Best part of working in big law — not the comp.

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At some firms, autonomy. I can work from home for a day if I need to. I can go to a doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day when necessary. Obviously some firms are full of micromanagers but my group gives me a lot of autonomy to do what I want as long as I’m responsive and doing good work.

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Honestly, I’ll throw in a slightly sappy response —I grew up with parents and family members in jobs that required a lot of physical and manual work. I take for granted how convenient and nice it is to work in front of a desk, in nice clean clothes, doing non-manual labor.

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Sorry, I should have clarified — my post was in no way meant to disparage those jobs! Plenty of people love them and I very much respect those workers! What I meant was like my dad worked in a factory as a machinist because he really didn’t have many other options as an immigrant with a college degree here. He did extremely well for himself, but he often complained about the dust and noise, etc, including some things that were actually potential health hazards. Same goes for a lot of the men in my family. My mom used to clean houses when we first moved to the states. They always dreamed of me having a “better” job and living the life of the people they worked for. These are 100% respectable jobs, but I just know many of my family members would have killed to have a job like being a lawyer. They just unfortunately didn’t have the means of getting that education themselves.

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*crickets*

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I can disappear for a morning or afternoon and no one will come after me

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Working with smart people on hard problems.

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To the SA who laughed, your firm must not put you on the hard problems or with the smart people. 😕

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*as compared to midlaw* resources to help you do your job - doc processing at almost all hours, research librarians, memberships to westlaw, etc.

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Yikes! Sorry A11, that really sucks

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24 hr tech support. They are the real MVPs of middle of the night IT issues.

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Based on what I see from in-house types, not having to be in a constant stream of meetings and internal obsequiousness and CYA. Not worrying that my job will be moved somewhere or eliminated if a new GC is hired or my company doesn’t do well or is acquired. More generally, subject to substantial demands, of course, a great deal of control over what I want to do, where, and with whom. There are some colleagues I like more than others, but unlike in-house gigs, my life won’t be completely ruined by one asshole boss. Sophisticated work.

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It is to an extent but it is taken up several notches in-house in my experience. I barely do any (blatant) internal CYA.

I like (1) having basically unlimited access to all the best legal resources and (2) firms’ willingness to shell out for things (nice events and dinners before COVID, personal wifi devices, cell phone bills, sports tickets, gym memberships, MTA stipends, etc.)

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Also free Ubers and work dinners when we work late…and limitless coffee!

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Unlimited access to resources, occassional bragging rights, availability of men who are easy on the eyes even though I can't have them, quality and quantity of good transactions

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LOL dead

Not a huge fear of being fired. It happens, but I’ve seen way more people quit than ever be fired. Firing seems to be pretty infrequent, or at least they keep it quiet at my firm.

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Not having to spend too much time with family members who annoy you, or even those who don't, because billables come first... 🙄

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It gives me a good excuse to avoid too much time with my in laws hahaha

Precedents! So many good precedents.

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It’s nice to work with smart hardworking people. It’s fun to learn a high-level version of your clients’ job/business. In litigation, big stakes make the trial outcome more exciting.

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I have the bi-coastal practice I always thought was pure fantasy.

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Both, though mostly creditor work these days, including preference defense (our prospective debtor clients keep managing to pull a rabbit out of a hat and avoid filing). I was previously at a boutique where the bulk of my work was bankruptcy trustee representation and that was exclusively in NY. Now I’m literally all over the country, but mostly NY and CA.

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The potential for learning and working with some of the top lawyers in my field. I enjoy the learning process, which helps the long hours go by

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Flexibility

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Learning to call out C-suite executives when they’re full of crap

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