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Thoughts on Everlaw vs DISCO?
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Covington has a 2,000 hour requirement for bonus and is notoriously cheap.
Reg is definitely harder to meet hours. Best to do at a firm without hours requirement if it is a true specialist and thought leader role. If more grunt work though then probably wouldn’t matter as much for junior and mid.
Mentor
Well they’re totally different practices and you’re basically committing to do one or the other for the rest of your career. It’s possible to switch practices later but it gets harder and harder and with a bigger and bigger penalty (i.e. basically resetting to zero in class and pay) as the years go by, and pretty quickly too. Practically speaking you’d have to realize you want to switch no later than like 3-4 years in and even then you’d be restarting as a junior.
There are pros and cons to each but just wanted to flag that your language about breaking into later, or which is better to “start” your career in suggests some fundamental misunderstandings.
Mentor
A3 you’re right that “regulatory” and “transactional” are both painting with an extremely broad brush, was just trying to give some generalities the way OP framed it. The specialist vs generalist thing is definitely personal preference when it comes to personal enjoyment (I’m transactional if you couldn’t tell, M&A specifically, so very biased toward generalist) but the things like WLB, partnership, and exits are more objective.
Coach
with few exceptions, you are likely joining a service group in reg, so the client relationships likely reside in a different group, and this will impact your career down the road. if you want regulatory, try to avoid things like government contracts, aviation. Insurance, healthcare, banking, investment funds, are better (finance and funds having the most options and best trajectory, imo).
Coach
Trade reg is niche and cool if you can actually get into it (depends on the group). Data privacy has more exit ops and likely more practical for growing your own book.
I think that starting as a corporate transactional attorney will give you a broader range of experienced with respect to the different types of transactions. Especially as a junior associate, the tasks that you’ll be assigned (e.g., diligence, certificates, signature pages) will be similar across corporate, M&A, finance, cap markets, or general corporate, so you’ll be able to do different types of deals and find out if there is a type of deal that interests you. I don’t know much about the regulatory practice, but my sense is that flexibility among different types of regulatory practices is not comparable.
What city do you want to be in long-term (i.e. - 10+ years from now or where you plan to permanently settle)? I live and work in the Carolinas, and there is very little regulatory work here. It's very common for law students from the Southeast to accept a regulatory role in DC and have a very, very hard time lateraling back to the Carolinas (which is what many eventually want to do). If you're not 100% sure you want to be in DC long-term and/or the regulatory practice is pretty limiting outside of DC, I would take the transactional offer.
Mentor
OP it’s not my area so I’ll defer to anyone who knows better, but I think generally a foreign company doing business in the US will just hire a US firm with US-based lawyers to advise on those issues. Whereas you seem to be talking about physically moving to Asia. Why would a US-specific lawyer be hired to sit in Asia?
Saw that you’re international - transactional is more portable to Asia. I don’t know of trade reg groups with very clear international exits, i would presume that a company that does high end import/export work would exclusively hire in the US where such expertise typically resides.
Start in corporate--always start in corporate.