lawgrunt
New York, NY
Male, 32
I am a 2nd year associate in the corporate department of an elite law firm in New York, NY. The bulk of my practice is grunt work on corporate transactions like IPOs, mergers & acquisitions, financing. I’ve also some work in derivatives, negotiating contracts between hedge funds and broker-dealers.
Hi! "Pride" is an interesting word. By and large I think lawyers are good, smart people who don't get anywhere near enough respect. Every once in a while, you'll hear about a real scumbag lawyer, chasing ambulances, or filing frivolous lawsuits, and of course that gets all the media coverage, Which is a shame, because that's not representative of most lawyers I know. I'm proud to live in a country where if you can't afford a lawyer, one is provided for you free of charge. I'm proud of lawyers who take on really unpopular cases, knowing they'll face public wrath, but doing it because that's simply what we do in our country. YES, Tim McVeigh gets a lawyer. Yes, the Boston marathon bombers get a lawyer. Lawyers are a necessity in our country. And I'm dismayed to see how much flak they often get. We need MORE smart hard-working people, not fewer.
But 'pride' is different than fulfillment...and yes, unfortunately the vast majority of my lawyer friends are not happy nor fulfilled working in law. It's tedious. You don't get to be Atticus Finch or David Boies right out of law school. You get a lot of grunt work; it's thankless and tedious. It pays well. But (in my opinion) not enough to spend the majority of your 20s (and maybe 30s) at work on weekends because you have a client who needs a set of documents turned ASAP.
So I'm not sure what kind of ranking I can offer: it depends on what you value most. Hey, if your #1 priority is making a lot of money, there aren't many jobs that pay as well as a lawyer, without the work being all that difficult. But if you told me you valued happiness, or personal fulfillment, I'd tell you to run fast in the other direction. Some lawyers find those qualities in the practice of law. Most do not. Hope that helped, even though I think I rambled a bit:)
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Kind of a tricky question...now keep in mind that I haven't practiced in ages, and when I summered, nearly 100% of summer associates got full time offers. You had to darn-near burn the place down (or at the very least get drunk and do something inappropriate at a summer event:) not to get an offer.
But I hear things are much different these days depending on what city you're in (and it seems to vary firm-to-firm as well.) I've heard the big NYC firms still give offers to most if not all of their summers...but they've adjusted to the economic downturn by simply hiring fewer summers. The biggest NYC firms used to have classes of 100+ summer associates(!) I hear that number's down to 40-60 these days. Other firms I have heard have kept hiring summer classes just as large as in the 2003-2007 boom years...except the percentage of the summer class who gets offers has been cut in half from 95% to closer to 50%.
I don't have a crystal ball...all I can tell you is that it's definitely tougher out there now than it was when I graduated. Good luck.
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Thanks for the question - I take it this was motivated in part by the recent round of super-generous bonuses being announced at NYC firms. To bring everyone up to speed, historically - at least when it comes to NY law firms - one big firm will announce the bonuses that it plans on paying to its non-partner lawyers some time around Thanksgiving, which will effectively "set the market" for what bonuses are going to be that year. After that, most other NY firms (at least those in the similar reputational bracket) will fall in line and give their lawyers the same bonuses that were given out by the market-setter (aka first firm to announce.) Sometimes though, like this year, a top-tier firm (this year it was Simpson Thacher) will be first out of the gate to announce its bonus scale, but then another peer firm (Davis Polk this year) won't simply offer matching bonuses, but will announce significantly HIGHER bonuses for its associates. This leaves other law firms scrambling to decide whether they're going to match the 1st-to-announce firm's bonus scale, or the higher 2nd-to-announce scale. Not to mention it pisses off the lawyers from the 1st-to-announce firm who all of a sudden see their peers at other firms getting higher bonuses.
Anyway, that's a summary of the politics, but your question actually gets at a more important and even controversial issue: why is there any "matching" going on at all? As you correctly point out: some NYC law firms have better years financially than others...shouldn't their associates get rewarded for contributing to that firm's better-than-average success? As with many things in law, the answer is 'yes that's the way it should work, but it doesn't'. The most reasonable explanation is that over the years, NYC firms have settled into this one-firm-announces-their-bonus-scale-then-everyone-else-matches-it pattern, which represents an political equilibrium that avoids a green-eyed chaos that might result from every firm paying its associates differently. (Note that SALARIES, in addition to bonuses, are generally identical across most top-tier NYC firms.) Lawyers are a notoriously whiny bunch, and there may be far more attrition and lateraling for even small differences in pay, and hence all firms have fallen into this unspoken game-theory-ish balance.
A cynic might conversely argue that what's going on is a form of wage-fixing (which would be grossly illegal...Apple/Google got zinged for just such an arrangement). That may be hard to ultimately prove in the absence of a paper trail that points to an express agreement to keep salaries and bonuses the same in a given market. But there are certainly critics who believe that better-performing firms should reward their associates with above-market bonuses, rather than just distributing the extra gravy among the partners.
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Thanks for the question, it's a good one. I chose corporate law because I thought that attention to detail was one of my strengths. But the truth is that you basically need strong attention to detail regardless of which field of law you're considering. I liked the idea of transactional work; I'm pretty organized. I think I liked the notion of knowing what suite of documents needed to be assembled for a given transaction, rather than living in a world of litigation uncertainty where an entire case direction might change overnight depending on the actions of a counterparty. Corporate seemed a little more stable and predictable (< this doesn't mean easy or non-stressful).
Some firms have junior associate programs that have a mandatory rotation among a firm's various groups for the first 1 to 2 years...I actually think that's a great system, though it's not how my firm operated. VERY few law school graduates have any clue what it's like to work in a given field day in day out (I certainly didn't), and a forced rotation I think does a good job exposing you to the realities of day-to-day work in a given field before you have to choose what you enjoy most. So if you're a student and uncertain what field you'd enjoy most, perhaps look around for a firm who will let you 'sample' different practices before you have to choose what you like best. Hope that helped.
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Agree 100% (provided you have your offer in the bag.) You could even say that extends to 2nd year too. Here’s how it works: 1st semester of your 2nd year you interview for a law firm summer associate position for your 2nd summer. The only grades the interviewer ever sees are those from your first year of law school. Offers are extended and accepted before that semester’s even over. Moreover, nearly all summer associates will get a full-time offer for post-graduation (the typical offer rate is probably less than 100% in a bad economy like this but when I was a summer, you’d have to have burned the firm to the ground not to get an offer.)
Effectively what this means is that the only grades that matter are those from your first year of law school (unless you are one of the small percentage of students who re-interview your 3rd year because you either didn’t get a full-time offer or didn’t like your firm.) I wouldn’t call 3rd year a ‘waste of time’ though: I had an absolute ball (outside of the classroom.)
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Depends what firm you’re at. Usually you’ll get a reduced bonus (or none at all). If you’re at a hard-line firm, or you’ve had other work-related problems, you might get fired. Most NYC firms, including mine, have a billable hour target in the neighborhood of 2,000 / year. My first year I didn’t come close (1,600) but never heard a peep; but also got a lower bonus than my friends who billed more. The second year I was around 1,950 and got a full bonus. At my firm at least, the ‘target’ is just that: a target. Not a magic number that the partnership uses to make draconian decisions. The partners understand that junior associates aren’t the ones bringing in business; we just get assigned to projects and work on them. So evaluating us on a metric over which we have little control is a little counter-intuitive, especially in a bad economy. If the firm was really busy and all of the other associates were hitting 2,000 hours and you showed up with 1,500, you’d probably hear about it.
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Hard to estimate because it’s not public knowledge, but it differs from firm to firm. Law firms will release figures called “profits per partner”, which media outlets parrot back, but those aren’t really representative numbers because they’re often just the firm’s profits divided by the number of partners. They don’t reflect the fact that different partners can take home wildly divergent paychecks, depending on how much business they bring to the firm. At my firm I think the youngest partners make about $600,000, but it’s not uncommon for a seasoned partner at a well-regarded firm like Simpson Thacher or Kirkland & Ellis to take home between $2-3 million per year.
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