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Century city > Downtown
Anyone's firm hiring in LA?
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In terms of work/life culture, most firms/offices in LA are probably going to be a step up from NY.
Bingo
Depends on what you’re going for.
As a general rule, the LA office of a national firm will be less intense than the NY office of that same firm, with wide variation between practice groups. This is the general trend at firms that have their national headquarters elsewhere (such as Sidley, MoFo, Perkins Coie, K&E). It is even more pronounced at firms headquartered in NYC. National firms with their headquarters in LA (e.g., Gibson, Latham) will have the HQ-effect where this is less true (and again, subject to practice group variation).
Smaller boutique-y firms that are still corporate shops but don’t necessarily have the same national reach (Irell, Munger, Hueston Hennigan, etc.) have unique cultures that may not fit the traditional mold, are nevertheless intense, but still have a particular vibe that many that work there like.
Honestly, hard to generalize without a sense of the types of places you’d be interested and your preferred practice group. Some work (e.g, securities, funds) doesn’t exist in the same way out here so that is another dynamic to consider.
I’m an ex-NYer and love it here. Better quality of life. That said, the traffic is gawd awful and there’s rarely an equivalent to summer (early out) Fridays in LA. Few young people have beach houses (in fact, few people in general do) and no one here gets the concept of summer shares.