An ongoing discussion in our Fat Friday newsletter about large law firm recruiting and salaries brought back memories of an article published in the Winter 1997 issue of City Journal entitled My Life As An Associate.
Written by Jonathan Foreman, it struck a chord with me back then when I myself was a large firm associate, and remains in my opinion the best inside account of large law firm life I've ever come across. Foreman is a formidable writer who practiced law at Shearman & Sterling for two years before embarking on a career as a journalist.
I kept a copy of the article on paper for many years and eventually scanned it into PDF format. I read it twice a year at least — and I'm not one of those people who usually consumes media more than once (the movie Wall Street being the only other exception).
So imagine my excitement when I discovered that City Journal (an excellent publication incidentally) now has all of its past issues online for free in an easy-to-read and printer-friendly format — including Foreman's article. Here's a taste of Foreman's take on large firm life in the mid-1990s:
"Our corporate culture required the show of enthusiasm in all circumstances. A partner would come into your office and ask if you had any plans for the weekend. The correct answer was "no." And you would then be given an assignment to fill your empty Saturday and Sunday. The first time I was asked the question, I mumbled something about having hoped to go to Vermont. The young partner, who was nicknamed "Dave the Barracuda," looked at me with a combination of incredulity and sympathy, as if I had just confessed to a subnormal IQ. "It's a rhetorical question," he explained with an exasperated sigh, before proceeding to assign me 20 hours of research.
"Every week we had to fill out a form saying how many hours we had billed the week before and for which client. If you put down a number that suggested you had enjoyed an easy week, the assignments partner would soon wander through your open door and ask if you were busy. It was another rhetorical question: it meant that you were about to become extremely busy. It also meant that there was an incentive not to work too fast. The idea was to charge as many billable hours to clients as would seem reasonable sometime in the future. If you worked too fast, the firm would not be getting its money's worth, and you would be rewarded immediately with another assignment. So our progress was sedate even when we were billing over 100 hours a week.
...
"It seemed that only law students and their parents thought it was a big deal to work in a Wall Street megafirm. Anybody who had had the slightest contact with corporate law, from investment bankers to secretaries to dancers-cum-proofreaders, just felt sorry for us. Our amazingly high turnover meant that over two years most of the people I liked quit or were fired.
"Others, the real unfortunates, were broken to the system. Once the cream of the Ivy League, they had been told too often that they were useless, that they were lucky to have a job at all. Years of semi-brainless paperwork while their college peers were starting businesses or making movies had dissolved their self-confidence. After three or four years the outside world had come to seem a terrifying place. Some claimed they were trying to get out, but one look at their eyes told the whole story."
Read Jonathan Foreman's My Life As An Associate.
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