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Any Spotify people here? Noticed there’s an AM role going at the moment in the UK but not sure what experience level it is. For reference I’ve got 6 years in ad sales experience with 3 years management (both in music industry). Would this be comfortable or is it worth holding out for AD?
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How hard is the path from lit to GC?
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On balance, easier to bill especially on a big mega transactional deal that is not especially fee sensitive. Open laptop -> bill all day -> close laptop.
Transactional 100%.
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Best case scenario is to be in a practice in which bills are rarely, if ever, scrutinized by a court and/or potentially need court approval.
I have worked in small and big law and have been close with litigators and transactional attorneys at both.
From everything I have heard and experienced, seems like transactional is easier to bill.
Transactional. A lot of calls where you don't have a very active role, even as a midlevel or senior associate.
Definitely litigation, especially if a trial is going on.
When busy, transactional, but the issue is transactional has more days where you have like 1 hour
Transactional. Calls, emails, and a ton of ancillary stuff you have to read and understand but is not active work.
I think there are more “easy” hours available in litigation since there always seems to be more documents that need review or standard discovery requests to just duplicate. Transactional work requires a lot of brain power and I start to feel exhausted after negotiating and drafting for 6-7 hours straight. I am rarely on calls that I am not leading or speaking on, so my experience is not similar to the above comments. It’s hard to pick up a whole new project after 6-7 hrs of drafting without risking errors. Unlike doc reviews, the easier transactional work (like document formatting) is expected to be delegated to admin staff. I have actually done both—started in lit and pivoted to transactional.
I’ve done due diligence before. Through I was looking for more than just change of control—usually had to analyze termination rights and chart out when each one expired/renewed. In some cases there were dozens of amendments and assignments with different entities that had to be reconciled. You also risk malpractice if you are wrong in your diligence memo, so you can’t be asleep at the wheel. For that reason, I still think those tasks require a level of brain power than can be more draining than clicking “next” through irrelevant docs on a doc review platform. I haven’t done doc review in years though, so it is possible AI has streamlined this process a bit.
There were some days in litigation where I just sat in a mediation for 8 hours. I also had to travel more, so we would bill for flights or simply commuting to a courthouse or meeting. There are plenty of difficult tasks in lit as well, I just think there are more opportunities to rack up easy hours that don’t require a lot of critical thinking. Whether the client actually pays for them is a whole other discussion though.
I think it depends on what level you’re at. I’m a junior transactional associate and the junior litigation associates have way more billable work than I do. Whereas the transactional partners are always busy but not delegating that well
That’s because M&A is slow right now and the partners are hoarding work. In better times, there is plenty of transactional work to go around.
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I honestly always presumed litigator but these comments are giving me pause.