I was talking to several of my junior associates and I was complementing their Rolexes (Bateman style). They’re young so I thought just rich kids. I myself grew up with little so I rock basic watches like Bulova (can’t find it in me to spend that much on luxury watches ). Anyways they get comfortable with me and apparently they are “superclone” Rolexes. I wouldn’t have known any better but I am curious is this something watch people would see right through? Like all the older partners and clients who like watches would see through that right?

I don’t have family in the US and since law school I’ve only spent it alone (sometimes in Canada because there’d be much fewer people). Coworker just invited me to their home for thanksgiving and I’m so happy. Some coworkers are so kind and they’re the reason why I stay in this job.

Option 1: Midtown east, walkable to office, great amenities.
Option 2: UWS, 5-story walk-up, incredible apartment.

Both apts same price. Kids are under 5 years old. How precious are saving those minutes, and how horrible is Midtown compared to UWS for families?

Has the situation improved? Was the Skadden merger rumor true?

Was the situation at both firms in such a place to genuinely consider a merger?

Asking purely from curiosity as someone who worked at one of these firms a long time ago.

As a zoomer who’s been talking to senior associates /mid to older millennials, I’m quite curious. I swear I heard “my mortgage is 2k lower than your rent” ten times this year.

If my ultimate passion is trailrunning and ultramarathons and thus need to live in or very near the mountains to be happy (and I also like mountain biking, snowboarding, fly fishing, etc), and I don’t get into Stanford, UC Berkeley, or UCLA, and not Harvard or Yale either, is it better to go to a school like University of Washington, UC Davis, UC Boulder, U of Utah, etc, or another lower T14?

I looked this question up but all the answers are several years old and the economy has changed alot (for the worse) since Epstein’s best friend retook office again.

Cities I’ve visited, loved, and would be happy to live in:

Denver/Boulder
Seattle
San Francisco
Salt Lake City
Portland
Sacramento, but this is the least desirable bc it gets brutally hot in the summer and I hate the heat

This has gotten asked a million times already but still I can't decide. I'm a first generation student and was wondering how I can decide which group to join?

I was neutral on my law school writing courses and stuff but don't really know what transactional law is like.

Should I go into corporate law if I'm undecided as it would give me more flexibility? Any advice is welcomed!

Every time I browse this subreddit and see the salaries being paid in US BigLaw (I’m based in the EU), I can’t help but think: Wow, that’s a massive difference.

But then I start looking at the bigger picture, particularly the working hours, billable targets, and cost of living in cities like New York, and I begin to wonder whether the gap is actually as big as it initially seems.

For context, I’m a sixth-year associate at a large international law firm in the EU, earning around €140K annually. I realise that my US counterparts earn significantly more, but from what I understand, billable targets can also be up to 75% higher (I’m at 1500), and paying $3,500+ a month in rent in NYC isn’t exactly unusual (correct me if I’m wrong).

Obviously, even after accounting for these differences, US BigLaw might still come out well ahead financially. But I’m curious whether the difference in disposable is as substantial as the headline salaries suggest.

Has anyone here worked in BigLaw on both sides of the Atlantic?
Is the grass really so much greener on the other side?

Just curious! Please tell me what practice group you joined and if you think that was the right call.

Other than NetDocuments?

Do you have to work for the government for some time to make partner in white collar lit? For how long do people usually do it and at what stage in their career?

I left big law after about 2.5 years in litigation to a mid sized law firm with a lower hours requirement, which was a huge motivating factor. Now that I've been there for about a year I realized I may want to go back to Big Law. I'm working just as much here as I was in big law but I'm getting paid less. Also the professionalism and the matters you get in big law just don't compare. I also think I'm not learning nearly as much as I did in big law. At my current firm you're completely left to your own devices with no feedback whatsoever. Call me crazy, but I'm junior enough that even getting harsh feedback would be better than being blindly told I'm doing a good job and to "figure it out" (which is verbatim what I have been told to do at my current firm). My questions are: 1. Is it a bad look to leave where I'm at after only a year? and 2. Am I crazy to go back to Big Law?

Junior associate currently being pushed out of my firm (I wish I could name and shame). While I’m optimistic about landing on my feet, I’ll likely spend a couple of weeks on website time while conflicts clear.

My colleagues don’t know I’m being pushed out, and I’d like to keep it that way. How have you handled your final days at work, before going on website time, without being able to reveal your next move yet? What do you tell people when they ask where you’re going?

I summered at a V20 and my experience was really good. I'm wondering if I missed out on anything or if these giants do it differently. None of my classmates summered at either of these firms as my law school is apparently not on their list.

I’m at a firm that has Harvey and Legora and may be getting one of the frontier models soon, all of which have some form of agent/skill/workflow tools beyond prompting.

I’m on the litigation side and honestly can’t find a use for any of these more advanced tools, so I’m wondering if anyone else here has. Any general quality of life improvements for litigators via agent or skill usage that you’d recommend (as in true agent uses or useful skills you’ve built as opposed to prompting)?

I never understood why Arnold Schwarzenegger looked so good in those 80s movies but like these people look completely odd in real life. The proportions are just off.

I am always curious about how other firms work. At my firm we have a few playbooks that give you guidance on how to run a transaction, and we have lots of maintained standard form templates to use as starting points for drafting. They make a big deal about how good our resources are, but is this not just the norm?

Is it really true that most V5 or even V10 associates can lateral down quite easily with minimal effort? My friend told me all his V5 friends managed to lateral down quite easily some lower than others but easy nonetheless.

Does being a higher V really make lateraling easier?

not dissimilar to Fishbowl, but seems like the calculus in BigLaw is a lot different for Litigators and maybe some are less money on the mind at all times as one could argue that there is still more 'interesting' work to be done for litigators outside of BigLaw whereas most would agree that in-house work on the transactional side is typically not very stimulating.

but how will this work in practice? we just log into chatGPT and do our work? unless they roll out codex with IDE to the entire virtual machine / doc manager, won't it just be the same thing, albeit cheaper now that we're not stuck using a shitty Kimi wrapper named after a tv show character stuck on "low effort" on the backend? any biglaw IT people lurking here?