I feel I should also point out what I think is the absolute worst job in the legal industry, perhaps any industry, and that is an attorney conducting a document review.
During the discovery process, there can be hundreds of thousands or even millions of documents that need to be read and categorized, 99.9% of which is garbage. Think of the typical John Grisham movie / Law & Order cliche where the oposing counsel sends over a dozen bankers boxes filled with documents and our noble counselor say something to the effect of “they are trying to bury us in paper.”
Well, it’s really more of a Raiders of the Lost Arc size room full of bankers boxes, although most of it is electronic.
Anyhow, the law firms will have junior associates or teams of contract attorneys (temps with JDs essentially) sit there with document review software and read through about a thousand documents a day for weeks, months, years or however long it takes.
One of the best parts of electing the government job I did is that I never, ever, ever had to do this type of stuff. My second month into my job I was closing multi-million dollar transactions. The real evidence of my job (I do different stuff but I’m responsible for disbursing low-income housing grants) I can visibly see all over Los Angeles. I’ll pass a building and recognise it as one of my projects.
Except…all those junior associates make triple my salary!!
Night school. Not hard, lots of fun. A much more interesting and dedicated group of students than the full-timers, IMHO, because the percentage of older, more serious second-career folks vs. kids who wanted another few years of the college lifestyle is a lot higher.
You’d think. I’m a temp these days, and while I don’t want to do it forever, it’s quite an easy piece of time – certainly a lot more manageable than my former life as an associate in a couple high-powered D.C. firms. It’s much more sociable when you’re in a room with other temps instead of stuck in your office all day, and the stress is non-existent.
