Do you ever feel like this job wastes our brains when we are at the associate stage? It would be nice to be able to do some business development

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Yeah but you’re effectively a secretary circulating dial ins and earning $215K. What’s not ti like

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Yes but it's a really good dial in

Lol what. The “associate stage” lasts for like 8+ years. I use my brain (a lot, it’s exhausting) everyday and every client interaction is “business development”.

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Yeah entirely

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15 hour days, Junior status

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I remember being a junior and midlevel and knowing so much more than seniors, and aspiring to take over the world. With the benefit of time and perspective, I realized that even though I was smart, hard-working, and knowledgeable on many issues (knowing more than the seniors and partners about various things, and even being better than them at some things, and not just having felt that way like nearly every associate feels, similar how every teenager and every college freshman who has taken some survey classes believes they are so much more informed and intelligent than their parents), that there are layers of considerations that go well beyond being smart, ambitious, and whatever other attributes one associates with being a good business developer that made my views at the time of thinking I could have pulled in major clients on my own, or executing other plans I had at the time, range from suffering from a lack of perspective all the way up to, in retrospect, cringeworthy with the benefit of time and hindsight. This isn’t so much because I now am smarter, more driven, smoother, or more experienced. It is more about clients’ expectations and the realities of pulling in legit biglaw clients. Looking back, I thought I could pull in major clients, but seeing how things really happen, I was just a naive kid and those beliefs, while having some foundation, were pretty ridiculous. Bus dev for major kills is more of a team game and involves more dog and pony shows than I imagined even very recently, and even when driven at an individual level, experience matters even more than I believed as a junior partner. This is all in the context of landing major matters or general representation for major clients. If we instead are talking about something like your mom’s best friend’s cupcake shop (or trying to get work from a smaller company or doing discrete work for a bigger one where an associate has a personal connection that helps get in the door, which is pretty common), those are different. In that latter respect, associates can and do contribute often, especially as senior associates.

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Great.

Yea…. Telling potential clients how great your firm is takes way more brainpower than actually making creative legal arguments and questioning evasive witnesses…..

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You must be in corporate.

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