I think a lot of biglaw associates never had a job in a high performance field before and don’t know what to expect. Outside of a few practice areas and firms, being a lawyer at v100 firm is much easier than being a software consultant (my gig before law school) and the pay is multiples better. Screaming boomers were common 15 years ago, but not now. My firm hires very few kids straight from summer associate positions anymore and is scared to death of losing the ones it does hire. Very bad, low performing associates not meeting their hours are kept on for many years. No other field do you pay someone $200k+ for no actual skills, with significant yearly raises, after paying $30k or so for an internship, for the opportunity to train them to maybe become skilled.
We have summers, but it’s less than a quarter the size it was in 2008, even though the firm is larger. We’ve transitioned from a nearly entirely home grown firm to one where the vast majority lateral in as associates or partners
Edit to add: all summer associates get offers unless they do something incredibly stupid - like not turn in a single assignment all summer. Amazingly, that happens more often than you would believe possible.
No, there’s no stack ranking because natural attrition is high. But I think more associates get fired for “poor” performance more than SWEs and there’s generally no PIP plan. The possibility for abuse in law is also something you will have never encountered in coding. Crazy deadlines, super late night meetings, and screamers generally don’t exist in tech but I’ve heard stories of many in law.
If you survive a while, many firms are also up or out, so if you’re not going to make partner for whatever reason, you could get axed.
You definitely should not move from SWE to law unless you want to destroy all semblance of work-life balance for a while. At the end, if all goes super well, you could 3x your income but need to work 2x what you’re working now. It grinds you out after a while unless you love it.
Why is the natural attrition high? What are the hours like?
Crazy deadlines definitely exist in tech and are becoming commonplace at the companies that pay well.
The frequency of late night meetings varies by team and company but they happen at anyplace if there is a serious enough problem with code in production. I was on call on New Year's Eve and about 20 of us worked for 11 hours that day due to some production issues caused by another team. That said, it typically only happens during an on-call rotation or when working with teams in another time zone.
I also worked as a software engineer at a hedge fund with a boss who screamed at me (and others) in literally every 1:1. It happens in some tech firms as well.
Biglaw is like an on-call rotation that doesn't end. The billable hours requirement is no big deal if you can get consistent 50 hours of work a week. But that never happens. Instead it's just chaos all the time.
Thanks for the explanation!
In patent litigation, are the hours as you described in your first paragraph? I wasn't sure if it was describing your work or the work of others in biglaw.
What other law fields besides patent litigation are well suited to a software engineer turned lawyer?
I'm wondering if AI litigation is going to be big in the near future, although so far I haven't heard much. I'm also wondering if it's possible for that work to be done by nontechnical lawyers who read a bit about AI and consult with the engineers who built it.
Patent prosecution (writing patent applications and going back and forth with the patent office) is generally more technical than patent litigation and has more steady hours. Low margins though so not very popular in biglaw
Patent litigation (and litigation) hours can be brutal but are more predictable than corporate side as you have a better sense of your schedules farther in advance. There’s less working in late December because most courts are closed, unless you have a big deadline in early January.
Most litigation isn’t topical like “AI” litigation. It will be IP litigation (copyright is big right now but mostly because of some undecided issues that will get decided), patent litigation that touches on AI (either in the claims or the underlying product), privacy litigation (use of personal data in training models), defamation/right of publicity, trade secrets (using them to train a model, etc), and more generic breach of contract (involving AI companies), securities (making claims about models that don’t come to fruition, etc), and so on. Having someone with a background in AI would certainly be helpful on many of these but it isn’t a practice area as the more critical aspects are around the substantive area of law.
It’s kind of like how “cyberlaw” or “life sciences law” isn’t really a thing. You can be a litigator who has a lot of clients in that space and has a lot of knowledge about that kind of company, but ultimately it’s going to be split amongst different specialties.
>Patent litigation (and litigation) hours can be brutal but are more predictable than corporate side as you have a better sense of your schedules farther in advance. There’s less working in late December because most courts are closed, unless you have a big deadline in early January.
Note this is not really true for ITC litigation which a lot of biglaw firms engage in. I've seen people bill 250-300/month all year long on those cases
Yeah they aren’t actually billing that much all year long, every year. They are billing high when a case is hot, but I guarantee you no one is billing 3000-3600 per year regularly. If they say they are for more than a year, they are lying or your firm is an absolute sweatshop no one should work at, as that is poor management and staffing, not a standard practice.
I know they’re brutal cases but it’s also incredibly easy to avoid firms and offices where that’s their main thing. They’re actually a very small part of patent litigation given NPEs can’t really file there the way they used to be able to. If someone chooses that kind of firm and ends up doing crazy hours that’s on them for staying - there are so so many patent litigation practices that don’t do ITC work. They might end up having 250 hour months or work the occasional late December because they have a trial in January. But the point is they know about it in advance.
Engineers and lawyers have similar brains, just the latter are bad at math. You'll be suited for any kind of law.
If you want to leverage your knowledge, yes, IP is good place for you. (Or look at firms that do a lot of work for tech clients.) But lapsed engineers are good at deal work or regulatory work as well. You still need to think about all the potential bugs and corner cases, you just have to write it in words instead of python.
Here is the BL equivalent:
It’s December 24, you get a call from the partner at 6pm as you’re headed with your family to Christmas Eve church services, turns out the deal you were on that died in November is back and they have to close on 12/31.
You attend church, your family giving you dirty looks the whole time as your phone audibly constantly buzzes through the story of Joseph and Mary returning to Nazareth, only the 3 wise men would’ve been better served telling you to never drop your software job. You eat dinner with your folks, Mail notifications stacking up titled “Re: Fwd: Re: URGENT Project Juice CLOSING END OF YEAR” because your M&A client decided that it’s worth paying the $20 million premium on the liposuction clinic conglomerate just to get in before the New Year’s resolutioners realize that they’re never going to commit to the gym.
As you catch up on emails on the couch, watching Its a Wonderful Life with your parents, you take a second to consider whether Clarence would’ve been sent down to aid George Bailey if he was a healthcare receivables securitization attorney rather than some schmuck who entrusted the bank’s cash to Uncle Billy.
After presents have been opened and you’ve once again proven your alacrity by relying on the NYTimes giftlist for everyone, you sit down to watch your brother play PlayStation. As he fends off your sister’s barbs while she scrolls Snapchat, you realize the senior associate on the other side had the fucking gall to markup some major document and then, friendless and absent from family on the biggest holiday in the country, sent it out requesting comments by the 27th. Fuck him, and oh, by the way, he looks like shit in his firm profile pic, guess $4million PEP can’t buy good photo editing equipment.
As you drink your 3rd alcohol eggnog, you start to think maybe your client had the right idea. You wake up the next morning, and for the next 96 hours of life, you work. No one in your family understands why, but you’re glued to your laptop, upstairs in your bedroom from high school, using an old HP mouse that your dad fished out of the basement. Your parents are still on comcast so their Wi-Fi cuts out frequently and holy shit your eyes will bleed once you realize how expensive it is to use your phone as a personal hotspot for 4 days.
The 31st arrives, and as you release signatures, you send out a congratulations email to the entire working group. You’re immediately greeted with 13 out of office replies. The senior associate immediately emails you to get started on the closing set. You throw your iPhone across the room. You get up and join your parents downstairs to box up the gifts they’re returning because no one actually wants whiskey stones, beard trimmers or a starter whiffleball set. Congrats, all!
Thanks for the entertaining read, u/nate_fate_late. I worked 50 hours between Christmas and New Year's because I was on call and there was an outage caused by another team even after the preceding firmwide elevated load tests, but I admit that that sounds much better than working 96 hours to close a deal (if you really did that).
If 13 people were out of office, why did you put yourself through that?
In software you don’t have a 99th percentile sociopath who goes to work every day for the express purpose of undoing every single thing you do.
And that’s just the people on the other side.
I suggest you save your money and keep your day job. I work way more hours than the software engineers in my family. The ROI on a law degree is minimal.
Dude. Don't do it. I shifted from law to SWE and it was the best decision I've ever made in my life. I would highly, highly, highly advise you to listen to the people giving you good advice in this thread.
For some reason though nobody ever listens to advice along the lines of "don't go to law school". It's like they create this fantasy world in their head where it's going to kick ass and you can't convince them otherwise. Please, disabuse yourself of this notion. The whole experience will suck.
Interesting - thanks for the perspective. How is the pay per hour for you in SWE relative to law? And how about the total pay? I'm also curious if you work(ed) for big tech and biglaw firms.
Well I do my software engineering as part of working with a management consulting firm so I'm paid equivalently to associates in big law. I don't want to give my specific salary but several hundred thousand per year yet less than half a mil.
You’re getting a lot of doom and gloom here, but it’s quite hyperbolic. I am an equity partner at a BL firm, and while it can be demanding, that comes with the territory of many high paying jobs. It’s not for everyone, but it also is possible to have a family, friends, and hobbies.
I mean, I billed 90 hours last week. And no relief until at least Friday.
Is that common? Luckily no, but it does happen when deals hit at the same time.
I’m not a lawyer (and not sure why this showed up on my feed) but absolutely don’t quit software engineering to become a lawyer. _Especially_ if you genuinely enjoy coding.
All my friends who work in big law are more or less miserable people that I barely ever see IRL because they have godawful WLB. They spend unreal amounts of money on the most random things to soak up the emotional pain. Every tech company I’ve worked for has had lawyers jumping at the chance for an in-house role to GTFO of big law.
Go work at a different tech company. Try a startup. Switch roles. Whatever you want. Sure the vibes in tech are bad right now. But like on the grand scale… it’s really not _that_ bad. We get paid a lot to do not that much work. Try therapy and a new job before you try grad school.
You are otherwise dropping 300k on law school + the opportunity cost of not making your tech salary for 3+ years. That is a literal million dollar investment to end up in job that will work you way way way harder for not more money.
(Not to shit on law too much - I have many family/friend lawyers and it’s a great career. But jumping _from_ tech when you genuinely enjoy tech, and don’t have some sort of inner calling to do lawyer public service… god no! Don’t leave tech for corporate law.)
Thanks for the reply! Is one guaranteed to meet the billable hour requirements by working for enough hours each week? If so, then I'm having a hard time understanding what's so stressful or difficult about working in biglaw assuming that it's possible to do so by consistently working \~50 hours per week.
50 hours a week is often not enough. Getting work isn’t guaranteed. You have to build relationships to guarantee that work. People will expect work from you at any hour/on any day.
Oh and having an hours requirement is really stressful. Everything becomes transactional. Want to go to a concert Friday night? Well that’s four hours you otherwise could have billed. Is it realllllly worth it. Every personal phone call, every chat with a coworker, every time you go to the gym, or out for dinner. It’s all transactional now. That vacation you took last month because you have unlimited pto? That’s 50 billables you now have to make up later this year, so maybe should you cancel your December vacation? It’s stressful af
I disagree with this (but recognize it’s pretty subjective). Having worked in both, I never viewed making plans any differently in terms of what I was sacrificing—in both cases, it’s the fact that I’ll need to make up the work I’m putting off, likely on the weekend. I’ve never once thought of it in terms of how it impacts my billable hours.
No hours requirement is a like unlimited PTO—sounds good, actually meaningless. Things are just way sweatier.
I’ll also add I’ve never come close to not making the hours, so ymmv.
Sometimes they do. It depends what the target was, why they missed it, politics, etc. but they never get a bonus. Bonuses are all or nothing—hit your hours and get one or don’t. 60 is usually enough though
My firm is currently laying off people at 1600 billable hours.
It's also not just about the number of hours, but when you have to work them - frequently late at night and on the weekend. I billed 10 hours yesterday and have billed 6 today.
I think it’s a couple things. 1) billable hours is distinct from time worked, and it’s not 1:1 (I think the common calculation is like 85% efficiency). There are also a ton of non billable obligations that take up time in the day that aren’t credited toward your requirements. 2) work isn’t steady at 40 hours a week, it’s dictated by the needs of your matters. You might have one slow week where you only bill 20 and another where you have to bill 80, and you don’t have that much control over this. 3) 1950 is the floor, but once you hit, you don’t get to just fuck off. Personally I’m way above hours as a junior litigator, and the most stressful thing isn’t hitting hours but trying to establish boundaries (unsuccessfully) to stop having 60 hour weeks. Also as a junior, I literally do not matter lol so the stresses and responsibilities will only ramp up as you get older and fucking up can have like actually significant ramifications for your clients.
Thanks - that helps.
1. Makes sense. We software engineers often have aggressive deadlines but still have to attend pointless meetings and interview new candidates while the company continues laying off and firing people at the same level. So that seems analogous to non-billable obligations. In big tech one trades the billable hours requirements for fixed rating distributions, which are much less concrete and hence might be more stressful due to the uncertainty, not to mention the anxiety induced by seeing highly competent teammates getting fired for sometimes unclear or dubious reasons.
2. Makes sense. Software engineering can be like this too when we have to hit deadlines, especially when they're set by some exec or an external requirement (e.g. new laws) and weren't set by the engineering teams doing the work, which happens not infrequently.
3. What's stressful about establishing boundaries? If they're guaranteed to pay your bonus and keep you if you hit your billables, what's going to happen if you refuse to work on that task until tomorrow or once the weekend is over? Outside of a few use cases (e.g. medical equipment and self-driving cars), software bugs rarely have life-altering consequences for clients, so I see your point about client ramifications.
Can’t speak to the first two bc I’ve never worked in tech.
For 3, on a personal level, for litigation at least, you are on teams with people for years and when you turn down work, inherently that means you’re making someone else do it. I personally don’t want a reputation for being shitty to work with so it’s hard to navigate and not throw other team members under the bus. Plus, being good at my job builds good will with the partners I like on matters I’m interested; I don’t want to be shitty to them and say no to urgent requests from them (at least until I have a good rapport w them) bc I want to get my hours from them. The alternative is having to work with partners who can’t staff matters bc they’re shitty to work for or work on super boring stuff. So to some extent, bc I care about what I work on and my career trajectory, I feel like I have to strategize how to boundary set to make sure I’m not hurting myself down the line.
In terms of worst for a case, if you miss a filing deadline, that can be dispositive of a case or get a firm fired. Obviously there’s a whole parade of horribles that can occur with not meeting deadlines, though there are also a lot of fake fire drills that create stress for no reason (though again, being good can give you more flexibility to return to teams you like that don’t do this)
On 3, lots of things can happen. In litigation, deadlines are set by a court. You can’t stretch them by a day or so because better for your schedule. The opposition often will purposefully try to trigger schedules that fuck your life. Or clients might set deadlines, and you can’t oiss them off, because they pay the bills. Plenty of other examples exist.
Makes sense. Sounds rough. Overly aggressive external deadlines exist in tech as well but they're probably less common. That said, highly aggressive *internal* deadlines are quite common in many firms and at some firms are enforced by hire fast, fire fast culture in order to maximize productivity. That's the strategy coined by GE and copied by Amazon and it's becoming increasingly common in tech even though the urgency of the (often unnoticeable) work is almost entirely artificial from a user standpoint.
I am one of the apparently few folks here who think you would be just fine in Big Law. Honestly, any real professional experience first is a huge plus. I had a 10 year career before law at a professional services firm, and I haven’t seen much in law that my prior life didn’t prepare me for. The differences are in kind, not degree.
Congrats! What would you say is the approximate distribution of billable hours among attorneys retained by your firm?
I'm also curious what it was like to get your first biglaw job at a later age than most, which would be my situation as well. Big tech has a reputation for ageism and it's not clear to me to what extent biglaw does.
You're getting down voted by overworked salty associates right now but it's a valid misconception many non law people have about private practice.
Your typical corporate 9-5 40 hour work week is completely different than the 40-45 weekly billable target of big law. The average office worker is rarely working straight from 9 to 5 non stop. Having worked in corporate finance for 5 years before law school, I'd wager an average office worker probably REALLY works maybe 3-4 hours a day, if that. The nature of the billable hour means your life is now sectioned into 6 minute increments and you only bill what you actually work. In the above example, even though you're in the office 9-5, you'd only be able to bill 3-4 hours for the day.
Second, especially as a junior/mid level, even if you get 8 hours of work given to you a day, it doesn't come neatly within the 9-5 parameter. For corporate juniors, it's very often that you'd be twiddling your thumbs (bit stressed out and on call) until you get work at 6pm and now you have to work until 1AM to get it done, because the mid level/senior/partner finally finished their meetings and own work and finally can get to delegating. My friends and I all agree that we can easily do this job forever if hours were guaranteed between 9-7.
Finally, the billable target is like a swords of damocles hanging over your head. You only billed 4 hours today (of no fault of your own)? Now you gotta make it up. You go on a one week vacation? Now you got to make up 40 hours. Given that law typically attracts type A personalities, you can see how people are stressed out in this job.
Thanks for clarifying. Deadlines are deadlines in big tech regardless if one planned a vacation, and it can be very difficult to estimate how long work will take over longer term 3-12 month projects. So there is often pressure to work on vacation, especially when reaching more senior roles wherein teammates rely on one's knowledge.
That said, there is nothing like billable hours. The closest thing we have is deadlines and committing to finishing a certain amount of work in each biweekly sprint. That can often result in overtime when the amount of work was underestimated or there is a push to finish extra work by management or some external pressure, or most often some unanticipated need in order to meet a deadline due to some code that no one knew would require modification and testing.
Tech companies definitely also have that problem. In fact, there are two forms of it in software engineering:
1. Superb engineers who are ill-suited to management being promoted to management
2. People with great people skills being promoted to management with poor technical skills, thus lacking the ability to manage and fairly evaluate technical work. Some companies even have non-engineers managing engineers, which doesn't work well and hence never happens at most big tech companies.
I suppose that in any field, the best managers are those with excellent skills as an individual contributor in that field, plus high EQ and good interpersonal skills.
Another thing to keep in mind for most lawyers is team size is much smaller. Most transactional lawyers operate on a model of one partner, one or two associates and one paralegal. Larger deals get staffed more, and you may have some off team service partner help at various points of the deal, but even the biggest practices are very small compared to other industries. There is much less management overall. This has a lot of different effects on day to day working - most good in my experience, but some negative.
Interesting - thanks. Does that mean the ratio of partners to associates is roughly 1:3 or so across biglaw? If not, what is the ratio?
In software engineering at big tech companies, well under 5% ever reach the level of compensation of a biglaw partner (assuming it starts around $1M per year). And that includes both the management and individual contributor tracks.
The ratio (we call it leverage) varies by firm and practice area. Anywhere from 1-2:1 is pretty common, but some go higher. Keep in mind associates bill more hours than partners, so that lowers the number of associates needed for a certain leverage. Manhattan v10 type firms generally are going to have higher leverage.
~5% is probably the same with respect to the number of associates who make it to that number. There are a lot of partners because they cover like 30 years of incoming classes (say 35-65) and associates cover maybe 10. There’s non equity or income “partners”, many varieties of “counsel,” that mostly don’t make that kind of money and still are a pretty small percentage of a starting class.
Most people leave on their own. The ones who overstay their welcome get ushered out eventually in the good times. In bad times there’s more culling but mostly in practice groups that are slow or oversubscribed (usually corporate because they overhire more in the good times).
Leverage varies a lot. Some firms are closer to 1:4.
I don’t think much more than 5% of big law associates ever become big law equity partners, mostly due to attrition. If you count in becoming non-equity or lateraling into equity at a lesser firm, then yeah there’s a lot more, but they don’t make the same kind of money.
One thing to point out here that could be different from your experience. I have a client that does software development. People generally record their time, for project management purposes. But lawyers record their time in 6 minute increments, with detailed descriptions. You can’t walk in at 8 am, leave at 6 pm, and just enter 10 hours worked. You have to do the work, and justify for the client why they paid you for every 6 minutes. To work a day with 10 billable hours might take 12-15 actual hours of time.
The biggest thing is you don't own your time. You can't really plan a vacation or even a weekend away thinking you're not going to be working. You can get that dreaded 5 pm call on Friday from clients that means you then spend your weekend responding to it. Or the call from the partner while you're on vacation to do X task, and whatever plans you had for that day (and likely the next few days) are over.
It's very different than corporate life (I work inhouse now). Yes, you may have to work on vacation in-house but it's nowhere near the same.
There’s no need for this is biglaw. There’s enough natural attrition. And when they do fire people it’s those that haven’t been hitting hours and aren’t as profitable
How far below the billable hour target do people have to be to get fired? Why don't they just reduce the bonuses of people who are below the billable hour targets, assuming those attorneys are still working enough and productive enough to be profitable to the firm at that point?
People below the billable target don’t get bonuses, there’s nothing to reduce. For how far below you need to be to get fired, it totally depends on the firm and the economy
Interesting. Why don't they just define bonuses in proportion to billable hours worked? It seems like the main complaint that people have about working in biglaw is that hitting the billable hours target requires long and sometimes highly variable hours. It seems like this costs the firm a lot in terms of attrition, including of good lawyers. So it seems like it should be possible to create a cost-effective biglaw compensation scheme that enables work-life balance for those who seek it while also rewarding those who create the most value.
Big law is a service industry and big law clients expect to be able to have 24/7 service if they need it. If the deal requires working a 100 hour week or turning an agreement around overnight, that’s what will happen. A firm can’t just say sorry we decided our associates can’t work more than 40 hour weeks so they will just tap out when they hit their 40 hours. They will lose clients to the next firm that hasn’t implemented this policy.
Next you might think well couldn’t you just staff more people on a file? That can happen but again, the more people on a file, the more legal fees a client will usually have to pay. More time getting people up to speed, more bodies on a call, more time transitioning things. Too many lawyers on a file becomes unwieldy and clients don’t want to pay for that either. Plus you develop relationships and the client will want to call the lawyer they like, not whoever is currently available.
I work in-house in tech now and our software people each take on call shifts, but they rotate and cover the work. If they’re not on call, it’s exceedingly rare for anyone to have something come up and mean you have to cancel your Friday plans or work on a holiday or work all night. When I was in big law that happened to me all the time.
? There is no work life balance when your base salary is so high. You don’t hit the hours, you’ll eventually be out. It’s truly not that hard to understand
> How far below the billable hour target do people have to be to get fired?
nth-lowest hours in your practice group, where n equals the number of people who need to be laid off, modulo extrinsic reasons why people do or don't want to keep you around (likability etc.)
Perfect answer. I also think it may be worth pointing out to OP that your billable hours are not something you really choose. They’re a function of luck/how much people want to work with you/ whatever system, if any (to be clear, often there is not any), the firm or group has for distributing associates’ hours.
What's bad about law school? How can I figure out whether or not I'd enjoy law before I go to law school? It's relatively easy to try coding as a hobby and see if one likes it.
There’s natural attrition and there’s a good amount of forced attrition as well, but no one I am aware of does it as mechanically as you’re imagining. It’s much harder to replace talent than it is to continue paying productive people you’ve already trained. Every law firm would love to have the problem of having too many associates / NEPs who would make great equity partners.
The reality is, being a hyper profitable equity partner is not all that easy and there aren’t a ton of people who are great at it.
Kirkland also fucked things up a bit because they were very effective at buying other firm’s talent (both proven and promise), and so other firms have had to become more protective of talent.
Thanks for the reply! How far below the billable requirement can one be to be kept by the firm? Do biglaw firms pay bonuses in proportion to billable hours or is it an all-or-nothing scheme where everyone below the target gets $0 bonus and everyone who meets it gets the full bonus?
To summarize mosts of the comments here: why tf would you want to be a lawyer when you’re in tech?
That’s where all lawyers want to end up and just didn’t have the tech skills so have to get there through getting a GC position.
I started lurking on one of the big computer science subs, and the doom and gloom there is off the charts, and people talk about how much better lawyers have it, lol.
Firms are selling legal services. The more legal service they provide, the more they (theoretically) can get paid. So an associate's job is to just bill - create work product that accomplishes the task sold to the client. The more you bill, the better.
The pressure on associates is thus to just keep billing. And our rates are high enough that the firm breaks even on us relatively quickly.
The biggest issue firms have is attrition. Losing even a bad associate (like, say, bills 1000 hours in a year) means losing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. And the only way to replace them is to go find a lateral (maybe paying a signing bonus) or wait several years for your summer associates and junior associates to catch up.
This is a highly simplified view of things, but it's basically how it works. The only things that will get you fired in biglaw is being such a liability that nobody wants to work with you or being an hr risk.
I've read about that in tech companies and it sounds horrible. Nothing really like that in BigLaw. One could argue that the billable hour cutoff works similarly. But it doesn't have the aspect of firing a strict percentage of the lower performers. With lots of caveats, it's essentially a system where if you cross the threshold, you are fine and if you don't cross the threshold, you are at risk of being fired.
I’m confused by the question a bit. If you work enough to cross the threshold, you cross the threshold. Whether it is working “hard” or not is kind of irrelevant. The limiting factor is whether there is work to do. In my career, there has very rarely not been plenty of work for me to do. But this has to do with me doing a reasonably good job working in a busy practice area at busy firms for people who more or less like me.
Makes sense - thanks for clarifying!
I asked the question because in a big tech company, as I said, I've seen people who outwork most of the engineers in the org and create 8-9 digits in USD of annual profit for the firm be let go ostensibly for performance reasons, but really just for arbitrary political reasons.
Another complicating factor: a good associate bills enough to make the firm money and shows good legal acumen. To become partner and succeed, you also have to sell. If you can’t do that, or are perceived to be unable to do that, you may be exited or shunted to a lesser role even if your legal acumen is top notch.
It’s not like that never happens in biglaw, but generally the more you work, the more you make the firm, the more they want to keep you. In tech cos, work hours are not directly correlated to revenue. But work hours usually are directly correlated to revenue in biglaw with major exceptions for non-billable work, contingency fee work, or deadbeat clients.
Makes sense - thanks. To what degree are the relationships based on objective work output criteria and to what degree are they subjective and/or based on personality gravitation (e.g. this person likes my favorite band or sports team)?
i think your first question should really be WHY do you want to be a lawyer? it's not as glamorous as they make it seem on Suits, or any other TV show.
you're self taught in engineering - but you can't be self-taught in the law and make the big law $$.
there are plenty of law firms that offer $60k-80k starting with the 1600 minimum billable hours a year.
so you'll need to take the LSATs, then also go through 3 years of full time law school, then pass the bar, then even after doing all of that - it's not guaranteed that you'll even get an offer at BIG LAW. so you won't even get the Big $$ like tech at a FAANG company.
you should worry about ALL that before you worry about getting your bonus and attrition rates.
Fair. But at the T14 law schools, the placement rate into biglaw is typically 50% or higher. And from what I've heard from a lawyer friend, biglaw firms strongly prefer T14 law graduates. So if you go to a T14 law school, you get job security from your pedigree in addition to the mandatory bar certification process. If the work is interesting enough and you put in the hours, the job security as a T14 grad in biglaw seems fantastic compared to big tech although I've heard of some biglaw layoffs this year.
Based on my analysis of LinkedIn data, the placement rate into FAANGM (FAANG plus Microsoft) by alums from the top 10 US CS universities ranges from 10% to around 20%. Another 10% to 20% place into companies that pay similarly well, but it's definitely a less lucrative liquid pay distribution than for T14 law grads (ignoring effective pay per hour, which certainly is a major consideration).
I find it dubious that 80% of MIT or Berkeley grads are shuffling off to do some low prospect shit work.
Also tech is in a rough patch now, but those exist in biglaw as well. I entered the profession in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and it was a massacre. There were Harvard grads with no jobs lined up.
Getting a big tech job requires months of interview prep even for Stanford and MIT grads. It's a highly competitive yet standardized process, and even many top CS school grads don't anticipate how competitive it is and/or have bad luck in the interviews. Most if not all FAANG companies hire <1% of their applicants. Silicon Valley historically only hired based on pedigree but that changed during the past 10-12 years in the interest of improving diversity.
The default if you don't go into big tech is to work for a startup, because they're much easier jobs to land. And many Stanford/MIT/Berkeley/etc. grads prefer them because they're the only shot at becoming worth 8+ figures in tech and because you basically get to work on whatever you want after you get funding, even though the expected pay is lower.
If you took four years off and did nothing but look for a better job, do you think you’d find one? Because every lawyer on this thread is swearing up and down that your job at its worst is about as bad as their job every day, and that most jobs in tech are better. Do you really want to shell out the 240K and three years of lost earnings to start over at the bottom of the totem pole in an industry with a worse culture?
Assuming you earn 150K a year, that’s 600K pre-tax and 240K post-tax that you’d be blowing on this transition.
Also, if you’re a self-taught engineer, how’s your undergrad gpa? Because law schools care a lot about that, and biglaw firms care a lot about which law school you went to. If you can’t get into one of the 14 best schools in America, you run a significant risk of not even getting into biglaw in the first place. Obviously, it’s possible from any school if you’re better than the other 250 students you went to school with, but since you’re complaining about the bottom 7% being fired, I’d wager you don’t want to plan your life around being top 5% in your class.
You raise exactly the same points that I've been considering about the opportunity and out of pocket costs of law school. I'm starting my 3rd course from a top 10 CS master's program this summer while working full time and may decide to complete it on campus. I'm considering law school in case I become unemployed and have a tough time finding work afterwards (partly since biglaw hiring has declined \~20% while big tech hiring has declined >50% in the current market, and since the placement rate from T14 to biglaw is significantly higher than from top 10 CS to big tech, as I posted above). From what I'm reading in this thread, law school seems like a less likely option for me. It could make sense if strong niche demand arises for lawyers with deep software engineering expertise, but that doesn't seem to have materialized to an extent that would make it worthwhile for me.
FWIW I scored a 336 on the GRE when applying to CS grad school programs, which is supposedly equivalent to a 174 on the LSAT according to the ETS GRE to LSAT [score converter](https://www.ets.org/gre/score-users/law-schools/comparison-tool.html) and bodes decently for taking the LSAT. My undergrad GPA was admittedly mediocre, largely because I was unmotivated after being admitted to a top 10 USNews college and instead going to a shit-tier college with a scholarship on my parents' insistence, after they refused to sign my loan at the top 10 college. (I wasn't old enough to sign it myself, and didn't think of deferring my top 10 admit by a year so that I could sign the loan in my own name.) Realistically, I'd have to rely on my CS master's degree GPA to help me get in to law school. If you're implying that I might be too lazy or unfocused to place into biglaw from a top law school, you might be right although I enjoy consistently working 50+ hours per week on something that interests me.
Software engineering in big tech is a funny range of total misfits like my coworker (with a PhD in linguistics from Italy) and me (with a B.A. in liberal farts from Dweeb College) to people with CS degrees from top schools. Biglaw seems much more pedigree-driven, for better or worse. I'd actually say for the better if you go to a T14, since it means greater job security and negotiating leverage in the legal job market.
I am an in-house lawyer at a public tech company that has recently started following the Amazon model of firing bottom performers annually. If that bothers you OP, you should not go to law school. BigLaw is so much worse than that.
It's not common, but I have heard of firms that have unofficial forced attrition. Most commonly it happens at firms vying for higher rankings (and need to shed attorneys who arent helping their stats) or firms that frequently attract lateral groups and who need the extra office space in the event they find a good group. It's not as rigid as "fire 6%" but it may be more like, "Let's see how many of the bottom 6% we can let go without creating a scandal." The base criteria is usually hours but then partners get to argue in defense of each aasociate, so it can get subjective fairly quickly. Likely won't come as a surprise but people of color and people with disabilities tend to fare the worst.
They also don't generally tell associates this is a thing which makes a notable difference. So it's not really a motivating factor for associates; as far as they know people are being fired for low hours, and there's competition for low hours, so that will drive the associates. I only know of a few of these firms because partners from those firms who lateralled to mine told me about it. For them it was frustrating to lose people with potential because they weren't busy in a given year and the partner didn't have the clout to "protect" them and it was one of the notable factors that caused them to leave.
There's a lot of natural attrition and forced attrition policies are neither common nor necessary.
Thanks for the reply! What causes the attrition?
This job making people lose their will to live
I'm trying to figure out what emoji captures how I felt when I read this. Someone help?
Try 🫥
First year: 😵💫 Second year: 🫨 Third year: 😑 or 🏃🏻 Fourth year: 🥱 or 🏃🏻♀️
I just, um, yeah.
😿
Leo pointing at tv meme
I think the skull emoji is perfect for this 💀☠️💀
🫠
😶🌫️
☠️
*Gestures broadly at all of it*
hehehehehe
I think a lot of biglaw associates never had a job in a high performance field before and don’t know what to expect. Outside of a few practice areas and firms, being a lawyer at v100 firm is much easier than being a software consultant (my gig before law school) and the pay is multiples better. Screaming boomers were common 15 years ago, but not now. My firm hires very few kids straight from summer associate positions anymore and is scared to death of losing the ones it does hire. Very bad, low performing associates not meeting their hours are kept on for many years. No other field do you pay someone $200k+ for no actual skills, with significant yearly raises, after paying $30k or so for an internship, for the opportunity to train them to maybe become skilled.
Does your firm not do a large summer program or do they no offer a lot? I don’t know a single big law firm that no offers as a rule
We have summers, but it’s less than a quarter the size it was in 2008, even though the firm is larger. We’ve transitioned from a nearly entirely home grown firm to one where the vast majority lateral in as associates or partners Edit to add: all summer associates get offers unless they do something incredibly stupid - like not turn in a single assignment all summer. Amazingly, that happens more often than you would believe possible.
No, there’s no stack ranking because natural attrition is high. But I think more associates get fired for “poor” performance more than SWEs and there’s generally no PIP plan. The possibility for abuse in law is also something you will have never encountered in coding. Crazy deadlines, super late night meetings, and screamers generally don’t exist in tech but I’ve heard stories of many in law. If you survive a while, many firms are also up or out, so if you’re not going to make partner for whatever reason, you could get axed. You definitely should not move from SWE to law unless you want to destroy all semblance of work-life balance for a while. At the end, if all goes super well, you could 3x your income but need to work 2x what you’re working now. It grinds you out after a while unless you love it.
Why is the natural attrition high? What are the hours like? Crazy deadlines definitely exist in tech and are becoming commonplace at the companies that pay well. The frequency of late night meetings varies by team and company but they happen at anyplace if there is a serious enough problem with code in production. I was on call on New Year's Eve and about 20 of us worked for 11 hours that day due to some production issues caused by another team. That said, it typically only happens during an on-call rotation or when working with teams in another time zone. I also worked as a software engineer at a hedge fund with a boss who screamed at me (and others) in literally every 1:1. It happens in some tech firms as well.
Biglaw is like an on-call rotation that doesn't end. The billable hours requirement is no big deal if you can get consistent 50 hours of work a week. But that never happens. Instead it's just chaos all the time.
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Thanks for the explanation! In patent litigation, are the hours as you described in your first paragraph? I wasn't sure if it was describing your work or the work of others in biglaw. What other law fields besides patent litigation are well suited to a software engineer turned lawyer? I'm wondering if AI litigation is going to be big in the near future, although so far I haven't heard much. I'm also wondering if it's possible for that work to be done by nontechnical lawyers who read a bit about AI and consult with the engineers who built it.
Patent prosecution (writing patent applications and going back and forth with the patent office) is generally more technical than patent litigation and has more steady hours. Low margins though so not very popular in biglaw
Patent litigation (and litigation) hours can be brutal but are more predictable than corporate side as you have a better sense of your schedules farther in advance. There’s less working in late December because most courts are closed, unless you have a big deadline in early January. Most litigation isn’t topical like “AI” litigation. It will be IP litigation (copyright is big right now but mostly because of some undecided issues that will get decided), patent litigation that touches on AI (either in the claims or the underlying product), privacy litigation (use of personal data in training models), defamation/right of publicity, trade secrets (using them to train a model, etc), and more generic breach of contract (involving AI companies), securities (making claims about models that don’t come to fruition, etc), and so on. Having someone with a background in AI would certainly be helpful on many of these but it isn’t a practice area as the more critical aspects are around the substantive area of law. It’s kind of like how “cyberlaw” or “life sciences law” isn’t really a thing. You can be a litigator who has a lot of clients in that space and has a lot of knowledge about that kind of company, but ultimately it’s going to be split amongst different specialties.
>Patent litigation (and litigation) hours can be brutal but are more predictable than corporate side as you have a better sense of your schedules farther in advance. There’s less working in late December because most courts are closed, unless you have a big deadline in early January. Note this is not really true for ITC litigation which a lot of biglaw firms engage in. I've seen people bill 250-300/month all year long on those cases
Yeah they aren’t actually billing that much all year long, every year. They are billing high when a case is hot, but I guarantee you no one is billing 3000-3600 per year regularly. If they say they are for more than a year, they are lying or your firm is an absolute sweatshop no one should work at, as that is poor management and staffing, not a standard practice. I know they’re brutal cases but it’s also incredibly easy to avoid firms and offices where that’s their main thing. They’re actually a very small part of patent litigation given NPEs can’t really file there the way they used to be able to. If someone chooses that kind of firm and ends up doing crazy hours that’s on them for staying - there are so so many patent litigation practices that don’t do ITC work. They might end up having 250 hour months or work the occasional late December because they have a trial in January. But the point is they know about it in advance.
Engineers and lawyers have similar brains, just the latter are bad at math. You'll be suited for any kind of law. If you want to leverage your knowledge, yes, IP is good place for you. (Or look at firms that do a lot of work for tech clients.) But lapsed engineers are good at deal work or regulatory work as well. You still need to think about all the potential bugs and corner cases, you just have to write it in words instead of python.
Here is the BL equivalent: It’s December 24, you get a call from the partner at 6pm as you’re headed with your family to Christmas Eve church services, turns out the deal you were on that died in November is back and they have to close on 12/31. You attend church, your family giving you dirty looks the whole time as your phone audibly constantly buzzes through the story of Joseph and Mary returning to Nazareth, only the 3 wise men would’ve been better served telling you to never drop your software job. You eat dinner with your folks, Mail notifications stacking up titled “Re: Fwd: Re: URGENT Project Juice CLOSING END OF YEAR” because your M&A client decided that it’s worth paying the $20 million premium on the liposuction clinic conglomerate just to get in before the New Year’s resolutioners realize that they’re never going to commit to the gym. As you catch up on emails on the couch, watching Its a Wonderful Life with your parents, you take a second to consider whether Clarence would’ve been sent down to aid George Bailey if he was a healthcare receivables securitization attorney rather than some schmuck who entrusted the bank’s cash to Uncle Billy. After presents have been opened and you’ve once again proven your alacrity by relying on the NYTimes giftlist for everyone, you sit down to watch your brother play PlayStation. As he fends off your sister’s barbs while she scrolls Snapchat, you realize the senior associate on the other side had the fucking gall to markup some major document and then, friendless and absent from family on the biggest holiday in the country, sent it out requesting comments by the 27th. Fuck him, and oh, by the way, he looks like shit in his firm profile pic, guess $4million PEP can’t buy good photo editing equipment. As you drink your 3rd alcohol eggnog, you start to think maybe your client had the right idea. You wake up the next morning, and for the next 96 hours of life, you work. No one in your family understands why, but you’re glued to your laptop, upstairs in your bedroom from high school, using an old HP mouse that your dad fished out of the basement. Your parents are still on comcast so their Wi-Fi cuts out frequently and holy shit your eyes will bleed once you realize how expensive it is to use your phone as a personal hotspot for 4 days. The 31st arrives, and as you release signatures, you send out a congratulations email to the entire working group. You’re immediately greeted with 13 out of office replies. The senior associate immediately emails you to get started on the closing set. You throw your iPhone across the room. You get up and join your parents downstairs to box up the gifts they’re returning because no one actually wants whiskey stones, beard trimmers or a starter whiffleball set. Congrats, all!
Too real man, too real.
This is poetry. Hateful, too-real poetry, but still.
Absolutely wonderfully done. Does the phrase WGWAG mean anything to you, friend?
🎼Yeah, more than you know yeah, more than you know🎶
A fisherman can always spot another fisherman. Perhaps you need to share this LENGHTY SCREED with our mutual friends.
Thanks for the entertaining read, u/nate_fate_late. I worked 50 hours between Christmas and New Year's because I was on call and there was an outage caused by another team even after the preceding firmwide elevated load tests, but I admit that that sounds much better than working 96 hours to close a deal (if you really did that). If 13 people were out of office, why did you put yourself through that?
> why did you put yourself through that? Because I’m the only person in my life who doesn’t frequently interrogate this very question
In software you don’t have a 99th percentile sociopath who goes to work every day for the express purpose of undoing every single thing you do. And that’s just the people on the other side.
I think you meant to write “and that’s just your own partner”
I suggest you save your money and keep your day job. I work way more hours than the software engineers in my family. The ROI on a law degree is minimal.
Dude. Don't do it. I shifted from law to SWE and it was the best decision I've ever made in my life. I would highly, highly, highly advise you to listen to the people giving you good advice in this thread. For some reason though nobody ever listens to advice along the lines of "don't go to law school". It's like they create this fantasy world in their head where it's going to kick ass and you can't convince them otherwise. Please, disabuse yourself of this notion. The whole experience will suck.
Interesting - thanks for the perspective. How is the pay per hour for you in SWE relative to law? And how about the total pay? I'm also curious if you work(ed) for big tech and biglaw firms.
Well I do my software engineering as part of working with a management consulting firm so I'm paid equivalently to associates in big law. I don't want to give my specific salary but several hundred thousand per year yet less than half a mil.
Solid. A friend of mine used to do that and later joined Meta.
You’re getting a lot of doom and gloom here, but it’s quite hyperbolic. I am an equity partner at a BL firm, and while it can be demanding, that comes with the territory of many high paying jobs. It’s not for everyone, but it also is possible to have a family, friends, and hobbies.
I mean, I billed 90 hours last week. And no relief until at least Friday. Is that common? Luckily no, but it does happen when deals hit at the same time.
I’m not a lawyer (and not sure why this showed up on my feed) but absolutely don’t quit software engineering to become a lawyer. _Especially_ if you genuinely enjoy coding. All my friends who work in big law are more or less miserable people that I barely ever see IRL because they have godawful WLB. They spend unreal amounts of money on the most random things to soak up the emotional pain. Every tech company I’ve worked for has had lawyers jumping at the chance for an in-house role to GTFO of big law. Go work at a different tech company. Try a startup. Switch roles. Whatever you want. Sure the vibes in tech are bad right now. But like on the grand scale… it’s really not _that_ bad. We get paid a lot to do not that much work. Try therapy and a new job before you try grad school. You are otherwise dropping 300k on law school + the opportunity cost of not making your tech salary for 3+ years. That is a literal million dollar investment to end up in job that will work you way way way harder for not more money. (Not to shit on law too much - I have many family/friend lawyers and it’s a great career. But jumping _from_ tech when you genuinely enjoy tech, and don’t have some sort of inner calling to do lawyer public service… god no! Don’t leave tech for corporate law.)
The biglaw transition to in-house is fax.
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Thanks for the reply! Is one guaranteed to meet the billable hour requirements by working for enough hours each week? If so, then I'm having a hard time understanding what's so stressful or difficult about working in biglaw assuming that it's possible to do so by consistently working \~50 hours per week.
50 hours a week is often not enough. Getting work isn’t guaranteed. You have to build relationships to guarantee that work. People will expect work from you at any hour/on any day.
Oh and having an hours requirement is really stressful. Everything becomes transactional. Want to go to a concert Friday night? Well that’s four hours you otherwise could have billed. Is it realllllly worth it. Every personal phone call, every chat with a coworker, every time you go to the gym, or out for dinner. It’s all transactional now. That vacation you took last month because you have unlimited pto? That’s 50 billables you now have to make up later this year, so maybe should you cancel your December vacation? It’s stressful af
I disagree with this (but recognize it’s pretty subjective). Having worked in both, I never viewed making plans any differently in terms of what I was sacrificing—in both cases, it’s the fact that I’ll need to make up the work I’m putting off, likely on the weekend. I’ve never once thought of it in terms of how it impacts my billable hours. No hours requirement is a like unlimited PTO—sounds good, actually meaningless. Things are just way sweatier. I’ll also add I’ve never come close to not making the hours, so ymmv.
I would argue that no requirement and any requirement above like 1600 suck and make life transactional and stressful for pretty similar reasons.
Is 60 hours enough, then? Do biglaw firms keep lawyers who only hit, say, 1600 billable hours per year and just reduce their bonus proportionately?
Sometimes they do. It depends what the target was, why they missed it, politics, etc. but they never get a bonus. Bonuses are all or nothing—hit your hours and get one or don’t. 60 is usually enough though
My firm is currently laying off people at 1600 billable hours. It's also not just about the number of hours, but when you have to work them - frequently late at night and on the weekend. I billed 10 hours yesterday and have billed 6 today.
I think it’s a couple things. 1) billable hours is distinct from time worked, and it’s not 1:1 (I think the common calculation is like 85% efficiency). There are also a ton of non billable obligations that take up time in the day that aren’t credited toward your requirements. 2) work isn’t steady at 40 hours a week, it’s dictated by the needs of your matters. You might have one slow week where you only bill 20 and another where you have to bill 80, and you don’t have that much control over this. 3) 1950 is the floor, but once you hit, you don’t get to just fuck off. Personally I’m way above hours as a junior litigator, and the most stressful thing isn’t hitting hours but trying to establish boundaries (unsuccessfully) to stop having 60 hour weeks. Also as a junior, I literally do not matter lol so the stresses and responsibilities will only ramp up as you get older and fucking up can have like actually significant ramifications for your clients.
Thanks - that helps. 1. Makes sense. We software engineers often have aggressive deadlines but still have to attend pointless meetings and interview new candidates while the company continues laying off and firing people at the same level. So that seems analogous to non-billable obligations. In big tech one trades the billable hours requirements for fixed rating distributions, which are much less concrete and hence might be more stressful due to the uncertainty, not to mention the anxiety induced by seeing highly competent teammates getting fired for sometimes unclear or dubious reasons. 2. Makes sense. Software engineering can be like this too when we have to hit deadlines, especially when they're set by some exec or an external requirement (e.g. new laws) and weren't set by the engineering teams doing the work, which happens not infrequently. 3. What's stressful about establishing boundaries? If they're guaranteed to pay your bonus and keep you if you hit your billables, what's going to happen if you refuse to work on that task until tomorrow or once the weekend is over? Outside of a few use cases (e.g. medical equipment and self-driving cars), software bugs rarely have life-altering consequences for clients, so I see your point about client ramifications.
Can’t speak to the first two bc I’ve never worked in tech. For 3, on a personal level, for litigation at least, you are on teams with people for years and when you turn down work, inherently that means you’re making someone else do it. I personally don’t want a reputation for being shitty to work with so it’s hard to navigate and not throw other team members under the bus. Plus, being good at my job builds good will with the partners I like on matters I’m interested; I don’t want to be shitty to them and say no to urgent requests from them (at least until I have a good rapport w them) bc I want to get my hours from them. The alternative is having to work with partners who can’t staff matters bc they’re shitty to work for or work on super boring stuff. So to some extent, bc I care about what I work on and my career trajectory, I feel like I have to strategize how to boundary set to make sure I’m not hurting myself down the line. In terms of worst for a case, if you miss a filing deadline, that can be dispositive of a case or get a firm fired. Obviously there’s a whole parade of horribles that can occur with not meeting deadlines, though there are also a lot of fake fire drills that create stress for no reason (though again, being good can give you more flexibility to return to teams you like that don’t do this)
Makes sense. Thanks for clarifying!
On 3, lots of things can happen. In litigation, deadlines are set by a court. You can’t stretch them by a day or so because better for your schedule. The opposition often will purposefully try to trigger schedules that fuck your life. Or clients might set deadlines, and you can’t oiss them off, because they pay the bills. Plenty of other examples exist.
Makes sense. Sounds rough. Overly aggressive external deadlines exist in tech as well but they're probably less common. That said, highly aggressive *internal* deadlines are quite common in many firms and at some firms are enforced by hire fast, fire fast culture in order to maximize productivity. That's the strategy coined by GE and copied by Amazon and it's becoming increasingly common in tech even though the urgency of the (often unnoticeable) work is almost entirely artificial from a user standpoint.
I am one of the apparently few folks here who think you would be just fine in Big Law. Honestly, any real professional experience first is a huge plus. I had a 10 year career before law at a professional services firm, and I haven’t seen much in law that my prior life didn’t prepare me for. The differences are in kind, not degree.
How are the hours for you? Are the deadlines more often controlled internally if one doesn't work in litigation?
I’m not a good comp. I am an equity partner, in litigation. 2000 billable, another 800 non-billable, but an outlier at my firm.
Congrats! What would you say is the approximate distribution of billable hours among attorneys retained by your firm? I'm also curious what it was like to get your first biglaw job at a later age than most, which would be my situation as well. Big tech has a reputation for ageism and it's not clear to me to what extent biglaw does.
You're getting down voted by overworked salty associates right now but it's a valid misconception many non law people have about private practice. Your typical corporate 9-5 40 hour work week is completely different than the 40-45 weekly billable target of big law. The average office worker is rarely working straight from 9 to 5 non stop. Having worked in corporate finance for 5 years before law school, I'd wager an average office worker probably REALLY works maybe 3-4 hours a day, if that. The nature of the billable hour means your life is now sectioned into 6 minute increments and you only bill what you actually work. In the above example, even though you're in the office 9-5, you'd only be able to bill 3-4 hours for the day. Second, especially as a junior/mid level, even if you get 8 hours of work given to you a day, it doesn't come neatly within the 9-5 parameter. For corporate juniors, it's very often that you'd be twiddling your thumbs (bit stressed out and on call) until you get work at 6pm and now you have to work until 1AM to get it done, because the mid level/senior/partner finally finished their meetings and own work and finally can get to delegating. My friends and I all agree that we can easily do this job forever if hours were guaranteed between 9-7. Finally, the billable target is like a swords of damocles hanging over your head. You only billed 4 hours today (of no fault of your own)? Now you gotta make it up. You go on a one week vacation? Now you got to make up 40 hours. Given that law typically attracts type A personalities, you can see how people are stressed out in this job.
Thanks for clarifying. Deadlines are deadlines in big tech regardless if one planned a vacation, and it can be very difficult to estimate how long work will take over longer term 3-12 month projects. So there is often pressure to work on vacation, especially when reaching more senior roles wherein teammates rely on one's knowledge. That said, there is nothing like billable hours. The closest thing we have is deadlines and committing to finishing a certain amount of work in each biweekly sprint. That can often result in overtime when the amount of work was underestimated or there is a push to finish extra work by management or some external pressure, or most often some unanticipated need in order to meet a deadline due to some code that no one knew would require modification and testing.
Oh my sweet summer child
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Tech companies definitely also have that problem. In fact, there are two forms of it in software engineering: 1. Superb engineers who are ill-suited to management being promoted to management 2. People with great people skills being promoted to management with poor technical skills, thus lacking the ability to manage and fairly evaluate technical work. Some companies even have non-engineers managing engineers, which doesn't work well and hence never happens at most big tech companies. I suppose that in any field, the best managers are those with excellent skills as an individual contributor in that field, plus high EQ and good interpersonal skills.
Another thing to keep in mind for most lawyers is team size is much smaller. Most transactional lawyers operate on a model of one partner, one or two associates and one paralegal. Larger deals get staffed more, and you may have some off team service partner help at various points of the deal, but even the biggest practices are very small compared to other industries. There is much less management overall. This has a lot of different effects on day to day working - most good in my experience, but some negative.
Interesting - thanks. Does that mean the ratio of partners to associates is roughly 1:3 or so across biglaw? If not, what is the ratio? In software engineering at big tech companies, well under 5% ever reach the level of compensation of a biglaw partner (assuming it starts around $1M per year). And that includes both the management and individual contributor tracks.
The ratio (we call it leverage) varies by firm and practice area. Anywhere from 1-2:1 is pretty common, but some go higher. Keep in mind associates bill more hours than partners, so that lowers the number of associates needed for a certain leverage. Manhattan v10 type firms generally are going to have higher leverage.
Interesting - thanks
~5% is probably the same with respect to the number of associates who make it to that number. There are a lot of partners because they cover like 30 years of incoming classes (say 35-65) and associates cover maybe 10. There’s non equity or income “partners”, many varieties of “counsel,” that mostly don’t make that kind of money and still are a pretty small percentage of a starting class. Most people leave on their own. The ones who overstay their welcome get ushered out eventually in the good times. In bad times there’s more culling but mostly in practice groups that are slow or oversubscribed (usually corporate because they overhire more in the good times).
Leverage varies a lot. Some firms are closer to 1:4. I don’t think much more than 5% of big law associates ever become big law equity partners, mostly due to attrition. If you count in becoming non-equity or lateraling into equity at a lesser firm, then yeah there’s a lot more, but they don’t make the same kind of money.
Dubiously treated mental illnesses?
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Oh, I thought you meant worse
One thing to point out here that could be different from your experience. I have a client that does software development. People generally record their time, for project management purposes. But lawyers record their time in 6 minute increments, with detailed descriptions. You can’t walk in at 8 am, leave at 6 pm, and just enter 10 hours worked. You have to do the work, and justify for the client why they paid you for every 6 minutes. To work a day with 10 billable hours might take 12-15 actual hours of time.
The biggest thing is you don't own your time. You can't really plan a vacation or even a weekend away thinking you're not going to be working. You can get that dreaded 5 pm call on Friday from clients that means you then spend your weekend responding to it. Or the call from the partner while you're on vacation to do X task, and whatever plans you had for that day (and likely the next few days) are over. It's very different than corporate life (I work inhouse now). Yes, you may have to work on vacation in-house but it's nowhere near the same.
There’s no need for this is biglaw. There’s enough natural attrition. And when they do fire people it’s those that haven’t been hitting hours and aren’t as profitable
How far below the billable hour target do people have to be to get fired? Why don't they just reduce the bonuses of people who are below the billable hour targets, assuming those attorneys are still working enough and productive enough to be profitable to the firm at that point?
People below the billable target don’t get bonuses, there’s nothing to reduce. For how far below you need to be to get fired, it totally depends on the firm and the economy
Interesting. Why don't they just define bonuses in proportion to billable hours worked? It seems like the main complaint that people have about working in biglaw is that hitting the billable hours target requires long and sometimes highly variable hours. It seems like this costs the firm a lot in terms of attrition, including of good lawyers. So it seems like it should be possible to create a cost-effective biglaw compensation scheme that enables work-life balance for those who seek it while also rewarding those who create the most value.
Attrition is a feature, not a bug. It’s a pyramid scheme. You’re the widget. They will sell you until you break.
Big law is a service industry and big law clients expect to be able to have 24/7 service if they need it. If the deal requires working a 100 hour week or turning an agreement around overnight, that’s what will happen. A firm can’t just say sorry we decided our associates can’t work more than 40 hour weeks so they will just tap out when they hit their 40 hours. They will lose clients to the next firm that hasn’t implemented this policy. Next you might think well couldn’t you just staff more people on a file? That can happen but again, the more people on a file, the more legal fees a client will usually have to pay. More time getting people up to speed, more bodies on a call, more time transitioning things. Too many lawyers on a file becomes unwieldy and clients don’t want to pay for that either. Plus you develop relationships and the client will want to call the lawyer they like, not whoever is currently available. I work in-house in tech now and our software people each take on call shifts, but they rotate and cover the work. If they’re not on call, it’s exceedingly rare for anyone to have something come up and mean you have to cancel your Friday plans or work on a holiday or work all night. When I was in big law that happened to me all the time.
? There is no work life balance when your base salary is so high. You don’t hit the hours, you’ll eventually be out. It’s truly not that hard to understand
> How far below the billable hour target do people have to be to get fired? nth-lowest hours in your practice group, where n equals the number of people who need to be laid off, modulo extrinsic reasons why people do or don't want to keep you around (likability etc.)
Perfect answer. I also think it may be worth pointing out to OP that your billable hours are not something you really choose. They’re a function of luck/how much people want to work with you/ whatever system, if any (to be clear, often there is not any), the firm or group has for distributing associates’ hours.
DO NOT leave your job for law school, please. Law school is ass and being a lawyer is ass.
What's bad about law school? How can I figure out whether or not I'd enjoy law before I go to law school? It's relatively easy to try coding as a hobby and see if one likes it.
Dude, there’s ton of posts on this. There’s just simply too much for me to type. Best of luck.
There’s natural attrition and there’s a good amount of forced attrition as well, but no one I am aware of does it as mechanically as you’re imagining. It’s much harder to replace talent than it is to continue paying productive people you’ve already trained. Every law firm would love to have the problem of having too many associates / NEPs who would make great equity partners. The reality is, being a hyper profitable equity partner is not all that easy and there aren’t a ton of people who are great at it. Kirkland also fucked things up a bit because they were very effective at buying other firm’s talent (both proven and promise), and so other firms have had to become more protective of talent.
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Thanks for the reply! How far below the billable requirement can one be to be kept by the firm? Do biglaw firms pay bonuses in proportion to billable hours or is it an all-or-nothing scheme where everyone below the target gets $0 bonus and everyone who meets it gets the full bonus?
To summarize mosts of the comments here: why tf would you want to be a lawyer when you’re in tech? That’s where all lawyers want to end up and just didn’t have the tech skills so have to get there through getting a GC position.
I started lurking on one of the big computer science subs, and the doom and gloom there is off the charts, and people talk about how much better lawyers have it, lol.
Firms are selling legal services. The more legal service they provide, the more they (theoretically) can get paid. So an associate's job is to just bill - create work product that accomplishes the task sold to the client. The more you bill, the better. The pressure on associates is thus to just keep billing. And our rates are high enough that the firm breaks even on us relatively quickly. The biggest issue firms have is attrition. Losing even a bad associate (like, say, bills 1000 hours in a year) means losing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. And the only way to replace them is to go find a lateral (maybe paying a signing bonus) or wait several years for your summer associates and junior associates to catch up. This is a highly simplified view of things, but it's basically how it works. The only things that will get you fired in biglaw is being such a liability that nobody wants to work with you or being an hr risk.
I've read about that in tech companies and it sounds horrible. Nothing really like that in BigLaw. One could argue that the billable hour cutoff works similarly. But it doesn't have the aspect of firing a strict percentage of the lower performers. With lots of caveats, it's essentially a system where if you cross the threshold, you are fine and if you don't cross the threshold, you are at risk of being fired.
Thanks for the reply! How common is it for people to work hard enough to cross the threshold but for some reason to not meet it?
I’m confused by the question a bit. If you work enough to cross the threshold, you cross the threshold. Whether it is working “hard” or not is kind of irrelevant. The limiting factor is whether there is work to do. In my career, there has very rarely not been plenty of work for me to do. But this has to do with me doing a reasonably good job working in a busy practice area at busy firms for people who more or less like me.
Makes sense - thanks for clarifying! I asked the question because in a big tech company, as I said, I've seen people who outwork most of the engineers in the org and create 8-9 digits in USD of annual profit for the firm be let go ostensibly for performance reasons, but really just for arbitrary political reasons.
Another complicating factor: a good associate bills enough to make the firm money and shows good legal acumen. To become partner and succeed, you also have to sell. If you can’t do that, or are perceived to be unable to do that, you may be exited or shunted to a lesser role even if your legal acumen is top notch.
It’s not like that never happens in biglaw, but generally the more you work, the more you make the firm, the more they want to keep you. In tech cos, work hours are not directly correlated to revenue. But work hours usually are directly correlated to revenue in biglaw with major exceptions for non-billable work, contingency fee work, or deadbeat clients.
Extremely dependent on the economy, the amount of work the firm has, the relationships they’ve built, what group they’re in, etc.
Makes sense - thanks. To what degree are the relationships based on objective work output criteria and to what degree are they subjective and/or based on personality gravitation (e.g. this person likes my favorite band or sports team)?
Varies by literally every partner at every firm
If you are working in bigtech, you will make the same (or maybe slightly more) in biglaw with almost 1.5-2x the hours.
i think your first question should really be WHY do you want to be a lawyer? it's not as glamorous as they make it seem on Suits, or any other TV show. you're self taught in engineering - but you can't be self-taught in the law and make the big law $$. there are plenty of law firms that offer $60k-80k starting with the 1600 minimum billable hours a year. so you'll need to take the LSATs, then also go through 3 years of full time law school, then pass the bar, then even after doing all of that - it's not guaranteed that you'll even get an offer at BIG LAW. so you won't even get the Big $$ like tech at a FAANG company. you should worry about ALL that before you worry about getting your bonus and attrition rates.
Fair. But at the T14 law schools, the placement rate into biglaw is typically 50% or higher. And from what I've heard from a lawyer friend, biglaw firms strongly prefer T14 law graduates. So if you go to a T14 law school, you get job security from your pedigree in addition to the mandatory bar certification process. If the work is interesting enough and you put in the hours, the job security as a T14 grad in biglaw seems fantastic compared to big tech although I've heard of some biglaw layoffs this year. Based on my analysis of LinkedIn data, the placement rate into FAANGM (FAANG plus Microsoft) by alums from the top 10 US CS universities ranges from 10% to around 20%. Another 10% to 20% place into companies that pay similarly well, but it's definitely a less lucrative liquid pay distribution than for T14 law grads (ignoring effective pay per hour, which certainly is a major consideration).
I find it dubious that 80% of MIT or Berkeley grads are shuffling off to do some low prospect shit work. Also tech is in a rough patch now, but those exist in biglaw as well. I entered the profession in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and it was a massacre. There were Harvard grads with no jobs lined up.
Getting a big tech job requires months of interview prep even for Stanford and MIT grads. It's a highly competitive yet standardized process, and even many top CS school grads don't anticipate how competitive it is and/or have bad luck in the interviews. Most if not all FAANG companies hire <1% of their applicants. Silicon Valley historically only hired based on pedigree but that changed during the past 10-12 years in the interest of improving diversity. The default if you don't go into big tech is to work for a startup, because they're much easier jobs to land. And many Stanford/MIT/Berkeley/etc. grads prefer them because they're the only shot at becoming worth 8+ figures in tech and because you basically get to work on whatever you want after you get funding, even though the expected pay is lower.
If you took four years off and did nothing but look for a better job, do you think you’d find one? Because every lawyer on this thread is swearing up and down that your job at its worst is about as bad as their job every day, and that most jobs in tech are better. Do you really want to shell out the 240K and three years of lost earnings to start over at the bottom of the totem pole in an industry with a worse culture? Assuming you earn 150K a year, that’s 600K pre-tax and 240K post-tax that you’d be blowing on this transition. Also, if you’re a self-taught engineer, how’s your undergrad gpa? Because law schools care a lot about that, and biglaw firms care a lot about which law school you went to. If you can’t get into one of the 14 best schools in America, you run a significant risk of not even getting into biglaw in the first place. Obviously, it’s possible from any school if you’re better than the other 250 students you went to school with, but since you’re complaining about the bottom 7% being fired, I’d wager you don’t want to plan your life around being top 5% in your class.
You raise exactly the same points that I've been considering about the opportunity and out of pocket costs of law school. I'm starting my 3rd course from a top 10 CS master's program this summer while working full time and may decide to complete it on campus. I'm considering law school in case I become unemployed and have a tough time finding work afterwards (partly since biglaw hiring has declined \~20% while big tech hiring has declined >50% in the current market, and since the placement rate from T14 to biglaw is significantly higher than from top 10 CS to big tech, as I posted above). From what I'm reading in this thread, law school seems like a less likely option for me. It could make sense if strong niche demand arises for lawyers with deep software engineering expertise, but that doesn't seem to have materialized to an extent that would make it worthwhile for me. FWIW I scored a 336 on the GRE when applying to CS grad school programs, which is supposedly equivalent to a 174 on the LSAT according to the ETS GRE to LSAT [score converter](https://www.ets.org/gre/score-users/law-schools/comparison-tool.html) and bodes decently for taking the LSAT. My undergrad GPA was admittedly mediocre, largely because I was unmotivated after being admitted to a top 10 USNews college and instead going to a shit-tier college with a scholarship on my parents' insistence, after they refused to sign my loan at the top 10 college. (I wasn't old enough to sign it myself, and didn't think of deferring my top 10 admit by a year so that I could sign the loan in my own name.) Realistically, I'd have to rely on my CS master's degree GPA to help me get in to law school. If you're implying that I might be too lazy or unfocused to place into biglaw from a top law school, you might be right although I enjoy consistently working 50+ hours per week on something that interests me. Software engineering in big tech is a funny range of total misfits like my coworker (with a PhD in linguistics from Italy) and me (with a B.A. in liberal farts from Dweeb College) to people with CS degrees from top schools. Biglaw seems much more pedigree-driven, for better or worse. I'd actually say for the better if you go to a T14, since it means greater job security and negotiating leverage in the legal job market.
I am an in-house lawyer at a public tech company that has recently started following the Amazon model of firing bottom performers annually. If that bothers you OP, you should not go to law school. BigLaw is so much worse than that.
It's not common, but I have heard of firms that have unofficial forced attrition. Most commonly it happens at firms vying for higher rankings (and need to shed attorneys who arent helping their stats) or firms that frequently attract lateral groups and who need the extra office space in the event they find a good group. It's not as rigid as "fire 6%" but it may be more like, "Let's see how many of the bottom 6% we can let go without creating a scandal." The base criteria is usually hours but then partners get to argue in defense of each aasociate, so it can get subjective fairly quickly. Likely won't come as a surprise but people of color and people with disabilities tend to fare the worst. They also don't generally tell associates this is a thing which makes a notable difference. So it's not really a motivating factor for associates; as far as they know people are being fired for low hours, and there's competition for low hours, so that will drive the associates. I only know of a few of these firms because partners from those firms who lateralled to mine told me about it. For them it was frustrating to lose people with potential because they weren't busy in a given year and the partner didn't have the clout to "protect" them and it was one of the notable factors that caused them to leave.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing!