Mindless goodness
I had my first corporate assignment today. I'd been doing litigation stuff the past week, which involved doing research online and writing a couple of memos. More on that later. What I really want to talk about is how awesome corporate stuff is. This is what I did today: replaced "June 2" with "June 3" on a bunch of documents, and changed names and addresses on a bunch more documents. That's it. They paid me over 500 dollars to do this, as well as taking me out to a three hour lunch. A ten year-old can do this. The assigning attorney actually said if I didn't finish it he'd just give it to his secretary. His SECRETARY! Some people would be pissed that they'd put in two years busting their ass in law school to be stuck copy-pasting. I'm ecstatic. This is the kind of mindless work that I excel at. Go law firm!
posted by M at 1:33 AM
10 Comments:
I'm at a close second. I got paid $300 to sit in court. Not participating, mind you. Just sitting there.
Being a lawyer rules. :)
You could have made it so much easier on yourself...
The find and replace feature is amazing.
umm, what do you think i did? I billed 2.5 hours, and that was stretching it. life is good
I always bill the exact amount of time I did things and my boss is always like "no no no, this should have taken you longer" and adds time in.
I love it.
Enjoy the summer because this is when big law firms show you the best parts of the firm. You get to be wined and dined, and treated like royalty. You get paid a lot and will socialize a lot./ But when you start working as a first year associate, your job will be boiled down to 6 minute billing increments, petty office policits, fellow associate backstabbing (woe is the lawyer who leaves each day at 5:30 pm, he will get ostracized as the "slacker"!!) and kissing up to Partners for assignments. Oh and the work itself?? For the first 2-3 years you will be doing this doc review crap, day in and day out.
Working in biglaw sucks. I got out before it made me insane. The $$ is just not worth it. My work only paid to make the Big Partners of my firm riocher and to pad their wallets so they could get more mansions in Westchester and Connecticut, for private school tuition for their kids, and basically to make THEIR lives better while I spent 80 hrs a week behind a computer monitor writing memos that never get read.
So enjoy your summer but know what is expected of you once you cross into the dark side of Associate-dom.
Good luck.
Notwithstanding that last comment -- where the hell do you work? And how can I get a job there?
Can NYC Lawyer get a blog? I love a pessimistic outlook on law life...
nyclawyer- that was the best comment by far that anyone has left on this blog. I will now kill myself.
Nye- I work at a "top 50" firm in a major market. This is all I can say. Especially when I reference my latest post. Oh crap.
I worked at Fried Frank. I now work in house. I have a life and finally can say I can enjoy the money I make. At FF I made about 30K more but was miserable and over time, was told by my DOCTOR that my health (mental and physical) was getting affected. From my class year (2002), only 5% of my original First year Associate class are still at FF. Most of them don't even practice law anymore.
nyc lawyer - - i used to work for a big firm where i live. i wholeheartedly agree with your first comment. one thing i loved about my firm was that not only did we have the billable hour requirement, we had a collections requirement we had to meet each year. try meeting your collections requirement when half the assignments you get those first couple years are for (a) memos that ultimately won't be used, so the partners end up cutting your time off the bill before it goes out to the client, (b) working on cases for friends of partners who for whatever reason decide that they will help out their friend by doing some cheap legal work for them, only they don't want to waste their own valuable time working on cases for clients they don't expect to bill full value, so they pass off most of the work to you, and (c) writing cle materials and putting together presentations for partners who have signed up to present on something at a cle but don't want to waste their valuable time working on their presentations, since you can't bill anyone for it. Imagine working your ass off all year, only to see that your collections look like shit at the end of the year. Imagine a fellow associate who is determined to outbill every other associate at the firm who you know must be fabricating most of his hours since he goes home at 5:30 every day, no fucking way is he billing 250 hours or more every single month. Imagine that same associate sabatoging your work so to make you look bad to the other partners you both work for.
My sister sent me a hallmark card one time during my first year as an associate; the front of it says something about how you need to destress and stuff, and tells you to picture a peaceful meadow, a beautiful stream, crystal clear water, etc etc., then when i opened the card it said "now imagine grabbing that so-and-so (curse curse cures) so-and-so by the neck and holding his head underwater in that stream and watching it turn purple and watching him choke and drown - there now, don't you feel better?
she wrote in the names of various attorneys she had heard me talk about on the card. and i have to say, it did make me feel better, that image!!
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