<p>how difficult is it to get a 50-55 hour a week job? </p>
<p>I’d be willing to take a hit in the salary. maybe 65k-70k a year.</p>
<p>how difficult would it be to get a job like that, in a larger metropolitan area (i’d be willing to work in the burbs)</p>
<p>Anyone expressing major concerns about high numbers hours in law firms and weekends off etc - shouldn’t be going to law school in the first place</p>
<p>Law school is about enjoying the reasoning process and so forth - and maybe combine careers like accounting and law or some other finance profession or something else -which will make it more viable</p>
<p>Some people like what they see and in that old movie the PAPER CHASE and some don’t - you have to consider law school an adventure</p>
<p>Here is the deal. Being a lawyer in any kind of private law firm – small or large, small city or big city – means that you are in a client service industry. When a client makes a demand, no matter how unresonable, you respond by working, writing, researching and doing whatever it is that you have to do to provide your client with the results that they have demanded by the time the client demanded them. That’s all there is to it. A client says jump and you simply ask how high. That’s why your weekends and evenings are not and will never be completely your own. This is the reality.</p>
<p>Are there some jobs out there that are very nine to five? Maybe – at least so I hear. I suppose that you would be more likely to find this work working for the government or working in the public interest. However, I sure don’t know any attorney, including those who work for the government and in the public interest, who never has to make sacrifices for work. Every attorney I know at least sometimes cancels plans, gives up evenings and works on the weekend. It doesn’t matter how little you are being paid. You will always have a client as an attorney – whether that client is the state or a low income criminal defendant or a big high powered corporation. </p>
<p>If you can’t handle the unpredictability and hard work, neither law nor any other customer service oriented field of work may be for you.</p>
<p>This is indeed intended as a reality check.</p>
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<p>it often depends on what you are working on at a given time. i worked at two different law firms – neither one a big nyc firm – and weekend work was not infrequent, but also not always predictable. some associates came in to do work over the weekends to spread their work out from the week – other times, work on the weekend was necessitated by the demands of the projects being worked on at the time. and it was not unheard of for weekend plans to have to be cancelled at a moment’s notice because a partner came to you on friday with work that had to be done by monday. </p>
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<p>again – just always remember the difference between billable hours versus hours at the office (ie what most regular people might consider hours of work). in order to “bill” 70 hours in a given week you can end up being at the office much longer.</p>
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<p>it depends entirely on the nature of the practice. if you attend a top law school many of the law firms who will recruit from your school will be the ones that expect higher hours. smaller firms where the hours may be less tend to hire fewer new associates, and sometimes do not hire attorneys straight out of law school. in addition, even if they are hiring new associates, they are less likely to participate in the formal law school interviewing process or to make their hiring decisions on the same timetable as the larger firms. at top law schools, students generally know where they will be working by the fall-winter of third year (at the earlier end if they plan to return to where they worked their second summer, at the later end if they go thru the fall interview process).</p>
<p>there is an enormous pressure to go to work for one of those big firms because those are the active recruiters that all your classmates are trying to work for and that are actively engaged in the law school recruitment process. it is not easy to sit thru the recruitment process waiting for that smaller firm job while those around you are accepting the big firm offers.</p>
<p>i imagine there may be cities where the hours tend to be “better.” – though most classmates of mine who worked in many different major cities all had to deal with long hours - so no such city jumps to my mind.</p>
<p>personally – i made a concerted effort to work at firms that “advertised” themselves as not being like those big nyc firms. the first was a small branch office of a larger firm where, during the recruitment process i was assured attorneys had time for their personal lives. i missed thanksgiving with family one year to work on documentation for a deal that never closed. the next firm i worked for was a small suburban firm where all the attorneys claimed to work so that they could avoid the big city practice – the hours were even worse than at my first firm.</p>
<p>there may be firms out there where you can work a balanced 50-55 hours a week (again, watch out for the difference between billable vs. hours in the office – 50-55 hours of billable time will still be a fairly high number of in-office hours) – but it may not be easy to find them, especially as a new associate. part of the problem in locating such a place is that when you ask the lawyers about their hours, they may well believe their hours aren’t that bad because they are so much better than what they might be at a larger nyc firm – but you have to ask a lot of follow up questions as to what exactly that means in terms of when they are at the office, when they are called at home, when vacations have to be cancelled – and unfortunately, i think a recruit who asks too many such questions risks being viewed as not being a worthwhile employement candidate.</p>
<p>That was a great post by unbelievablem, who also pointed out a very significant issue – candidates who ask too many questions about hours, weekends and “lifestyle” will often be viewed unfavorably in the hiring process (I know that they have been everywhere I have ever worked). The perception is that these candidates will not be willing to do what it takes to serve clients to the best of their abilities.</p>
<p>Law and medical shows on TV to a large extent have created a false reality - which of course is the nature of dramatic license, and w/o that they would lose viewers</p>
<p>Personally I believe probably 60 to 70% of undergrads at major colleges (except for hard core engineering types) either have some interest in being either a lawyer or a medical doctor</p>
<p>However, since most people lack the capability of being a medical doctor, being a lawyer (for whatever reason) is probably the next best thing in terms of just plain challenging a person’s intellect.</p>
<p>Imagine for example if the profession of law really were like the David E Kelley television productions L.A. LAW or ALLY MacBEAL, people just standing around all day talking about their personal problems, tort (damage suit) defendants folding like a house of cards with million dollar settlements within days of a case being filed, endlessly interesting legal cases, overtime consisting of night clubbing, billable hours being magically produced, dancing to Barry White half the day - that would actually be amazing</p>
<p>good responses. </p>
<p>are you guys taking account “mom and pop” law offices? </p>
<p>my experience in a rural environent is that the attorneys do actually work 9 hour days. they never work a minute after 5.</p>
<p>I got this from US Bureau of labor. I think if your willing to take a cut in salary and prestige, and move to wierd rural places or work in government, there are jobs that offer more reasonable hours (below 65). </p>
<p>“Lawyers often work long hours, and of those who regularly work full time, about half work 50 hours or more per week. They may face particularly heavy pressure when a case is being tried. Preparation for court includes keeping abreast of the latest laws and judicial decisions.”</p>
<p>Often, solo practitioners and lawyers working for very small law firms can also work long and/or unpredictable hours. </p>
<p>I’ll give you an actual, current example. I am currently working on a deal that involves a smaller company in the midwesst that decided to hire a local solo practitioner to represent them. Though it certainly seems that this gentleman is generally accustomed to getting in at 8:30 a.m. and leaving by 6:30 p.m. or so, he worked until well past 11 p.m. last Friday and through the weekend in order to prepare for the closing of our deal at the end of the month. Mind you, in this deal, I have done all of the drafting and heavy lifting – all this lawyer has to do is review documents and get his client to sign off on them. It all takes time, though, and being an attorney requires taking whatever time is necessary to cross your t’s and dot your i’s. </p>
<p>While it is true that the large law firms are certainly guilty of having hundreds of associate attorneys working very long hours on a regular basis, working those kinds of hours is not limited to the big firms. As unbelieveablem pointed out earlier, often it is the firms/employers who preach the most and the loudest to candidates about “work/life balance” and “lifestyle” that, in the end, require you to work the most. Particularly as a junior lawyer (meaning for the first five or six years out of law school), you won’t have much choice in terms of your hours. In fact, in many cases, if you take those jobs where you won’t have to work “too hard” right out of law school, you may cut yourself off from many later opportunities because you won’t have the amount of experience that many of your peers have a year or two or three down the line. </p>
<p>Client service is the name of the game. Sometimes, you just have to do whatever is necessary for your clients. </p>
<p>Again, this is a snapshot of reality. Be an educated consumer, because law school is certainly expensive enough to warrant it. Know what you are getting into. If you still aren’t sure, take a year or two off after college and go to work at a law firm as a paralegal (most of the big firms have significant programs where they hire recent college grads to work as paralegals for a year or two before law school).</p>
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<p>as sally has articulated, bottomline, law is a service industry. the demands of your practice are the demands of you clients. fewer, less demanding clients can well mean fewer less demanding hours – but whoever the client and whatever the demands, it is your job as an attorney to meet them. </p>
<p>the type of small rural practice where the lawyers never/rarely work past 5 pm may exist – and if having seen that, you feel that this is truly the type of practice you want, great. but i’ll throw out some things for you to think about:</p>
<p>1) how long had the lawyers who always left by 5 pm been in practice? how long did it take them to be able to earn their livelihood at that type of practice?</p>
<p>2) how involved did they have to be in the day to day operations of the law firm as a business – ie, making sure clients got billed and paid their bills, deciding what photocopier to buy, figuring out how cash flow would cover the rent and electric bill?</p>
<p>3) how dependant were they on their personal relationships with their clients? could a new-comer to town expect to enjoy the same type of clientele?</p>
<p>4) if you go to a top law school, this type of career goal will be seriously questioned and doubted – are you committed enough to not let that bother you?</p>
<p>5) little you learn at a top law school will actually prepare you for legal practice – will you have the opportunity at your desired small rural firm to learn on the job? will the structure of the firm support it? will the clients paying the bills tolerate it?</p>
<p>6) is the nature of the practice at such a firm what is attracting you to the law? some people want to become lawyers so that they can work on big deals, cutting edge legal arguments, etc. for others, helping people with the everyday legal affairs of life is what is appealing. those are two very different types of practices. What is pulling you to the legal field? </p>
<p>7) whatever the nature of the practice, some lawyers will approach things as if most things are routine, others will feel a need to question everything and accept nothing as routine – which type of approach do you see yourself taking – if the latter, expect to put in more hours than if the former.</p>
<p>i am not saying that there are any right or wrong answers to these questions. just that there are questions for you to consider.</p>
<p>the fact that you had the opportunity to see such a practice first hand puts you in a much better position to judge whether that is a career path for you than someone who merely knows they want to avoid a big firm practice. the more you can learn about different types of practices the better position to judge for yourself why you want to be a lawyer and what type of lawyer you want to be.</p>
<p>hate to throw this out, but one more mundane thing to consider – what type of law school debt can be handled if one ends up working at such a smaller firm?</p>
<p>really interesting responses. </p>
<p>my experience at a smaller practice showed me many of the stresses that you mentioned in your post. </p>
<p>one attorney lost a client, which will directly affect his income. </p>
<p>so yeah, there are definitely pluses and minuses.</p>
<p>I understand the pressures but 100 hours PER WEEK is insane and I refuse to believe anyone can function by working 20 hours a day. Billing 70 hours a week would account to around 3300 billable hours a year (considering vacation and holidays). Why so many? Is this for a person who is trying to achieve partner in a couple of years? Why so much when most firms only require 2000? I understand that one must be respectable but 3300 is far beyond that.</p>
<p>I would consider 2100-2200 to be respectable. Now consider this
2100/ 47 (weeks in a year after vacation and holidays)= 45 hours a week</p>
<p>Now lets say that you spend 3-4 hours a day doing non-billable work and now we end up with 60-65 hours a week. Is this even reasonable to consider? Or am I crazy? </p>
<p>Please before you answer know that I realize hard work, my dad works 70-80 hours a week but the talk going around of 90-100 hours PER week is crazy to me.</p>
<p>I’ve definitely worked 100+ hour weeks in my career – and I’ve worked too many of them to count. There are plenty of times when I’ve gone to work on a Monday morning, pulled an all nighter, gone home at some point Tuesday afternoon to take a shower and change clothes and headed straight back into the office to pull another all nighter. Maybe you get some sleep Wednesday afternoon. You will be back in the office bright and early Thursday morning for another all nighter, followed by a full day of work on Friday, then all day and evening Saturday and Sunday in the office. It happens and it is very real. I have billed just under 3000 hours a year three times in my career (my first, second and fourth years out of law school – and those were some rough years, I might add). It just happens, and it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with trying to make partner. You do what you are told to do if you want to keep your job. Typically, when you’re working crazy hours like that, you are surrounded by other attorneys working crazy hours like that too, so it can actually begin to seem normal at some point. It is certainly expected. The “I already have weekend plans” or “It’s my anniversary and we have dinner reservations for 7:30” excuses won’t be persuasive to many. </p>
<p>I don’t know where you came up with the idea that most big firms require 2000 billable hours a year, but that is just not true. Many firms have no stated billable hours requirements (for those who care, this includes Wachtell, Cravath, S&C). Other firms have billable hours requirements, but the majority that do have billable hour requirements of 2200-2400 at a minimum. That said, it’s usually easy to hit those requirements (at least in a good economy) because there is typically more than enough work to go around. The cautionary tale for the young attorney who is not working enough to hurdle these targets is that people are not choosing to bring that attorney in on their projects, or that the attorney’s chosen practice area is slow. Lay-offs are not uncommon in recent years, and an out-of-work junior lawyer is going to have a tough time finding another job and paying off those student loans. I’ve seen it happen again and again.</p>
<p>If anyone thinks that the above is crazy, unthinkable, horrendous and un-doable, please know that this is not uncommon in big law firm life, even if it occurs only occasionally for some. You don’t get paid six figures right out of law school to put your friends, your hobbies, your sports teams and your family first.</p>
<p>^I don’t think that’s crazy. I feel it’s expected every once in a while. But people here are making it sound like 100 hours work weeks happen every week. </p>
<p>I got the 2000 number from looking at different firms on NALPdirectory.com. Please note that all these firms were in Chicago so that might make a difference since I’m sure other markets like New York and D.C. are just as demanding if not much more.</p>
<p>What kind of quality of life can you expect by working 100hr/week, and doing that for several years? I guess marriage, family life, and downtimes are nonexistence? Sally, how did you manage to remain sane and not be burned out working that much for that long of period of time? If you made partner with those hours, then it might seemed worth it, but what if you didnt? Where can you go for another job, another firm and then start the whole process all over again?</p>
<p>At my public interest job, attorneys who earn under $50,000 a year routinely work from 9-7 or 8pm and often work all day Sats and then some in the eves.
Many of them work at other jobs to try to pay off their tuition bills! Why do they do it? Because they are idealistic, enjoy working with compassionate and non-competitive types and love their clients. Please do not go into law because you cannot think of anything else to do and you think it sounds impressive or cool. You will be sorely disappointed and probably not very affluent to boot.
In my experience, if you are very competitive, bright and industrious and have good political skills, you can succeed and enjoy firm life; if you are very industrious, idealistic and happy being middle middle class, you will enjoy public interest law.</p>
<p>^That is certainly true. From talking to some friends, you must be really DEDICATED to do public interest. They work for little pay yet many still do very long hours to boot.</p>
<p>a 70 hour work week RIGHT OUT of law school, and 10 years after, sounds exciting to me right now, in a wierd kind of way.</p>
<p>but working 70 hours a week when i’m 50 and raising a family doesn’t seem quite as appealing.</p>
<p>Quality of life? Well, I guess that that’s really a relative concept, isn’t it?</p>
<p>Working as an attorney, for the first time in my life, I actually had some disposable income. I was able to pay off my enormous student loans in half of the time allotted, I bought one home and then another, I bought a car for cash and I have been able to put away a good sum of money for retirement. I can afford to take vacations that I once only dreamed about. In that sense, the quality of my life is fantastic. No, I’m not wealthy, but I am very comfortable, and I feel that I am living the American dream by doing so much better than my parents and grandparents before me. </p>
<p>Marriage and family life? Friends? Downtime? Those all definitely take a beating at times, but I’ve always been someone who makes much more of my time when I am busy than when I am not – efficiency, I guess you would call it. I rarely sit around watching TV and I rarely sleep really late on a day off. I make the most of the time that I have. Yes, I have definitely lost some friends along the way who were not able to understand the unpredictable nature of my job and the constraints that it placed on me. I think that you often find that lawyers working these kinds of hours often don’t settle down, get married and start families until they are 30 or later. In fact, if you look around at professionals (I’m thinking of lawyers, bankers, accountants, and people working in many other fields that require long hours (which, today, is quite a number of them)), especially in big cities, you will find that a large percentage of these professionals do indeed get married later and start families later than the traditional American model. Actually, the statistics show that in the last thirty years, the average age of first time moms has risen from 22 to 28. That’s significant, and I have to believe that it has something to do with women having more opportunities to begin careers. </p>
<p>Working parents (unfortunately, Moms especially) definitely have a tough road working as attorneys. Can you say nanny? Many take themselves off of the partnership track at law firms to work part time (not usually available until you have worked at a firm for several years first). The so-called “Mommy Track” works out for some and not for others. Oh, and keep in mind, too, that part time in a law firm usually means 30-40 hours a week, sometimes worked over the course of three days, perhaps with one day working from home, and comes with a big pay cut. It is definitely a tough road.</p>
<p>As for getting burned out, it definitely happens. Many people leave the practice of law at some point for just that reason. Others make a change – finding jobs that require fewer hours (though not infrequently the attorneys who make that change are disappointed that the job actually ends up requiring more hours than expected), going “in house” (though that is not the great utopia that it once was considered to be, and you take a huge pay cut to do it) or by becoming a contract lawyer, working whenever there is work to be done. I definitely feel that I have been exhausted and stressed out at times, but then I take a vacation, start a new deal and somehow find myself refreshed and renewed. That’s probably why I’ve been able to survive in this career so far. I am so grateful to have a job that challenges me every day – sometimes too much! 
I would much rather be an attorney, though, than have a job that is slow and boring and repetitive, where I had to count the minutes until the day would be over. </p>
<p>I hope that that helps to answer your questions.</p>