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Amazing OP! I’m happy to answer questions people have about: - Moving to / practising in HK and China* (JD > LLM, don’t come here straight out of law school or come to law school here, practise a couple years in the US/UK first) - Working as a Private Equity lawyer, the upstream/downstream work etc** - Moving to a corporate as a non-lawyer - Legal tech stuff - Why many in house lawyers suck to work with and how to be a good cool one instead * Technically you won’t be practising local law you’ll be practising foreign law in the jurisdiction you qualified in. The difference can be surprisingly hard to see when eg local counsel gives you a data dump of local regulations instead of an answer to your question, and you have to somehow parse it for an impatient client. ** Requires a thick skin. I once got a by hand mark-up from a client who hadn’t bothered to read my covering email, and had scrawled “NO” on the draft so hard it had broken through the paper, next to a note saying “Do you even loving read what you are writing?” They went on to be a very loyal client, but never changed their characterful prose style.
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Aug 8, 2018 03:35
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Phil Moscowitz posted:We are pretty US-heavy, please contribute. I assume you’re a UK lawyer? Was English and Hong Kong qualified, no longer practising. History is: Qualified in London firm; Switched to NY firm in London on qualification, worked 2 years; Moved to HK with different NY firm and did 6 years; Quit law and joined one of the big legal vendors, did 4 years there in a variety of business roles including sales which was fun as hell; Now I’m at one of the Chinese tech unicorns in a pure business role, introduced by a former client. I get to use my old firm for investments sometimes, which is nice. I can do an effortpost on the HK legal market for foreign lawyers if anyone’s interested. Basically, there are still a few opportunities for non Chinese speakers but not so many as before - Singapore and Dubai are the expat lawyer destinations of choice these days for the most part.
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Aug 8, 2018 04:45
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Vox Nihili posted:jesus christ i hope youre not one of the people i have to interact with Doubt it unless we knew each other already before I left law, and I think I know all the lawgoons here in HK/BJ.
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Aug 8, 2018 12:54
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Throatwarbler posted:
1. Yes. A US JD from a good school is still the gold standard for US firms’ offices in both regions, and if you have the right practice area (see below), it’s attractive to the magic circle and other big UK firms too. 2. COLAs are more likely for Dubai than Singapore. I hear mixed things on whether people can still get them - they’re less of a given than before but a good recruiter should be able to tell you which firms are desperate enough to still offer them. Firms sometimes lose entire practices overnight here as associates are notoriously mercenary, so there’s usually someone who needs warm bodies and is willing to pay for them. NYC base is only paid by large US firms and magic circle in my experience. A lot of firms have 2 or 3 tier pay structures, with local associates on a separate track until they get promoted to full associate. The general rule in payscales is: Top 20 US firm —> top 50 US firm / UK Magic Circle or equivalent —> other US/UK firm —> other foreign firm —> local firm Although as a partner, you can do very well out of local firms (and it can be possible to make partner a lot earlier if you’re willing to get the local qualifications). 3. Corporate (M&A/PE/funds), structured finance / DCM and investigations/FCPA were the main practice areas where you see a lot of US lawyers. Some ECM work but not so much as the system is closer to the UK one. Don’t think I’ve ever seen a pure US-qualified litigator or arbitrator here.
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Aug 14, 2018 08:25
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Sab0921 posted:Awesome IHC effortpost So here are a few thoughts on IHC based on 1) them being my clients when in private practice; 2) their being my customer when I was selling legal tech; 3) me being their client once I was the business guy; and 4) my wife having been in-house at various companies for about 8 years now. 1. The central difference between in-house and BigLaw life is that once you go in house you become a cost centre. This informs everything else. 2. The genuine value of IHC is if they, personally and not via outside counsel, are familiar with both (i) what your company does; and (ii) the law applicable to its activities, such that they can give an accurate answer to legal questions that arise in the course of doing business. This is amazing and worth cherishing if you find it. If you’re in house please be this kind. 3. This is also rare as hen’s teeth because most IHC at big companies are your typical type-A overachievers from a BigLaw background and therefore (i) have no useful knowledge outside of their practice area, which like as not is M&A or similar, whereas most of the legal issues you face will be commercial, employment, etc plus any industry-specific regulatory stuff; (ii) don’t understand actual business operations well; and (iii) expect to be treated as Important People because they haven’t fully realised they are just a cost centre yet. 4. In an effort to continue to be treated like a profit centre not a cost centre (and therefore like an Important Person), many IHC spend a lot of time and the company’s money playing make-believe. The goal of this as far as I can tell is to get to a position where you personally do nothing to help the business, sit on top of a large team of lawyers (some of whom may help the business as a side-product of their actual job, which is to make you feel like a senior partner), raise deeply ignorant questions in business meetings, send all substantive work to outside counsel, and sit on regular panels talking about how you are redefining the role of General Counsel so that it’s equivalent to a C-Suite role. I regard this as basically a fraud on the shareholders of the company, but OTOH GC is hardly the only role with this problem.
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Aug 29, 2018 02:58
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Mr. Nice! posted:You couldn't make anything enforceable, but you could definitely make consent agreements that help disclaim you from liability due to injuries suffered during a session. What’s the equivalent of R v Brown in the US?
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Sep 12, 2018 09:01
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Alexeythegreat posted:Ah, I see This is late but just noting same is largely true for local staff at PRC or Hong Kong offices at first, although in my time it was normal for the good ones to get promoted to real associate after 2 years.
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Sep 24, 2018 17:25
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Nice piece of fish posted:Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuckkkkk Context, or just the existential misery of practising law?
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Oct 2, 2018 14:18
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I always think this is amusing because counsel do get promoted up to partner occasionally. You made the right call. If you can also find some free space to actually develop your own clients who will leave if you do, then you’ve got some leverage to revisit the issue later anyway.
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Dec 5, 2018 01:03
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Simpsons Reference posted:Also considered "if it's legitimate hope, law school has a way of shutting that down" Save that for later. One day we will need it. I was reading through some of the advice from litigators in this thread and it surprised me how little abuse of process people described. I started my career at an English firm called Herbert Smith (now HSF after acquiring some Aussie firm, and apparently still the top English firm for disputes) whose informal motto was, according to people I met after leaving the firm, “never knowingly polite”. The belief that process was there to be abused was deeply held by many of the people who were then partners, and while I loathed my mandatory 6 months in litigation (and to be fair was equally loathed by my supervisor), I actually rather enjoyed the intellectual exercise of bending the process as far as it would go.* Weirdly this bled into the corporate practice that I ended up in, making the firm’s ambitious associates hyper aggressive in a way that ensured most never got close to partnership. *Also writing scrupulously polite letters implying that opposing counsel might very well be the worst, laziest, most incompetent individuals ever to practise. That was a lot of fun.
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Jul 11, 2019 15:16
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evilweasel posted:In civil litigation, a lot of the process stuff happens outside the view of the judge, and the judge will be very mad at both sides if he has to deal with it unless one side is so very clearly in the wrong he's only mad at that side. So there's a lot of games of chicken about "is this unreasonable enough to actually risk going to the judge" and "is he actually willing to take this to the judge or is he bluffing?". A propos this, leaving law and having to find actual commercially viable solutions to problems was a total mindfuck and I spent two years head in hands, gibbering “the horror...the horror” as I wondered what kind of madhouse I’d entered where it was necessary to actually reach an imperfect solution that satisfied juuuust enough people because otherwise we make no money and our business folds. Maybe being a mediator would prepare a person for this. It gave me a phenomenal respect for small-mid tier firm practitioners because holy poo poo guys, establishing a reputation without borrowing your firm’s prestige is HARD.
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Jul 11, 2019 18:05
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Discendo Vox posted:My understanding is the defense bluster is not for the court's benefit nor the cases, but for the client's perception of "fighting". See also elected prosecutors. This is true for corporate law too. The best partners I worked with or opposite knew which points to genuinely fight and which to just concede. They got deals closed quickly, quietly and efficiently. The most commercially successful sometimes missed the big points, but were A-1 on knowing which ones they could embarrass the other side or go super-partisan on. Clients loving lapped this poo poo up.
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Jul 11, 2019 18:08
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mastershakeman posted:Imagine working for a banks doing foreclosure who just violate everything constantly. one firm solved this by falsifying affidavits and got a slap on the wrist for it after half of their own attorneys reported the practice to the state bar but business proceeded as usual That sounds like it’s across the line. What I’m describing is more like aggressive but plausible interpretations of the rules: asking for long extensions for filings as a matter of course; trying to force replies over weekends and keep the psychological pressure up; disclosing reams and reams of meaningless documents - the ordinary course ways of making the litigation process bitter, slow and miserable for everyone involved. Writing arsey letters really was fun tho.
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Jul 14, 2019 06:14
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Do US states have land registers? We’ve been all registry in the UK since before I qualified in the dim and distant early 2000s.
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Jul 17, 2019 18:52
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nm posted:Yeah. I remember sitting in an airport in Australia, trying to ignore this woman talking about how they have too many immigrants. She ended saying I should move there because there are always jobs for people like me (white). In my last job I was delighted to be paired on a deal in an Asian city with a (white, like me) Australian colleague: she was super competent, smart, and stunningly attractive and yes, all of these made me happy to be working with her. So it got a bit awkward when we’re having post work drinks and she suddenly goes off on one about how Australia’s now full of bloody Chinese and Indian people and you can’t trust them and it feels like you’re not in your own country any more, you know? I don’t think we were even talking about that, it just came out. I mean I’m from the UK and we’re no slouches at the old racism, but it felt a bit OTT.
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Jul 26, 2019 05:55
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ulmont posted:The profession predisposes people to sadbrains. The job fundamentally is to care about things (legal technicalities and formalities) that have no meaning except that we collectively agreed to make them a big deal. So the kind of people who care about that bullshit are going to be sadbrains type worriers. So much this. I remember the cognitive dissonance when it finally struck me that my PE clients didn’t give a poo poo about the quality of my legal analysis or work product so long as they could say they’d run it past outside counsel and we said it was ok. Everything about managing your future and making partner is client relations (that is, sales). Large parts of the profession are fundamentally “bullshit jobs” in the Graeber sense of your actual role and ostensible role being different. Try to understand your actual role and do that. Caveat that I never once regretted pissing off clients when they asked for unethical poo poo, which happened rarely but not that rarely. Examples: asked not to tell the other side that we were representing our client not them both jointly; asked to take instructions from Bob, who was a buddy of the middleman who brokered the deal and not actually employed by the client; asked to accept a performance bonus (a small one, everyone has their price of course) by the same middleman; asked to falsify a shareholder register and related minutes; asked to give a legal opinion that was not true. I said no to all of these and it was a bit scary and I got yelled at a lot and I’m very glad in each case that I did. And I have to say that in each case the partners backed me up (well except the performance bonus one because I didn’t tell them about that).
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Jul 8, 2020 07:25
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Sab0921 posted:If you are an auto admit poster, you should probably delete your poo poo. Auto admit...now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. Kalman posted:Also if you’re a junior associate just loving bill it (as long as you actually did the work and aren’t double billing) and let the partners fight with the clients about whether they’ll pay or not. The billable hour is a bit of a fiction. You will undoubtedly work a lot of hours you don’t bill, and the purpose of the exercise is usually to get to a total price for work done that strikes the right balance between opportunity cost, effort, deal size, value to the client, how much leeway the partner has to take a writedown and, often, how much of an rear end in a top hat the client is allowed to be. That’s the billing partner’s job to figure out. If you’re a junior associate, record everything until you can make those judgments for yourself. Beefeater1980 fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Jul 17, 2020 |
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Jul 17, 2020 05:22
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Vox Nihili posted:Another fringe fly-by-night school staffed by downright questionable professors. Shut it down IMO. The whole story is so deeply weird and inconsistent, and everyone involved seems so untrustworthy, that I kind of assume it’s actually a Rashomon-style mystery and it will eventually come out that there was a ghost involved as well and the ghost was lying too.
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Aug 10, 2020 10:39
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TheWordOfTheDayIs posted:All this sounds strangely comforting... I mean the real question is, when mankind is nearly wiped out and the cockroaches take over, who will provide their legal representation? Because I’ll be damned if it’s Wachtell again.
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Aug 28, 2020 17:05
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Phil Moscowitz posted:Come to the Discord We have a discord?
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Oct 5, 2020 02:14
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Ani posted:I'm in biglaw. I would never have an "I told you so" call with a client because that's a good way for your client to stop being your client. I do sometimes commiserate, usually with other lawyers at my firm or sometimes even the lawyers representing the counterparty in the transaction, very much in a "these loving people, we did tell them this was going to happen and it would be a shitshow" kind of way. Partner told me when I was just getting started out that we yell at each other because we can’t yell at our clients. E: He did yell at me a lot, though. Maybe it was just me? Beefeater1980 fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Mar 20, 2021 |
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Mar 20, 2021 03:41
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Flip Yr Wig posted:Drunken thought last night: I mean it works as a description of me when I was still making the world safe for private equity LPs’ money.
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Jun 19, 2021 08:20
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It always draws you back in somehow. I had 8 years happily away from the practice of law and have just applied to be readmitted because I’m doing something law-adjacent again.
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Jul 26, 2021 00:18
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Getting a practicing certificate again after surviving eight whole years outside the profession. I feel dirty.
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Oct 27, 2021 05:30
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SlyFrog posted:A lot of transactional work is really just used car sales, in terms of the negotiations and what ends up in agreements. Like 95% of the stuff I negotiated was just each side using vague reasons as to why they "couldn't accept that risk" on a provision by provision basis without any quantitative (or often even situational) reasons why. And it often just came down to one party or the other getting angry and saying gently caress that, we are not doing that. Usually on my PE deals these crappy warranty / indemnity points went to whoever could make the most concrete analogy. Total bullshit. It took me years to realise that almost everything interesting has already happened by the time you get the TS; the rest is just process. Could have been worse though, could have been cap markets.
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Nov 9, 2021 04:46
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I genuinely don't understand what drives people to do biglaw over other kinds of law. I mean I guess money is nice but jesus christ. Speaking for myself, it was the sense that I’d suffered to get there and that having got onto the conveyer belt it would be suicidal to get off it again and I would never again have the same degree of personal or professional success. This turned out not to be the case, but it still kept me there for 9-10 years.
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Nov 18, 2021 04:34
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Dear Diary, I never thought this would happen to me. I’m going back to BigLaw, but in a back office role. Looking forward to ranking slightly below a first-year’s fraction of a secretary.
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May 20, 2022 02:28
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Pook Good Mook posted:I had a conversation with my legal assistant a while ago where we were talking about careers and issues we were having and my assistant said something like, "I'm just here to make you look good" and all I could think was how much easier I was to replace compared to her. A lot of the back office roles in BigLaw (especially the ex-attorney ones like PSL or legal project manager) are incredibly safe, quite well compensated jobs that let you go home at 5.30 and virtually never ask your time on evenings or weekends. They also usually don’t expose people to the worst stressed partner bullshit. As a result they never quit. At my shop our office’s finance manager has been here 25 years, almost since she entered the workforce.
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Sep 1, 2022 15:25
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Nonexistence posted:more lawyers should play tabletop Had drinks with a BigLaw partner yesterday and was delighted when he saw my kids reading the Monster Manual and asked “is that 5E?”. We may end up getting a game going (although based on my own time practicing I assume it will be cancelled 9/10 times for client stuff).
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Jan 30, 2023 02:34
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ulmont posted:2nd-5th year associate during 2008-2011 was, uh, not great. But yeah. gently caress we’re exactly the same vintage. I kept going till 2013 and STILL missed the good times. OTOH I got to be Not A Lawyer after that so it all worked out.
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Dec 19, 2023 11:57
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evilweasel posted:the litigators in this thread spend most of our time either reading people’s emails or using those emails against people I spend a fairly large amount of time pointlessly telling people not to write stupid things on our internal chat app. Might as well not bother honestly.
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Mar 2, 2024 05:55
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Also if you join a large firm you’ll be sorted into a practice area without necessarily having much choice over which one it is. Oh you wanted to be an IP attorney? Tough poo poo we need warm bodies in the IPO mines.
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Mar 3, 2024 05:25
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