<p>^ this is a bizarre incident to say the least…</p>
<p>“Again, these are the same fallbacks: prior work experience helps; a T14 diploma helps; and, yes, law school grades still matter. This is one of the main reasons to seek a top-tier firm, is to preserve exit options.”</p>
<p>I get the impression that in the legal industry, getting hired from firm to firm is more difficult compared to say, like in consulting or finance. peep in the finance/ consulting sector, if they have proven track record of strong work experience, they tend to find no problem finding new jobs across different companies. However, i am getting the impression that it is quite difficult for ex-biglaw associates to find lucrative legal jobs… at least compared to the people in business. any thoughts?</p>
<p>I don’t know enough about consulting to make the comparison. It certainly is harder in law than the “no problem” you state for consulting, if you are characterizing that correctly. </p>
<p>Nonetheless, almost all of my laid-off friends ultimately found either in-house jobs or jobs at other firms. It took them a while, and this really was one of the worst legal economies we’d seen in quite a while. Still, among the kids I know who got into Biglaw, most of them eventually found very acceptable exit options.</p>
<p>Most, not all. Eventually, not immediately. Very acceptable, yes, but not perfect. (On the other hand, not “barely survivable,” either.) Note the qualifiers.</p>
<p>But almost all of them ended up okay. (I can only think of one who is still struggling.)</p>
<p>^ thanks for the input. another question i seem to have is… a lot of lawyers complain about the stressful work conditions within biglaw… do u think, compared to other lucrative fields such as finance or consulting, biglaw jobs are more stressful due to certain factors? (long hours… or maybe the type of the work at biglaw is boring?) do u get the impression that your biglaw friends actually enjoy their jobs?</p>
<p>All “Corporate America” jobs are stressful, strenuous, and indeed make short shrift of you as a valuable human being. In other words, you are the means to the end. A soulless android industry is what law, banking, and consulting can pretty much be. They don’t care about you as a person, and will objectify you. Just listen to the Judge’s comments I posted on that link above with regard to biglaw as a whole.</p>
<p>From what I’ve seen, biglaw is definitely less stressful than finance and definitely more stressful than consulting. Not surprisingly, it also pays pretty much right in between them.</p>
<p>The astonishing thing is how boring all three jobs are, at least in my opinion. Investment banking tends to mask that by having people yell at you all the time, but fundamentally shuttling numbers from Excel to Powerpoint really isn’t a fascinating job. I don’t know why consulting isn’t fun – it seems to me like it should be – but everybody I know assures me that it’s boring. And being a low-level associate in biglaw – the GOOD parts of work involve researching cases and writing memos on various corporate problems, which is already pretty dull. The bad part of work will involve poring over hundreds of contracts to find one which might potentially be relevant to a merger, or doing a fifty-state survey on the status of non-compete clauses.</p>
<p>Whatever the downsides of medicine might be – and being a physician is generally MUCH more stressful than biglaw, with worse hours – it is much, much less boring. It has become much more boring in recent years, but is still vastly more interesting than any of the above professions.</p>
<p>Biglaw partners/associates and other Corporate America/Wall Street/Investment Banking folks have the most stress and worse hours out of all other professions, since the nature of the job is in fact the most diciest. The Judge in the youtube clip even assented to the unreal hours you face when entering such fields.</p>
<p>By reputation, investment bankers are by far – by far the most stressed. After that, based on personal experience, I can assure you that on balance, most of the doctors I know have noticeably more “time-stress” than either big-firm lawyers (followed distantly by consultants). As for other sources of stress, obviously that’s going to vary from person to person.</p>
<p>While I don’t disagree with your assessment, I would think that doctors should experience the greatest stress. If an investment banker makes a mistake, some money is lost. But if a doctor makes a mistake, somebody could die. </p>
<p>I think that’s a rather telling testament of the values of our society that a job involving moving money around is actually considered more stressful than a job where people’s very lives are at stake.</p>
<p>How do you have so many laid off lawyer friends? They must have graduated at least 2 years ago to have been laid off (since all first years are still employed as far as I know) and you probably wouldn’t have met them at law school because you said it took them a while (another year of separation) to get another job. And if you were at medical school, how do you know so many lawyers?</p>
<p>1.) I’m a 3L.
2.) I know lots of people who were already lawyers by the time I started law school. (Professional bonding or something? I don’t know. “Hey, my other friend is a lawyer, too. I think you’d get along.”)
3.) None of the laid off attorneys graduated from my school.</p>
<p>So, the general consensus is that the biglaw jobs aren’t necessarily as bad as what many lawyers make it out to be. I guess the biglaw jobs are manageable, then??</p>
<p>My opinion is that each profession makes their own jobs out to be worse, and the others’ jobs to be better, than they actually are.</p>
<p>Walk around any hospital, and physicians will tell you not to go to medical school – go be a lawyer or something else with an easier life. And, of course, the situation is reversed in law firms.</p>
<p>^
haha. Thanks, that makes sense. I was just trying to kinda grasp the relative stress level of a typical biglaw associate. I brought up this question because so many lawyers say they are miserable and they want a career change. I don’t think other careers, including doctors, have this high rate of a turnover, no?</p>
<p>Most of the investment bankers I know were out within three years. I mean, a ton of doctors SAY they’re going to quit (but never do). [The</a> Medicus Firm](<a href=“404 - Page not found”>404 - Page not found)</p>
<p>The thing is that many lawyers also say they’re going to quit… and then get asked to leave. So they quit.</p>
<p>One thing that I think is missing from all this discussion is rain-making; in other words, to make partner (and the big bucks), one has to sell-sell-sell. Yeah, I know its an ugly word, but the simple fact is that a partner is expected to bring in not only his/her salary but enough to feed the rest of the team, and cover G&A.</p>
<p>But more to my point: not everyone is cut out to market/sell; most do not have the personality for it. Such personality types will have an extremely difficult time making partner – bcos they will have a difficult time selling – regardless of how brilliant they are.</p>
<p>Of course, the same is true in EVERY professional service organization, whether it be consulting, i-banking, or Big 4 Accounting. The difference is that medicine has created significant barriers to entry thus, decreasing compeitition, unlike the others.</p>
<p>Doctors can work fewer days a week whereas biglaw partners/associates/IB’ers measure up to 80 plus hours a week. This is obvious. Plus the stress is just ridiculous and it is labeled as a “soulless android” industry, and virtually everyone in these Corporate America fields have immensely inflated egos, and make short shrift of you as a person. </p>
<p>My friend just graduated LS and said he wished he had never done it and only did so because of the pressures of what others told him to do. He said he’d rather be a “Ski Instructor”, because that was his passion. I love law, but the practice of law is much different than the study of law, so the means don’t justify the ends.</p>
<p>I mean I could be wrong, but BDM, what is your take on ls now that you’ve been through? Was it what you initially expected? It’s such a dicey field and you invest much time and money in it. Unless you attend a T-14, the rule of thumb is your law degree is worth CRAP after Vanderbilt, which I believe carries the last “national weight.” It matters so much where you go to ls, but it doesn’t matter at all where you go to med school, because, well the assurances are already there.</p>