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How much hike does BNY provide every year?
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Any insight on 21 Grams?
will EXPR and NOC take off ..?
Anyone waiting on the HBS waitlist decisions?
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How many days PTO do you have? (And YEO?)
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Better than biglaw but not quite as good as similar in-house positions. I’d never trade it for my firm and that’s the consensus with everyone else I’ve spoken to about it.
Music to my ears. If I hear one more time that someone has billed over 250 hours in a month I’m going to lose it
Anecdotal but a couple of years ago someone from my firm left to go in house at Amazon and I saw him a few months later at a firm sponsored happy hour for our summers. He was surprisingly apathetic about Amazon and mostly shrugged and talked about how not having to bill anymore was cool, “I guess.” Aside from that he didn’t seem happy and I got the sense he wanted to come back to our firm but wouldn’t say it.
Amazon has a rep for being pretty intense and strict on budgets so I don’t hear great things in general. This is from other friends at Amazon who aren’t in legal (engineering/hr) but again all anecdotal.
There are lots of threads. In general has a sweatshop (for in house standards) reputation but ymmv
agree with Amzn 1 and 2. Colleagues are great; managers are good too. I think there’s more of a focus on good management as opposed to law firm partners. Comp to work hours ratio is also better than a law firm. Since joining during the pandemic, I’ve had some late nights but zero weekend work. It’a mostly 9-6.
WLB will depend on your team and role, but my co-workers in the legal dept are awesome. Super smart and mostly genuinely nice people that I like hanging with outside of work.
Good!
I had an informational interview with a real estate lawyer at Amazon when I was looking and he was working on 21 leases among other documents. Sure they use outside counsel but at that volume I said F it. Also, everyone's base salary maxes put at like 160K before bonus and RSU and I couldn't get over the psychological part about a massive base pay cut. To each his own I guess.
Is there a good way for an outsider to learn how the legal team culture varies within the different divisions (AWS, Products, Payments, etc.)? Unfortunately, I don’t know anyone who works there or I would ask them. Are the legal teams between the business divisions really that different? Do some have better WLB than others? Anyone who works there, how would you describe your workload (i.e.: on a scale of 1,600 billable hours to 2,400, what does it feel like)?
Not a ton of luck on Google, Reddit or other forums for this particular bit of information. In fact, the general sense I get from the internet is that a lot of people are unhappy at Amazon, but I don’t necessarily know if that’s true for Amazon legal. Part of me wonders if the people who are unhappy and being the most vocal are non-lawyers working in a really competitive environment who might not be used to working in similar conditions in biglaw. Just trying to make an informed decision and hope to get some valuable insight for anyone else wondering. Would truly appreciate any thoughts on the above. Thank you (so much) in advance!
Hard for an outsider to tell, and also it depends on what a team might be working on at any given time. Some businesses are also more seasonal than others. You’ll be able to get a sense though during the interview process - watch for obvious things (e.g. is it a deal-heavy role supporting a high volume business, will you be supporting a large junior client group, have they been hiring like crazy due to expansion, etc). Also trust your gut when it comes to the HM - if you don’t like them during the interview, you probably won’t like working for them day to day. For what it’s worth, I’ve been here 5 years, and have worked maybe 3 weekend days in my entire time here.