<p>i know the focus here had been on “biglaw,” but i thought i would note that much of what has been discussed about hours and demands will also apply outside of those mega law firms.</p>
<p>my first job was with a big law firm though at one of their smaller branch offices. after a couple of years i relocated for personal reasons and desperately did not want to work in another such firm. i ended up at a smaller boutique firm. it was like going from the frying pan into the fire.</p>
<p>at both jobs, good work was rewarded by more work. at both jobs, a friday call from a client could ruin a weekend. at both jobs, the partners were incredibly driven and lived for their work – and the expected the same of their associates. </p>
<p>one of the selling points of the boutique firm had been more responsibility and client contact – i’d spent many long hours at my prior job reviewing documents and stuck in the library. well more responsibility and client contact was great – but it also meant even greater demands. i had clients i worked for (with a partner) who called me directly and expected me to answer them. at a smaller firm there is no concept of “someone else can do it” if you “can’t.” </p>
<p>i took a cut in pay going to my second job and if anything my hours increased. my stress level certainly increased. the work was more interesting than that at my first job, but the intensity was also far greater. and there was certainly no concept that if i put in my time and made partner things would improve – the partners worked just as hard, only they also had to deal with the business issues of running the firm. while they were on “vacation” they often were on the phone with the office or clients, having things over-nighted to them (this was in the dark ages before email). they took almost a pride in the fact that what they did was so important, they could never really be entirely off the clock.</p>
<p>someone up the thread made the comment that to some extent an associate could manage their time – get a brief done early so they could get to their child’s birthday party. at least at the two firms where i worked, i couldn’t imagine that working. if you worked hard and finished one thing, it just meant you were available for something else (remember, good work was rewarded with more work). and at least at the firms where i worked, i could never imagine a partner signing off on a project before it was due. if you got a draft to them early, it just meant more time for more revisions - they were driven to turn out as perfect a product as possible which meant using as much time as necessary (or available) to do so. it didn’t mean you could never get out for a personal commitment – but if work demanded it, your priority was expected to be in the office.</p>
<p>it is a lawyers job to serve their clients. clients make demands. government agencies and courts have deadlines you have to meet. lower level lawyers answer to higher level lawyers. all that’s true no matter where you practice.</p>
<p>no pain, no gain. you speak as if 100k was easy to earn in this world. you’ll have eye bags inches deep and your balls mangled before you make it big in “big law”. i live in nyc, my friend is an associate at one of the top environmental firms in the city. he sleeps less than he does when he was at columbia and has seven alarms in the morning to help him wake up. it ain’t easy but his pay… let’s just say he could buy as many cars as he wanted. he just has no time to drive them.</p>
<p>As you are thinking long term, remember what others have mentioned: that it is a service industry. Can you exist happily in an albeit well paying service job for 30-40 years? At some point in your career you are answering directly to the client, rather than to a partner, but think about having your livelihood depend on folks who send you rude emails that you must answer in nothing but a gracious, professional tone, who want work done on a Saturday night or when you are on vacation or on Christmas Eve, who set up conference calls with London and don’t care at all that it’s 4 am your time? As time goes on, think about what comes naturally given your temperment and look for other options if being in a service profession grates on you.</p>
<p>And don’t forget – it’s also important to accept that your position on any particular matter may be rejected by the client, partner or Judge, no matter how strong or clear you think the facts or argument may be, or how hard you’ve worked. Your’re in a support position, not the ultimate decision-maker. You have to be able to graciously accept that others think you’re wrong and know when to stop arguing, even when you think you’re right. This is very tough for good lawyers. </p>
<p>(Of course, there are a few exceptions such as when criminal conduct is involved.)</p>
<p>I can tell you from personal experience that there’s a RARE associate coming out of law school who is being brought in at $160K starting salary.</p>
<p>There is such a glut of laid off attorneys that the chances of employment (unless you are in the top 5% of your class and on law review) are grim. Law schools today are producing about twice the number of attorneys as the profession can absorb in a year. Five and six year associates at big firms are being laid off en masse to dry to keep the bleeding away from our partner salaries (us partners are a greedy lot with high fixed personal overheads from the good old days).</p>
<p>Sure, we do some hiring every year regardless–it’s part of keeping your image in the marketplace up. No client wants to hire a law firm that has the appearance of being in trouble. In our 100 person office, we’ll hire possibly 5 associates from the big five law schools this year (from about 200 top notch applicants we would have wined and dined ten years ago) We get down to the 200 from the 1,500 or so applications we get by sorting them out by school then by rank in graduating class and special citations. Their starting pay will be in the $160K range and if their billable hours aren’t 2,200 plus for the first year, that pay will be “revisited”.</p>
<p>If you are not a super star from a top 5 school (be honest with yourself about this), plan on starting in the $50K-$80K range and look forward to working at least 60 hours a week for a very long time.</p>
<p>Don’t mean to be a downer to all of you aspiring attorneys, but “thems the facts” from a partner in one of the top law firms at which you want to work.</p>
<p>I’ve been a trial lawyer for the last thirty years, my first half a decade with a “large firm”, as opposed to big law. I learned a lot, I was young and single, but it was not a Job I would have wanted for a career. If you are a competent trial lawyer, if you learn how to try a case, maybe by watching some of the best, you can make more money in a year working for yourself than the big law lawyers working three times as hard. And one of the dirty little secrets about big law is this . . nobody really gives a damn about you. Your “friends” don’t care that you have a large house, nice cars, earn several hundred K or more a year. Your partners don’t care about you, only how much money you make for them. Your associates see you as the competition for the partnership spots… You are just another nobody lawyer who could easily be replaced and never missed. When you work for yourself, you have the personal satisfaction of helping real people. How much satisfaction do you expect to get by helping the Banking industry rape the American Public? And I would guess that the skills “big law” lawyers earn are useless outside of big law as not being relevant to the real practice of law most of us engage in.</p>
<p>“If you are a competent trial lawyer, if you learn how to try a case, maybe by watching some of the best, you can make more money in a year working for yourself than the big law lawyers working three times as hard.”</p>
<p>I’m glad that you are doing well, but you do those who are thinking about law school a great disservice by suggest that your experience is the norm. The reality is that a many if not most sole practitioners (litigators or otherwise) have to work hard simply to make a decent living.</p>
<p>True, big law practice is all about being exploited and learning few actual legal skills, while a smaller practice is about actually practicing law, where the quality of life is potentially much greater. And don’t kid yourself, those years wasted slaving away in big law could be put to much better use learning to be a good and competent and happy lawyer. And I reiterate that anybody who has the personality and ability to be a good trial lawyer can in the end earn far more than their big law counterparts for much less effort.</p>
<p>“I’m glad that you are doing well, but you do those who are thinking about law school a great disservice by suggest that your experience is the norm. The reality is that a many if not most sole practitioners (litigators or otherwise) have to work hard simply to make a decent living”</p>
<p>The reality is that most lawyers end up in smaller practices sooner or later anyway if they are people who actually like practicing law. Why buy into the Big Law propaganda machine like they are the best places to work. How can spending you latter twenties slaving away in a big law firm be a worthwhile thing?</p>
<p>“us partners are a greedy lot with high fixed personal overheads from the good old days”</p>
<p>exactly, and its good to hear you admit it. Why would anybody want to work for people where the only thing that is valued is money? How does this enhance somebody’s quality of life? Its sad that so many law students seek a life that in the end will make them miserable instead of being satisfied with making a decent income but doing work that is far more fulfilling than the boring, drudgery you will get working for the egomaniacs who populate the higher ranks of big law.</p>
<p>My point was not to suggest that practicing in BigLaw is necessarily a good thing, but rather to dispute the suggestion in your earlier post that going it alone is the road to riches.</p>
<p>In my opinion, the ONLY road to riches (depending how you define riches) in law is by working for yourself, either solo or with partners, but being in a position to keep a significant portion of what you bring in to the firm. Yes, law is very competitive, but regardless of the number of lawyers out there, any competent lawyer who wants to put in the time to ensure quality work is bound to reap the rewards by the referrals of enough clients so that they will be as busy as they choose to be. </p>
<p>The thing is, starting out, law is a low capitalization business. All you need is a computer, an internet connection and a few suits. If you do good work, in whatever field you work, you will sooner rather than later have plenty of business. And personally, since I believe litigation is potentially so lucrative, the best way to learn the game is to early on watch the masters at work. If you are a young twenty something starting out . . being lulled into working for a large firm because you are convinced you can’t do it on your own is simply from lack of confidence. A smart and energetic 25 year old with a law degree, from whatever tiered school, has the world as his oyster if he/she is only smart enough to see it. And in my opinion, that means not wasting too many years working for firms where what you learn will be useless in the real practice of law. That’s all I am saying.</p>
<p>There is no road to riches in billing your time by the hour. Very few lawyers get truly rich. Top partners at big firms are paid handsomely because they control books of business that are worked on by large teams of lawyers and paralegals and they share in the resulting profit. They are compensated not only for their legal work but also for their management of the team. Lawyers at smaller firms who take cases on a contingent fee basis have the potential to achieve similar or better financial results to the top partners at big firms. Lawyers at smaller firms who bill only by the hour do not have the same earning potential.</p>
<p>Agreed, which is why I said litigation is so lucrative versus time-value billing, especially when you get cases worth millions of dollars on a contingency fee basis. If you are relatively small with low overhead, it doesn’t take much to make a good living. And if you don’t live in a huge city, you can have a decent house for reasonable dollars. </p>
<p>How much does somebody need to be happy? When is what somebody earns enough?</p>
<p>I don’t know where to start, davidg, but I disagree with some of what you said and find most of the rest completely factually incorrect. </p>
<p>First, litigation in big firms is billed by the hour for the most part. If you’re thinking that the wealthiest lawyers are the personal injury and other tort lawyers who work on contingency, you may be right in some instances, but not in most instances compared to the very impressive profits per partner made by many Biglaw partners. </p>
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<p>No, not necessarily. I’ve had many opportunities over my career to hire solo lawyers for various reasons and I’ve not met one yet who wouldn’t appreciate more business than he or she currently has.</p>
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<p>No. Not at all. Your statement is a sweeping generalization based upon an opinion (and a faulty one, at that).</p>
<p>On the other hand, I’ve met many lawyers who worked in Biglaw and said people were nice and didn’t yell at them. Like everything else in life, luck is a big part of it, I guess, it depends on your practice group and what kind of boss and colleagues you get.
And on the other, other hand, I do expect to make $150k+ when I graduate law school. But I’d never stay in biglaw.</p>