I am sure it isn’t like this for most lawyers. I was a 23 or 24 year old kid who thought he might be interested in big cases and big money. I just found that the work was not interesting enough and the pay not high enough to justify the extreme lifestyle.
A good friend of mine is a seventh year at another major firm in NYC. I actually see him fairly regularly. But when we are done socializing (maybe 11PM), he often goes back to the office. He is perfectly comfortable working day after day with 4 hours of sleep. Being an attorney is a great fit for him. He does very well for himself, sure, but it would take a hell of a lot more money to motivate me to work like that.
I haven’t really heard an answer yet, but what exactly does an attorney work on for 3500 a year?
And why are the associates responsible for the number of hours they bill? The firm either has matters for you to work on and you work on them or they don’t and you sit around with your thumb up your ass. Either way, how does the Associate control how much work they have?
The only explanation I can think of is that they routinely overbill their clients.
**Maeglin **- I think my next question would be “why would anyone in their right mind take such a shit job?” I mean I would tell candidates something similar at my old firm -travel, long hours, etc - but the positive is that you got paid overtime, the work is interesting-ish and there’s potential for rapid advancement. And the people are kind of fun to work with. What do they think you are there for? The glory of working for Wachtell?
My emphasis, and bingo. In exchange for the lousy job, you get the prestige of working for Wachtell and, if you are lucky, a good rec from a Wachtell partner.
This is not necessarily a bad deal. If you are a good paralegal for maybe two years and then go to law school and do the right things, you have a very good shot at getting an offer at the firm you paralegaled for. This happened to a few former colleagues of mine at a firm I worked for years ago that happens to share a name with a lanky character from Seinfeld.
I would not be surprised if one day, Wachtell started charging first years fifty grand or so for the privilege of working there. If you pay your fee and bill 3500 hours, you just might get a real offer in your second year.
I work reasonably hard (not crazy hard, but I’ll work late some nights and go in on weekends - not always but reasonably regularly), and generally I do not bill more than 1900 hours a year. I simply do not believe that it is humanly possible to bill close to double that.
For one, there is “work” cultivating client contacts, for which one cannot bill. For another, people need to sleep, eat, travel to and from work; people get sick on occasion, and sometimes even take vacations.
3,500 hours means quite literally almost 10 hours a day billable each and every day of the year - no exceptions. That just isn’t very likely, even if for some perverse reason you wanted to do it. Much more likely is a firm culture that makes people work really hard it is true but also turns a blind eye to padding the dockets.
If I was a client, I’d take my business to a lawfirm that did not expect 3,500 hour billing targets, because that simply does not compute.
Although I was never part of this type of arrangement, some consulting projects my firm negotiated did not involve tracking billable hours - they just set a fixed amount per role type and did the math. In some of those situations, the hourly rate and hours billed per day were negotiated and sometimes resulted in a discounted rate that wasn’t discounted nearly as much as it first appeared since the hours per day billed was higher.
So $100/hour at 8 hours / day = $800
and $80 discounted per hour, but 10 hours a day also = $800
In this way, the folks in those roles also got to bump up their chargeable hours…
I wonder if that is what is going on in this situation with legal hours - but I know nothing about how law firms are run vs. consulting firms…
Maybe not. But in my limited time, I did regularly experience some crazy stuff.
It was not uncommon for some of the attorneys I worked with to take conference calls on the crapper. On one memorable occasion, an attorney in the stall next to me was unabashedly blasting ass and talking about debentures for all and sundry to hear. I cannot imagine what the client thought.
I rarely worked on the weekends, but my workday was 9am-10pm five days per week. Occasionally I would get stuck until 2 or 3am. This happened regularly once or twice per week. All the money in paralegaling was in the OT. After nights like that, we just went to the bar and back to work a few hours later.
This would be even worse when there was substantial discovery. Frequently we would have to produce or analyze a staggering quantity of documents. Obviously this is par for the course in law, but one particularly egregious example included spending a week working 18 hours a day in a warehouse in Brooklyn in the middle of the summer. There was no air conditioning, almost no ventilation, and because all of the documents were FBI evidence, we had to wear gloves.
That was a blast, let me tell you. There must have been some spores or other pollutants in there, because I had respiratory issues for weeks afterwards.
I worked in bankruptcy law. There is crushing scrutiny placed on attorney’s fees since the counsel to the creditors’ committee is paid by the estate. We had to be extremely careful what we billed for and how much, lest the judge hold our bill up and delay payment. When you are billing six or seven figures a month, this adds up real fast.
All the same, the amount of paperwork involved in a global bankruptcy is hard to imagine. I worked on a gigantic retail bankruptcy for the second firm. About 85% of my job for almost a full year was just reviewing, summarizing, and indexing documents relating to a single matter. And I was just the paralegal. The amount of crap the associates had to do was even worse.
I have two friends in law school now. I would probably love law school. I worked for PFAW for a year, so I loved the idea of doing civil liberties law. I would probably love being a judge. But working in a major practice area at a serious player in NYC? Not so much.
I am not sure if it still exists but 7-8 years ago when I was thinking about going to law school the meme was that one should work at a law firm in order to a) better his chances of getting into law school and b) get a sense of what being a lawyer is like. So yes, the glory of working at Wachtell is probably what they’re selling to a 22 year old who is considering law school and thinks it will add some lustre to his resume.
I’ve never heard of 3500. But I have friends who claimed they’d been quoted 2500 at Bryan Cave"officially" and that was with the understanding they’d put in a couple hundred more.
I love everything about my job except for two things:
I can’t take any serious time off, although I can work from anywhere. This means that when I am wandering around Rwanda on holiday, I have a laptop with me.
Despite earning in the area of $250K, I can’t buy health insurance in the USA because of a pre-existing condition.
I can see doing it if you plan on going to law school to become a lawyer. I imagine it would turn a lot of people off though. I got turned off to going to law school a month after getting into litigation consulting. Half the people I work with are former attorneys or law firm lit support staff and paralegals.
The problem with those law firms is that it is quite literally a rat race. You don’t advance for inventing a longer lasting lightbulb or a better business process that saves the firm money or anything. It seems like they basically hold out the carrot of being a million dollar a year earning partner and whichever donkey reaches it first (IOW bill the most hours over 8-10 years) gets partner.
What kind of life do you have billing 3000+ hours a year? A lot of those guys are divorced or have families they never see. Alchohol and drug use is probably pretty high. That was one of the problems I found in consulting was that you never had time for a life outside of work. You can’t plan trips or do things with friends or family because you were always traveling. Drinking by yourself in some random hotel restaurant bar gets old real fast.
Incidentally, I disagree with this proposition that one has to be working at Cravath-Arps to be required to work those types of hours. There was a firm that recruited at my school and who deigned to interview me, of course I forget their name now but it’s located in Dallas Texas, so maybe that could start the hunt to confirm, that openly told me they expected 90 hour work weeks. It’s a small-medium very very aggressive litigation firm that paid 175K starting, and that was back in 2003 (yes, you read that right, but they also informed me that they increased the salary slowly from then on because starting was so high). A significant proportion of the firm seemed to be married to each other (unsurprising) and my interviewer JOKED about that in the interview and suggested all incoming associates take a look at the potential dating pool. I did not make it to callbacks but one of my classmates did and got the job and said his summer was the worst hell he had ever been through (he ended up at Kirkland for his post school job) and that attorneys routinely slept, slept at the office.
Another unforgettable story. I was in a partner’s office in a meeting about some huge bankruptcy matter. A partner at the accounting firm we had retained had offhandedly mentioned that he was going to miss the next creditors committee conference call because he had a parent-teacher conference.
The partner blew up like a bottle rocket.
“What the fuck are you talking about with this PTA shit? I raised two fucking kids and I never went to any fucking parent-teacher conference! You’ll be on that call or we will fucking fire you! Never bring these bullshit excuses to me again.”
The partner did in fact have two kids, but incidentally, he wasn’t on speaking terms with either of them.
At least I never caught anyone fucking in a conference room at 4am on a weekday at his firm.
Another paralegal where I worked did just that. He wanted to save money to buy an apartment, he did not have a lot of stuff, and he worked unsustainably long hours. So he figured he would not renew his lease and see how long he could live at the office. It was essentially a 24 hour place, so as long as he picked a different closet or conference room to sleep in, he wouldn’t get caught.
He lived at the office for over 6 months, worked around the clock, and expensed two meals a day. He took showers in the gym a few blocks away. He saved at least $20 grand that way, almost certainly much more.
I thought it was Cravath, Swaine & Moore or Scadden Arps (unless you meant 2 different firms).
Consulting firms are like that too. Lower pay though, unless you are working for McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group. A.T. Kearney was paying about $130,000 for MBAs in 2001. That’s always a warning sign when companies make a big deal about married couples in the office. It usually means they don’t expect you to have any life outside of the company.
They ought to talk to some friends of mine who are attorneys. One makes somewhere in the 80-90 range, I’d guess, and the other makes over 200k (her husband told me).
Both of them absolutely loathe their jobs. To the point where one is going to graduate school to get an MBA and start her own non-law business, and the other is just biding time until she finds a different job that she’s willing to do.
And at lawyer events in my area, my wife is apparently somewhat legendary because she quit her job and is selling cosmetics successfully. Woman attorneys come up and go “Wow- you quit? I wish I could do that. My job sucks and I can’t spend time with my family, but what else am I going to do?”
<slight divergence>
There seems to be very high attrition among female lawyers because they’re expected to act just like male lawyers to be successful- having a child is a definite career detriment, in a way that it really isn’t in other careers.
Most female lawyers under say… 35 that I’ve met hate it, regardless of the pay.
</slight divergence
Why wouldn’t people hate being lawyers? I mean what could there possibly be to like about it? 90% of the people who get into it do so because of the money and so they can tell people at cocktail parties.
It wasn’t Jones Day if you’re talking about the firm I referenced. I know Jones Day well, they recruit a lot at my school. It was a boutique litigation firm located in Dallas. They might have had another location in TX but that was it.
I remember loads of random details from that conversation-my interviewer was married to an Indian woman (his colleague at Law Factory) and recognized my last name as Maharashtrian. The joking around about marrying inside the firm and then a detailed explanation how your salary increases only slowly, litigation stuff blahblahblah. Of course, I remember the whole interview and don’t have the firm’s name.
For what it’s worth, I’m a lawyer who makes a decent salary but neither works ridiculous hours nor hates my job. Indeed, I must be that most rare of creatures, one who did not go into the law to brag about it at cocktail parties. Oddly enough I have a son with whom I spend a good deal of time.
But what do I know? I must be some sort of mutant, apparently.
