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I didn't see a 'what does a corporate lawyer do all day' in the first post. Since in my experience more lawyers end up on the corporate than the litigation track, I figured this might be interesting to some. Full disclosure: I'm currently a mid-level corporate associate with the overseas office of a New York firm. Morning: Starts at 9am. For our firm, including in the NY mothership, it's usually 9.30. However, the local partnership has strong feelings on the matter and if there's one thing that's always worth doing, it's conforming to local standards set by the people that pay you. After the mandatory Pacific Coffee Co coffee I prepare a client memo. The client's in-house lawyer emailed overnight to asking a bunch of questions about local regulatory issues in respect of a proposed transaction. The lazy answer is to explain the statute; the necessary answer is to then go on and explain that the statute isn't worth a bucketfull of warm spit because in practice the requisite licenses and permits are never granted to foreign invested companies whatever the law says. Overall the questions are good and interesting ones that would require about 8 hours to research and answer properly; I have 3 and do the best I can. I send the memo to the partner for signoff before sending to the client: it's about 50/50 whether she will in fact do so. 12:30 One of our financial intermediary clients wants a document turned urgently. It's a fairly simple loan guarantee tangentially related to a deal I worked on for them last year. After reading and providing some fairly minor markups I send it back to them. Once you have been doing the job for a couple of years, partners won't generally want to check this kind of thing, although you should of course copy them when you send it. 1:30 Lunch. Here, we usually get the full hour - one of the nice things about working in my part of the world. People don't eat sandwiches at their desks here. 2:15 Day really starts. The partner I am working for wants a detailed step-plan setting out how one of our clients will do a particular type of investment and what documents and approvals are needed. I nod convincingly, and then delegate to a paralegal who has been here for 10 years and knows this sort of thing backwards. I'll check it later. While she's attacking the first draft, I deal with the partner, who has given me a ton of comments on the morning's memo. Approximately none are substantial; the remainder are stylistic and two involve her correcting my (correct) grammar to make it wrong (this is common outside home jurisdictions - in this case the partner is not a native English speaker but is used to being the best English speaker among people she is dealing with. C'est la vie). I then turn the memo and send it out. 4:00 I dial in to a conference call with the second client to discuss their comments to a document I sent out yesterday. While the call is ongoing: 4:02 Another client wants to call me urgently. My secretary tells them I'm on a call. 4:03 The client sends me a panicked email asking if I'm available. I email back that I'm in a meeting. 4:04 The client sends me another panicked email, copying in his boss and my partner, saying that he can't get hold of me. I fume, quietly. My partner emails to ask why I'm not calling said client. I remind her that I'm on another client call. 4:05 The client sends me yet another email with their question. They set up an SPV and want a pdf copy of its formal ownership documents as part of an internal audit. The audit date is next week. I am rapidly losing the will to live. 4:30 Still on my call. Another partner emails me to say I've been staffed on an exciting new deal. Briefing will be at 5:45pm. 5:45pm. The call continues, although every issue of substance has by now been covered, re-covered and buried under a crossroads with a stake through its heart. I drop off to attend the briefing. At the briefing, the instructing partner excitedly tells me about the commercial rationale for the deal. This is interesting but completely irrelevant to what he then asks me to do, which is to analyse potential disclosure requirements. This task involves going through quite tediously written statute and a bunch of specialist books, to provide a rationale for telling our client that they have to disclose something so obviously market sensitive information that a five-year-old could have worked out they had to do so. After the briefing I mark up the steplist that the paralegal prepared for me and send it to the partner for signoff. She signs off and I forward it to the client. 7:00pm. I call my wife and tell her I won't be home for dinner. She is also a lawyer, a situation that is depressingly common among my peers. I get some food from a local takeaway and start working on the research task. 10:00pm. I receive a panicked email from a junior at the financial intermediary client. Can I join a conference call at 11:00pm to discuss funds flow for a deal that is closing later this week? I say 'yes' because one never says 'no' without a very good reason and I don't have one. With sinking heart I forward to my secretary for printing the funds flow memo that the junior has thoughtfully attached to his email. 10:30pm. I stop the research task to take a look at the funds flow memo, which was prepared by the deal accountants. There are a lot of typos, including my name, and the accountants appear not to understand the deal structure. Again, this kind of thing is relatively rare in home markets (London, NY, San Fran etc.) but more common here in Asia where quality control is less consistent. 11:00pm. I dial in to the funds flow call. Accountants and other professional advisers have also dialed in. 11:05pm. Still on the funds flow call. But where is the client? 11:15pm. The client emails. Something came up. Can we do the call at 11:45pm? Applying the rule of 'no good excuse', the answer is 'yes'. I try to get more work done on the research task. 11:45pm. We do the call. The client is late. It's pretty dull. 12:30am. Call ends and I start finishing the research task. 12:45am. The client emails. He's on the road. Can I summarise something I sent him in a pdf yesterday that he hasn't read yet? He needs to see the redline on his blackberry. Oh joy. There is no-one but me in the office now so I ask the NY office to help. Jolene in wordprocessing is nice but dim and I end up having to do it myself. 1:15am. I send the client his markup in a form he can see on the blackberry. Truly, I am a God of the Redline. 2.00am. I finish the research task and send an email summary to the partner. Tomorrow he will copy and paste it into an email he sends to the client. 2.15am. I finish doing timesheets for all of the above and go home. The taxi driver regales me with interesting stories of how much the city has changed in his day. I seriously consider suicide. Incidentally this wasn't too stressful and counts as a 'good' day. A bad day is one in which you are given mutually exclusive objectives and the quest-givers then make themselves unavailable for comment. Bad days are fairly uncommon, but they really suck.
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Feb 8, 2011 17:56
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@colorblind pilot. It's not that bad. I live in a bubble where nearly everyone I meet works in law and finance and a lot of them have similar lives. There's huge positive reinforcement that goes on with that. @Vander. Hong Kong. For what it's worth, Mrs. Beefeater is a couple years senior to me and pushing for partnership in her firm soon, and has much better hours. A lot depends on your specific practice group and the partners/clients you work for. M&A for mostly finance sector firms, which is what I do, tends to be time intensive because deals have to be done within a certain window for financial and confidentiality reasons.
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Feb 8, 2011 18:19
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entris posted:My wife is scheduled to have a c-section on Sept. 16th, so I've been asking around my office, trying to figure out how much paternity time to take.... A bit late to the party here but I'll share my experience: Class of '06, V15 firm in an Asia office, got 4 weeks paternity leave which I understand to be standard in NY, and took every day. The statutory minimum here is...1 day. OTOH my wife and I are having another child and it has been heavily hinted to me that I will get a lot less this time, which seems fair tbh. Re: holidays generally, it really depends on the partner you work for. Some take the attitude that any moment not spent billing is time wasted, others don't. It's funny, firms do have their different cultures, but the one thing that determines how bearable your life will be is the approach to life of the individual partners you work for. Then again it's September and I haven't taken a single day's vacation yet this year... EDIT: At my last firm, I had a colleague who rushed onto a conference call while his wife was in labor. That memory will be with him for the rest of his life. Don't be him.
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Sep 3, 2011 04:44
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Linguica posted:
Nope...feel free to drop me a pm if you're in the region though.
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Sep 3, 2011 07:21
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your initials wouldn't be S.L. would they?
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CmdrSmirnoff posted:I worked in a Notorious BIG line into my closing address today. Shockingly it didn't make it into the paper. Snobs. Been a few pages but I wanted to let you know you're not alone: I've been working in bits of x gon give it to ya to client pitches (this is HK so it has passed under the radar so far).
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Jun 3, 2017 09:23
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Congrats on kids! When our second one arrived it finally gave me the push I needed to get out of the profession.
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Jun 3, 2017 17:39
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Hot Dog Day #91 posted:"What do you call two lawyers in the same cab? Just drop some lines about living your life in six minute increments.
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Jun 6, 2017 04:00
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Sab0921 posted:The money is a hollow substitute for what you're giving up going to transactional big law. If you're a 3rd-4th year you'll be making 210-230k a year (Cravath Scale) which means you're between $100-120k right now. I promise you that's enough and not having to work big law is worth it. Having done around 10 years in transactional big law I endorse this, with the caveat that if you're one of those people that loving loves doing M&A (and they do exist), the trade off is a bit better.
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Jun 15, 2017 16:46
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Sab0921 posted:You can't trade your life and sanity for money. You can be set up well with a modest salary and not have the negative mental and physical effects that big law causes. Maybe my experience is outside of the norm, but it's dark in here man. Currently on a call at 9:50pm to discuss some random bullshit that just popped up at 8pm today. I'll be up until 3am. I will bill 2800 hours this year. It's a depressing slog on a daily basis. I'm fat, don't exercise, don't spend time with my wife, don't spend time with my family (sister and cousins live within 1 mile), haven't been to my parents house since January and they live in a suburb about 45 min away. I feel for you dude. Consider legal tech or working for one of the vendors. Your experience will be gold dust to them, and control of your life will way outweigh the downsides.
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Jun 15, 2017 16:50
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Flutieflakes017 posted:Where in Asia? I'm taking a dude's trip to West China then working our way to HK and Macau. Oh hey, come hang with HKgoons while you're here. It's a pretty friendly community. Drop me a PM if interested.
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Jul 17, 2017 10:55
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Omerta posted:It's more that your rate is too high to pay you to do math. We run regression analyses all the time related to reductions in force/equal pay act compliance, but the people who put together the analysis bill out at like 1/3 my rate--maybe less. It's also handy for all the legal tech poo poo I do now.
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Sep 28, 2017 07:03
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Staryberry posted:Do any of you use software to help create documents? I'm an estate planning attorney, so we use a lot of form documents where everything stays the same except for the names. Right now, I draft a memo and my assistant types the names into a form word document and saves it to the client's file. This is wildly inefficient. For example, I have to double check that she hasn't misspelled JOHN DOE as JON DOE, each time it appears in the document. I would love to have a form where I could type in JOHN DOE once and it would populate the entire suite of documents we are doing for a client, and if the client shows up and wants to change their name to JOHN H. DOE, it is a simple process. I feel like mail merge could probably do this, if I spent some time to figure it out, but I was wondering if there is any software (particularly software that older non-technologically prone attorneys can figure out) that would make this an easy task. For that specific use case, all you need is mailmerge. On your broader question, it's becoming quite standard now in the UK and Australia to automate the creation of at least first drafts. My day job is to make it standard in Asia too, which includes selling software that does this and running a team that handles the actual automation (the buzzwords are document assembly and contract automation if you want to google what's out there). Not sure about the US but we do good business there so I guess it's growing. There are a few different brands. Contract Express is our one; the other ones we see are Hotdocs and Exari, although Exari is pretty dated right now and probably on the way out. There are doubtless a bunch of startups too though I don't really see much of them here in Asia except for a local one called Dragonlaw that targets the mass market. Good software is on about the 3rd or 4th generation now, and it's a lot less clunky than it used to be when I was in private practice. A good system is one that lets you: * create a template contract in MS Word * still in Word, mark up optional text, conditional text etc and write the questions whose answers control that conditional text * upload the template to a server * every time you want to make a new document, answer the questionnaire instead of working in Word * go change the template yourself if you need to later instead of paying the vendor to do it for you If you're interested then just submit an enquiry to the contract express website, any issues then PM me and I can find who handles accounts for wherever you're based. Also seeing this stuff in use warms my cynical and jaded ex-lawyer heart because every partner we pitch to tells us that his documents are too sophisticated to automate and it's always a complete loving lie, and it's very entertaining to show them how cookie cutter their documents actually are.
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Oct 9, 2017 15:49
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Omerta posted:I've used contract express to create tools for automating answers, discovery requests/responses, and settlement agreements. Yes, automation shines when you get to suites of documents with a lot of reactivity or where you want to automate fiddly drafting, pluralisation and so on across clauses (e.g. I used to do PE M&A work: the Term Sheet, SHA, SPA and ancillary documents all key off the same questionnaire, which is a huge time saver versus creating them individually). If all you are doing is creating fields that you are going to type in manually then it doesn't add anything you can't do with ctrl+h, although the UI is a lot friendlier. Compared with selecting, for example, the jurisdiction of incorporation of a target company and having it figure out what dispute resolution and governing law language to add and the proper corporate form etc. That said my only experience with litigation was six miserable months doing bundling and the odd memo as a trainee so ymmv- I think a number of firms use it for court forms. My practising experience is 10 years, all transactional. Fwiw, typically the first two depts to automate are real estate and employment, based on our customer annual surveys. Third is corporate. My comment about cookie cutter documents is also rooted in M&A tbh. Usually, an SPA for example is negotiated and has a lot of deviation from the precedent, but the deviation is on known lines: there are only a few positions that really crop up on things like limitation of liability, length of warranty period, standard or custom conditions precedent etc. Once you sit down and draft those positions into a template, you realise just how little actual free drafting goes into what is otherwise thought of as a "bespoke" document.
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Oct 11, 2017 07:54
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CaptainScraps posted:I don't understand what a transactional lawyer actually does. Neither do clients, you'll get along with them famously!
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Oct 15, 2017 07:53
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evilweasel posted:they're like a programmer but for contracts I'm dying, this is perfect. I actually use the "programmer but for contracts" analogy all the time, and managed to sneak it into a rant about drafting I wrote for the local law journal.
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Oct 15, 2017 07:56
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"You know those bankers who tanked the financial system and made everyone poor? Daddy helps make sure they don't have to pay out if their investments go bad."
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Oct 16, 2017 06:11
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Vox Nihili posted:Biglaw lateral status report, month 4~ I'm sick as a dog and still working. Got chewed out for not getting poo poo done in the middle of the night. Every time I need to turn a doc this attorney scribbles fifty pages of bullshit on it in pencil as their comments and if I'm not there they email me an admittedly high-quality but still largely illegible scan. If it's the second pass they will go into all sorts of poo poo they didn't touch in the first pass, and half of it is completely arbitrary. This person is not even an old. Lmao. The one thing that annoyed me the most as a junior was people changing their own loving drafting in their second pass and then adding sarcastic comments about how bad what they just changed was. Then I went on to perpetuate the cycle of abuse as a senior assoc, probably.
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Nov 9, 2017 09:22
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Vox Nihili posted:The blood money is good, almost have my loans paid off now. You’ll get to the point where you enjoy one quiet day, and then start stressing over your billables when the second quiet day starts.
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Jan 10, 2018 02:40
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Roger_Mudd posted:Now imagine all of the things like this but I can’t tell you because of the NDA. South Korea has been really hard for us to sell legal tech, practice management software etc into because half the goddamn country still uses Lotus Notes. Yes, I know it was a technically superior product when you made the buy decision in 1994 or whenever. Get over it. God.
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Jan 30, 2018 13:29
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CaptainScraps posted:The only thing I remember from my negotiation course is they assigned us to buy and sell a painting. We ran an in-firm course once for our juniors where we put them in pairs for negotiation practice. For the final exercise, one of them got the standard list of asks: warranties, conditions precedent etc. The other one got an instruction that said “say no to everything, explain nothing and don’t blame the client.” (Yes, this was based on an actual deal).
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Feb 3, 2018 13:09
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gvibes posted:1) copying and pasting That’s only a part of it, there were closing checklists too.
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Mar 30, 2018 06:47
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Re: good outcomes from Biglaw: After 5 blissful years out of the profession, which I mostly spent selling techy things to lawyers, my latest job change has finally had something magical happen: from the end of this month I’m moving to a senior business role at a headline client of my old (NYC) firm. One of my former clients ended up becoming a VP there and wants me to handle their global partnerships. The good: junior partner level pay plus attractive stock options in a really exciting tech company, and what sounds like an actually interesting, challenging role with the cooler sort of international travel. It’s a real job that isn’t being a lawyer. Plus, client entertainment from my former partners. The bad: The reason I know this guy is he’s ex private equity and I’m p sure he hired me in part because he assumes I’ll be as cool with working every god damned second now as I was when I was a senior associate. Also, even the cooler sort of business travel still sucks. But it’s a role I would never have got close to without biglaw or, I dunno, spending 5 years in consulting. So I’m feeling a lot rosier about all those years turning SPAs after midnight right now.
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Apr 7, 2018 11:50
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Vox Nihili posted:Cool biglaw thing: stay in office until 1030 pm doing project A. Finish, feeling irrationally satisfied at completing the job in good time. Drive home, get email about piddling update to Project B during drive, go to bed without checking email (fatal error). Wake up to emails getting chewed out about Project B in the morning; apparently the "deadline" for piddling update was last night (the actual deadline for Project B is today, this deadline for piddling update was news to me). You’ve got to find a way of letting the petty aggravations just wash over you. Or just drink I guess.
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Apr 15, 2018 19:14
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Abugadu posted:
I mean, if she’s not before practising for a couple of years, there’s a good chance she will be after. Flutieflakes017 posted:Same but China. It was a pain to find the addresses themselves and I couldn’t decide if I should write out the Chinese characters or the English transliterations which were really long and just look like strings of consonants. Just joined a Chinese company and I feel the pain on this one. There’s a country which loves itself some bureaucracy. E: when I sat the Hong Kong bar, my first application form was rejected because I had changed the font size in the footnotes of the form (to make a bit more space on the page).
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Apr 26, 2018 03:30
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I just had a former client from my BigLaw days introduce me to a colleague as “the best lawyer I ever worked with” 
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May 25, 2018 23:29
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blarzgh posted:Happy Father's day, boys! Painful but true
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Jun 19, 2018 09:25
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I was terrible at pro bono work and stopped doing it the moment I qualified (in UK we do 2 years on half pay as a trainee first, which is like being a first second year associate with less cash but no law school debt). I remember sniggering inappropriately when doing civic centre work for a guy who had gone bald and wanted to sue the company that sold him lovely hair restoration product (snake oil). I feel bad about that now. OTOH I did rewrite and unfuck a lovely franchising contract for a Somali immigrant who wanted to start up a kwik-copy printing and reprographics business so she could be financially independent of her abusive husband. That felt good.
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Jul 4, 2018 14:50
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So I’m sharing my law school / career experience since it may be of some use to poor deluded aspirants ITT. I’m from a UK background but had a buddy from Baltimore who followed same route very successfully. 1. At undergrad, read [useful non-law thing that partners won’t understand well]. In my case it was Chinese. For my buddy was economics. [Optional - 2. Develop useful contacts (I was FWB with the best friend of a magic circle law firm’s secretary and stayed friends with the secretary)] 3. Apply for UK law school, for which law firms typically sponsor you. 4. Once you get your law school offer, apply to law firms in UK [NB, some US firms offer TCs too] for a training contract + sponsorship. When applying lean heavily on what your useful non-law thing does. These days it could be machine learning or data science or sth. If you developed useful contacts, use them here. In my case secretary buddy put my CV in her boss’s in-tray and he called me in for an interview at 5pm same day; I had other offers but ended up going there as it was a quality league up from them (top 5 versus top 20). 5. Go to UK law school, where so long as you come in with a sponsorship and guaranteed TC place it doesn’t matter how well you perform. If you don’t have these things, don’t bother and don’t get into debt. gently caress around for 1 year if you have a qualifying law degree, 2 years otherwise. 6. Be a trainee for 2 years on like $60k. This sucks. OTOH you have no / minimal student debt. 7. Leave your English firm and qualify into a US law firm wherever at NYC rates or nearest equivalent. Use your interesting non-law undergrad as the bait. 8. After a couple of years in NYC or London as BigLaw associate move to somewhere with low taxes. I recommend Hong Kong or Dubai. Do this for as long as you can handle without severe mental trauma. 9. After all your friends have left you and your soul is crushed, go in house or quit law for something more interesting. If you did the above properly, by early 30s you’ll own a property outright somewhere, be married with maybe kids, have a mild alcohol abuse habit, and have a non-law job that actually interests you. You won’t be on the partner track in short term, but if you really want to you can by this point leverage industry experience to get back in at at least counsel level as people will correctly assume you can bring a book of business with you.
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Jul 22, 2018 20:01
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Yuns posted:NYC biglaw partner so basically I'm already behind my peers since I haven't had a failed marriage yet A propos this, Freshfields HK corporate group was for a long time rumoured to have a partner divorce rate that was north of 100%.
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Jul 22, 2018 20:08
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Vox Nihili posted:My impression of the Chinese offices that I've interacted with is that the people there seem to be getting worked to death at a pace that exceeds even the standard biglaw grind. More often than not, associates in those offices will respond immediately to emails sent to them at 3 am their time. Associates in PRC firms get paid nothing and work all hours, but if they have BD skills or great contacts or are banging the managing partner or similar they can make partner a lot earlier than in US firms. Partners don’t seem to have meaningful liability to each other so people can be really relaxed about legal opinions. At many firms partners don’t share costs beyond office rental and utilities, so have their own stables of associates. HK work culture is 24/7 but I didn’t find that particularly different than being in a corporate group in a London firm tbh. The main difference is that in London you can do both Asia and US at ok times whereas in HK you’re often scheduling calls around late morning in US (if you’re lucky it’s east coast). Conscience-wise my worst deal was aircraft leasing for the Saudi government (US firm in London), nothing in China even came close in terms of making me feel I needed a shower afterwards. Re HK as has been noted upstream the main thing is your living space will be tiny. Really, really small.
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Jul 24, 2018 09:57
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