Top Law Schools

Hearing that Paul, Weiss is aggressively hiring and might have a toxic culture nowadays. Any thoughts from anyone with experience/friends there?

It's a more direct culture than other places. Whereas someone at Davis Polk is more likely to say, "I read your memo and parts of it were inconsistent with my understanding of the law. Can you maybe send a revised version once you've taken another look?", someone at Paul Weiss would say: "I skimmed your memo and it was wrong. Do it again." Otherwise, the culture there is no better or worse than other biglaw firms, really. Some attorneys there are pleasant to work for, others not so much. As always, depends on your personality and work style too.

ex-PW (corporate). I probably had as good an experience as anyone did there /in BigLaw...

but the culture has definitely slipped quite a bit. Would I consider it toxic? Maybe not quite. But it's definitely taken a turn under Barshay. Check out other posts on this topic - it's essentially turning into a weird hybrid of Kirkland, but passive-aggressively hiding under its former "white shoe" veneer.

I once would've said PW had one of the best cultures out of the top firms, maybe even across BigLaw generally. I wouldn't say that now. FWIW, the firms I consistently hear good things about these days are LW and Milbank (to a slightly less extent).

That said, PW seems to continue to be doing very well, especially in the public M&A sphere - just appears to come with a cost.

friends that used to be associates there have all told me that the M&A workloads are quite brutal, which may only have gotten worse due to attrition. I don't know if all applicants/2Ls realize this, but you should probably go into public / Apollo work at PW expecting workloads closer to places like Cravath and its peers than the average NY corporate biglaw firm.

If corporate, work for Brian, Sarah, Neil and Bonvino and you'll be OK. You will have to work hard. There is just too much work at that firm not to. Staffers mean you can't hide.

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