be in three years when they’ll actually start as an associate, and what hiring will be like when they do OCI? How do they price the odds of making partner against the odds of making MD? How many people actually stay in biglaw or ibanking for six years, and which exit options pay better, and for what hours? Why just compare biglaw and banking, why not include consulting or medicine or dentistry or sales? Oh, and entry level ibankers are usually analysts, not associates, unless you’re talking about post-MBA hiring, in which case that person will typically have pre-MBA job experience and that throws the analysis even further off.

This.

This post misses the point. This thread isn't about helping people decide between IB and Biglaw, its about comparing the compensation between two intense, and relatively similar, white collar jobs. It would be an interesting exercise to compare compensation between high-powered Doctors and Lawyers, or between NFL players and NBA players, to see how compensation matches relative intensity/hours worked/effort, regardless of whether many people are ever realistically in the position of choosing between those careers.

They are not "relatively" similar though, that was my entire point. They are very, very different.

If the goal isn't to actively compare or help someone decide, why is in the legal employment forum instead of the lounge, and why is it framed as whether one hours/compensation scheme is "less enough to justify" and is "fairly priced," as if one "price" is dependent on the other in order to be "fair" when, again, they have very little to do with one another from a competitive labor perspective.

And if the point is just a navel gazing exercise around the relative compensation models of various unrelated white collar jobs, the data needs to be a lot better than the wishy-washy OP and the OP should probably be written by someone who has working knowledge of at least one of biglaw or ibanking, instead of this OP who clearly doesn't know about either (no one who has actually worked biglaw is actually just dividing annual hours by the number of weeks worked to talk about the nature of the workload, that's simply not how it works).

Its in the Legal Employment section because it relates to whether, by a metric that OP is proposing, biglaw lawyers are fairly compensated. It would be relevant to a discussion of NBA employment/compensation to compare them with other types of professional athletes (e.g., NFL, PGA), even though basketball is "very, very different" than football and golf.

I don't know which idle TLS post hurt you in the past, brave anon, but I hope you are able to find peace.

lol to the bone. Who hurt that guy. Maybe an "investment banker" from HYP snatched his ex cold.

[Anonymous User]

I was that hypothetical college senior from HYP (not Econ though, liberal arts), who was weighing HYS against my offer from a finance summer. You're completely right - I don't know anyone who would do a DCF to figure this out. It's at least a little about what you want out of life. I missed reading and thinking about something other than numbers in finance (to be fair, not IB, quant trading). I wanted at least the option of going to government or PI and doing something good or whatnot after a few years.

For what it's worth, from what I can tell biglaw hours have been much much worse than in trading, but a good deal better than what I remember my friends who were IB analysts/associates were pulling. You can kinda see from the policies NYC banks are putting in now that facetime matters that much more in banking.

Ha, not every day you see quant folks here. I was debating prop trading vs law school. Despite the comp, I think I made the right decision -- I don't think I would have stood out by ANY means at a Jane Street or an Optiver.

[Anonymous User]

This topic comes up a lot and it never makes any sense.

Biglaw and banking are different job, with different day to day activities, utilizing different skill sets, recruiting from different applicant pools, on different timelines, with different career trajectories, different cultures, and different people want to do them. The number of people actively making this decision is vanishingly small. Who is this actually describing, some hypothetical college senior Econ major from HYP who is weighing an HYS admission against going back to their ibank summer gig? Are they doing a detailed discounted cash flow analysis, or are they figuring out whether they want to go to work right after school versus three more years of school (and accompanying debt load)? Do the actual substantive differences of those two professions not come into play? Do they even know what biglaw compensation will be in three years when they’ll actually start as an associate, and what hiring will be like when they do OCI? How do they price the odds of making partner against the odds of making MD? How many people actually stay in biglaw or ibanking for six years, and which exit options pay better, and for what hours? Why just compare biglaw and banking, why not include consulting or medicine or dentistry or sales? Oh, and entry level ibankers are usually analysts, not associates, unless you’re talking about post-MBA hiring, in which case that person will typically have pre-MBA job experience and that throws the analysis even further off.

This.

This post misses the point. This thread isn't about helping people decide between IB and Biglaw, its about comparing the compensation between two intense, and relatively similar, white collar jobs. It would be an interesting exercise to compare compensation between high-powered Doctors and Lawyers, or between NFL players and NBA players, to see how compensation matches relative intensity/hours worked/effort, regardless of whether many people are ever realistically in the position of choosing between those careers.

They are not "relatively" similar though, that was my entire point. They are very, very different.

If the goal isn't to actively compare or help someone decide, why is in the legal employment forum instead of the lounge, and why is it framed as whether one hours/compensation scheme is "less enough to justify" and is "fairly priced," as if one "price" is dependent on the other in order to be "fair" when, again, they have very little to do with one another from a competitive labor perspective.

And if the point is just a navel gazing exercise around the relative compensation models of various unrelated white collar jobs, the data needs to be a lot better than the wishy-washy OP and the OP should probably be written by someone who has working knowledge of at least one of biglaw or ibanking, instead of this OP who clearly doesn't know about either (no one who has actually worked biglaw is actually just dividing annual hours by the number of weeks worked to talk about the nature of the workload, that's simply not how it works).

Its in the Legal Employment section because it relates to whether, by a metric that OP is proposing, biglaw lawyers are fairly compensated. It would be relevant to a discussion of NBA employment/compensation to compare them with other types of professional athletes (e.g., NFL, PGA), even though basketball is "very, very different" than football and golf.

I don't know which idle TLS post hurt you in the past, brave anon, but I hope you are able to find peace.

But ibank compensation has nothing to do with whether biglaw lawers are fairly compensated. Go ask the associates talking on here about how miserable biglaw is whether or not they feel fairly compensated because some Goldman analysts make less or work more. It simply isn't a useful metric, and my post was pointing out various reasons why it's not the useful metric that OP thinks it is. What makes that argument so offensive or objectionable? Because it was phrased as a series of questions pointing out factors the OP didn't take into account in their analysis?

[For the record, I started this conversation anon since I have work experience in both biglaw and in-house at an ibank and in case the conversation flowed in a way that would be relevant for me to refence those experiences (such as about the culture at each of those workplaces or conversation with collogues at each place about their career paths and goals), I didn't want to have statements about my work history associated with my user name since it could out me when pieced together with other information about me I've written on here (e.g., law school and graduation year) publicly.]

[ExpOriental]

This topic comes up a lot and it never makes any sense.

Biglaw and banking are different job, with different day to day activities, utilizing different skill sets, recruiting from different applicant pools, on different timelines, with different career trajectories, different cultures, and different people want to do them. The number of people actively making this decision is vanishingly small. Who is this actually describing, some hypothetical college senior Econ major from HYP who is weighing an HYS admission against going back to their ibank summer gig? Are they doing a detailed discounted cash flow analysis, or are they figuring out whether they want to go to work right after school versus three more years of school (and accompanying debt load)? Do the actual substantive differences of those two professions not come into play? Do they even know what biglaw compensation will be in three years when they’ll actually start as an associate, and what hiring will be like when they do OCI? How do they price the odds of making partner against the odds of making MD? How many people actually stay in biglaw or ibanking for six years, and which exit options pay better, and for what hours? Why just compare biglaw and banking, why not include consulting or medicine or dentistry or sales? Oh, and entry level ibankers are usually analysts, not associates, unless you’re talking about post-MBA hiring, in which case that person will typically have pre-MBA job experience and that throws the analysis even further off.

This.

This post misses the point. This thread isn't about helping people decide between IB and Biglaw, its about comparing the compensation between two intense, and relatively similar, white collar jobs. It would be an interesting exercise to compare compensation between high-powered Doctors and Lawyers, or between NFL players and NBA players, to see how compensation matches relative intensity/hours worked/effort, regardless of whether many people are ever realistically in the position of choosing between those careers.

They are not "relatively" similar though, that was my entire point. They are very, very different.

If the goal isn't to actively compare or help someone decide, why is in the legal employment forum instead of the lounge, and why is it framed as whether one hours/compensation scheme is "less enough to justify" and is "fairly priced," as if one "price" is dependent on the other in order to be "fair" when, again, they have very little to do with one another from a competitive labor perspective.

And if the point is just a navel gazing exercise around the relative compensation models of various unrelated white collar jobs, the data needs to be a lot better than the wishy-washy OP and the OP should probably be written by someone who has working knowledge of at least one of biglaw or ibanking, instead of this OP who clearly doesn't know about either (no one who has actually worked biglaw is actually just dividing annual hours by the number of weeks worked to talk about the nature of the workload, that's simply not how it works).

Its in the Legal Employment section because it relates to whether, by a metric that OP is proposing, biglaw lawyers are fairly compensated. It would be relevant to a discussion of NBA employment/compensation to compare them with other types of professional athletes (e.g., NFL, PGA), even though basketball is "very, very different" than football and golf.

I don't know which idle TLS post hurt you in the past, brave anon, but I hope you are able to find peace.

But ibank compensation has nothing to do with whether biglaw lawers are fairly compensated. Go ask the associates talking on here about how miserable biglaw is whether or not they feel fairly compensated because some Goldman analysts make less or work more. It simply isn't a useful metric, and my post was pointing out various reasons why it's not the useful metric that OP thinks it is. What makes that argument so offensive or objectionable? Because it was phrased as a series of questions pointing out factors the OP didn't take into account in their analysis?

[For the record, I started this conversation anon since I have work experience in both biglaw and in-house at an ibank and in case the conversation flowed in a way that would be relevant for me to refence those experiences (such as about the culture at each of those workplaces or conversation with collogues at each place about their career paths and goals), I didn't want to have statements about my work history associated with my user name since it could out me when pieced together with other information about me I've written on here (e.g., law school and graduation year) publicly.]

Just as a sanity check, I have no idea why people are trying to argue this with you, you're completely right. The OP is dumb and is founded on several faulty premises.

I don't understand why people keep posing this "question" in this forum; this is like the fifth time I've seen it, and it has never produced anything useful besides "these aren't really comparable in this way."

[jotarokujo]

At first glance, it's meaningfully less than banking hours which is ~80 hours/week. But in banking, you spend some portion of your "working" hours in just screwing with colleagues, going out for coffee, and chatting at bullpen, while waiting for senior bankers' comments or just in the downtimes. So my guess is the difference in real working hours would be pretty much in the similar range with comps 10~15% difference?

My take is, purely from comps/hours perspective, there is no meaningful difference between biglaw and banking.

i feel like in big law you also spend a decent portion of the working hours "screwing with colleagues, going out for coffee, and chatting at bullpen, while waiting for senior bankers' comments or just in the downtimes". that's where the lack of 1:1 billing:work comes from no?

[Anonymous User]

At first glance, it's meaningfully less than banking hours which is ~80 hours/week. But in banking, you spend some portion of your "working" hours in just screwing with colleagues, going out for coffee, and chatting at bullpen, while waiting for senior bankers' comments or just in the downtimes. So my guess is the difference in real working hours would be pretty much in the similar range with comps 10~15% difference?

My take is, purely from comps/hours perspective, there is no meaningful difference between biglaw and banking.

i feel like in big law you also spend a decent portion of the working hours "screwing with colleagues, going out for coffee, and chatting at bullpen, while waiting for senior bankers' comments or just in the downtimes". that's where the lack of 1:1 billing:work comes from no?

I was an IB analyst fresh out of college that did 80+ hour weeks…I’d say the ratio in IB was closer to 50-50 work vs. twiddle thumbs. I did a decent amount of work between the hours of 6PM and 12AM-2AMish, and basically just satisfied facetime requirements during the 10AM to 6PM window.

[jotarokujo]

At first glance, it's meaningfully less than banking hours which is ~80 hours/week. But in banking, you spend some portion of your "working" hours in just screwing with colleagues, going out for coffee, and chatting at bullpen, while waiting for senior bankers' comments or just in the downtimes. So my guess is the difference in real working hours would be pretty much in the similar range with comps 10~15% difference?

My take is, purely from comps/hours perspective, there is no meaningful difference between biglaw and banking.

i feel like in big law you also spend a decent portion of the working hours "screwing with colleagues, going out for coffee, and chatting at bullpen, while waiting for senior bankers' comments or just in the downtimes". that's where the lack of 1:1 billing:work comes from no?

I was an IB analyst fresh out of college that did 80+ hour weeks…I’d say the ratio in IB was closer to 50-50 work vs. twiddle thumbs. I did a decent amount of work between the hours of 6PM and 12AM-2AMish, and basically just satisfied facetime requirements during the 10AM to 6PM window.

got it so the proportion of not actually doing work during work is higher for IB. if IB is 50:50, maybe biglaw is only 66:33 or 75:25 work to coffee