Tag: leaving biglaw

How I left biglaw (Part II)

… Of course, nothing happened at first, but even the act of sending out my resume made me feel triumphant.  Though my grand plan to work for several years and go in-house flew out the window, I felt all right.  I felt hopeful for the first time since starting work that there was an exit, and that the wheels were in motion.  It turns out however, that it would be a long and arduous eight months before I finally had my opportunity…

The following is a continuation of my story of the next eight months, and how I eventually escaped from biglaw.

Part I of this post: How I left biglaw (Part I)

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Silence.  It turns out that getting a job requires a lot more than sending out a resume.  I was also unsure of my decision.  I had just spend the last 3 years in law school, just passed the bar exam, and had secured a position at one of the nation’s top law firms.  On paper, I looked great and outsiders looking in were impressed.  On the inside however, I felt a mounting desperation that working in biglaw was unsustainable.

After my Thanksgiving plans were interrupted by the ‘short-fuse’ deal, I sent out my resume to several engineering job ads which I had been browsing in the preceding weeks.  To me, it represented a mental hurdle that I had overcome.  I was no longer the golden example, the one people envied, but I was a quitter.  That was hard to come to terms with.  Law students in particular are a stubborn breed; the vast majority make the calculated decision to go to law school, and when there, attack their courses with tenacity.  I had done the same, passed all the hurdles to landing the biglaw job, and now after three months, was ready to quit.

To describe my thought process as clear and rational at the time would be giving myself too much credit.  I didn’t know what I wanted.  Part of me thought that I was complaining about nothing, that all biglaw associates went through the same thing, and that though attrition rates were high, the vast majority still took their licks and made it out.  No one had ever heard of someone lasting only three months in biglaw.  Another part of me however, possibly the more emotional part, thought that I was uniquely unsuited to being in biglaw.  I’m fortunate.  I have a background in computer science, which happened to be in high demand.  I had a backup plan.  However, my rational side constantly warred with my desire to leave: “why would you spend three years and $200k to get a J.D., go through all the suffering of law school tests, applying, the summer associate position, and the bar exam just to quit in three months?”  This was my constant debate over the next several months, up to the point where I left.

Thanksgiving came and went, and work actually slowed down.  My partner, to be fair, recognized that I had been burning the candle at both ends and thought I needed a break.  He avoided staffing me on a deal for the remainder of the year and my holidays were actually pleasant and restful.  And I forgot about sending out my resume.  Of course, this didn’t last very long and come the new year, I found myself in the same position as before, my personal life and time living and dying by the lifecycle of the deal.  It turns out that I had done a commendable job on my past deals, and I was ready to start operating without the guiding hand of a senior associate, at least with respect to the due diligence.  My workload increased again, but without my senior associate interceding and turning down the demands of other associates and partners, I found myself buried again.  Yet this time around, I held onto my quiet defiance with knowledge of the fact that my resume was out there, circulating.

Work continued to mount and I continued my late nights, while fighting against senior associates hounding me for work product and my partner staffing me on new assignments.  I closed my door purposely, in order to deter passerby’s from dropping in and in the natural flow of any conversation, deciding I needed more work.  I kept busy, and learned to work faster and more efficiently.  By the end, diligence became old hat, and I no longer feared the large document drops as I had in the first few months of my job.  However, new challenges always presented themselves.  I got staffed on a few licensing deals, which I knew nothing about.  Often times, as a specialist, I would jump onto a deal mid-cycle, feeling lost and inundated with deal documents.  I still rarely took a Saturday or Sunday off.  On one occasion, on the eve of deal signing after spending the last several nights working, I fell asleep instead of hopping on an 11PM conference call for the corporate attorneys.  I had already submitted my portion of the diligence memo, fully negotiated the IP reps and warranties, and thought I was in the clear.  Early the next day, I remember turning to my nightstand, saw that I had missed over 100 emails and felt a sinking feeling in my stomach.  I saw that the senior associate on the deal (my friend and also a mentor) had been up all night and took my place on the call while sending out emails at 4AM.  The deal had signed overnight.  I truly felt bad that I had dropped the ball by going to sleep instead of staying up for the call.

After that experience, I renewed my desire to get out.  By this time, it was around March, so I had around six months of experience under my belt.  As I said before, the rational side of me thought that by going back to software engineering, I would be throwing away years of my life and hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Yet I was still desperate to get out.  So I thought I would try my hand at applying for in-house positions.  There’s a website, called http://www.goinhouse.com, that lists in-house job postings.  I would check this site and linkedin daily for job postings for junior in house counsel positions.  Nothing took.  I prepared a detailed cover letter and resume, and submitted it to every junior in-house position I could find, but never received any response (some to this day).  I tried my network as well.  One friend, a director at his startup, told me of an opening on their legal team.  I applied there and most likely due to the strength of my friend’s recommendation, had a phone screen with the startup’s attorney.  I remember clearing my schedule that day and hopped in my car, trying to drive to a secluded parking lot where I could do the phone screen in peace.  I didn’t get far enough in time by the time the phone screen started, and ended up taking the call from my car.  The end result: while the interviewer was “impressed with my knowledge”, I was too junior.  Another time, my friend referred me to Google and I was flat out rejected for not having enough experience. After several failures, I finally found a position for a junior transactional attorney on goinhouse, with a new legal startup.  It was a contract position, which I had avoided until now.  For those readers who are not attorneys, contracting positions are generally looked upon with disfavor by law firms.  It’s a black mark on one’s resume.  Yet I was desperate enough to not care.  I reasoned to myself that even if I was leaving my law firm job after only half a year, I would still be leaving it for a legal job.  I could then evaluate whether I really wanted to leave law, so I wouldn’t be completely throwing away my education and time spent in the law.  I submitted my resume and to my surprise, heard back from the lead recruiter within a few days.  We had an initial phone screen, and she wanted to continue the conversation.

This legal startup is geared towards working mothers.  They call it “high end contracting” and claim to hire high-caliber attorneys to do biglaw type jobs at a cheaper rate.  The hours were flexible, and work could be picked up at the pace of the contract attorney.  It sounded perfect to me.  I scheduled the on-site interview for early in the morning, so I could wake up early and drive into the city and back to my law firm before the day started.  Anyone would just expect that I had gotten a late start.  On the day of the interview, I ended up underestimating traffic, and was five minutes late to the meeting.  It turns out that it didn’t matter.  I walked into the startup’s well-appointed office, took a seat and waited for my on-site interview to begin.  After a few minutes wait, the leader recruiter with whom I had spoken on the phone brought me into her office.  We started talking about my background, why I wanted to leave my law firm, and what this startup was trying to accomplish.  After half an hour of talking, the lead recruiter rejected me on the spot.  She told me that I was too junior for them to hire me, even for a contractual position.  She told me to reapply when I had more experience, and sent me on my way with some mints and lip balm.

Dejected, I made the long trek back to my office, where I closed my door and contemplated my future as a lawyer.  I looked at the spreadsheet that I had made, which counted down the months until I my net worth was $0.  Still over two years away.  I knew I wouldn’t make it.  I abandoned my plan to stay in law, and began to draft a new resume.

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How I left biglaw (Part I)

Another popular question I received when I made the decision to leave biglaw was how I got out.  This is my story, and it won’t apply to everyone.  However, I hope that other associates can relate to the fears and feelings I had when I was planning my exit.  And I hope that it gives some hope to those friends and colleagues who feel stuck.  The story is long, so I’ll have to give you some background first.

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My desire to leave biglaw really started during my summer associateship.  Bear in mind that this was back in 2011.  The legal economy was still reeling from the economic recession, law firms were facing bleak times, and though things were improving, law firms had still not recovered.  Salaries were still frozen, offer rates were way down, and law firm layoffs made the news daily.  I think Cravath’s class size had dropped from 120 to about 30.  Everyone I knew was worried about getting a job, even at the top law schools around the country.  I monitored ATL on a daily basis, had a massive spreadsheet of every law firm that had conducted layoffs (I purposefully bid them all lower during OCI) and concerned myself with finding the best law firm (read: most profitable and highest offer rate) I could get into.

The circumstances at the time colored my decision and my actions during my summer associateship. Essentially, I arrived for the summer with my other classmates fearful for my job and potential offer, so I was ready to hit the ground running.  I wanted to make sure that I stood out even among my other peers (no small task), so I would produce the best work quality I could while putting in the necessary time.  It turns out that that is a lot easier said than done.  On the third day of my summer associateship, I agreed to help one of the other junior associates with some bookkeeping tasks before a public filing goes out, a process called “circle ups.”  A circle up, for non-corporate attorneys, is essentially the process of going through a public filing (in this case, about a 100 page 10-K), identifying all the “material” numbers, then cross-referencing them with previous filings to see if they were missing any relevant information.  Then, the associate takes to the task of verifying these material numbers with accountants or other experts based on their level of significance.  It’s a ridiculously tedious task (you can imagine how many numbers there are in a public filing about 100 pages long).

That day I ended up staying in the office until around 1:30AM to finish circling and sticking post it notes next to all the numbers in the 10-K.  Tired from the long task, I turned in my work to the junior corporate associate thinking that I would finally go home.  However, much to my surprise/dismay, she said that we would be hopping on a call shortly to go over the results with a senior associate (also my associate mentor for the summer).  I was completely shocked.  It was already 1:30 in the morning, I had just spend the last 15 hours in the office circling hundreds of numbers and now it was time to verify them?  This was my first taste of the “real work” that corporate attorneys do.  I wondered what I had gotten myself into.  Things progressed much the same for the rest of the summer, but still at the end, and despite the long hours, I stilled needed a job offer (which I ultimately received).  I already knew I wouldn’t like the job, but I needed one because my student loans were mounting.  I remember on the last day of my summer associateship when my offer arrived, I felt a wave of relief but also the first feeling of desperation that this would be my life.  While waiting to go home on that day, I started browsing our school’s career website for other firms to interview at 3L year in case I wanted to go somewhere less intense.  I never tried.

Fast forward a year to my orientation week at this same law firm.  The law firm flew the incoming first-year associate class out first-class (my first time), put us up in luxurious accommodations and eased us into the law firm experience with relaxed sessions where other more senior lawyers told us battle stories and how to succeed at the firm.  In short, orientation week was good.  We celebrated the end of the week with a night out where we heard whispers of new associates already being contacted by partners looking for people to work the weekend (the partner eventually changed his mind when he learned that the new associate hadn’t been issued a laptop yet).  Though I laughed it off nervously, it turns out that this practice was not out of the ordinary at all, and the same fate was about to befall me.

Orientation week was the last time while at the firm that I called it a night at 5:00PM.  Pretty much from the next Monday on, I started getting slammed with work.  The trial run was over; this was real life.  I had chosen this career, my fate, my means of survival, and it would be a long stretch before getting out.  For the first three months, I never took a day off. I was on back to back deals, learning the ropes, drinking from the firehose, and working all the time.  I hated it.  My original plan of just biding my time for 4 years until I had saved enough to pay off my loans and gotten enough experience to jump in house eventually decreased in duration to three years, then to two, then finally to one.  Each day was tortuous, and while I liked my coworkers and the pay, I lived in constant fear that my schedule and life would get interrupted by a “hot” deal.  By November, I felt like I was burning out, and I looked forward to some respite over Thanksgiving.  I made plans with my family to go away for the long weekend, to relax somewhere and not think about work.  The plans were made, we were set to go.  Then it hit.  The Tuesday before Thanksgiving at 5:30PM, I received an email from our of counsel: “We just found out about a ‘short-fuse’ deal and need someone to staff it.  Looks like it will run over Thanksgiving.  Sorry.’  My heart sank.  I felt empty, broken, powerless.

I had thought about leaving before then.  It only takes so many late Friday night emails to break one’s spirit.  Maybe my peers or others have more guts or a stronger will than me, but every time I got a message like that, my desperation grew.  Somewhere during the two month marathon of work, I had actually prepared a resume, highlighting my software engineering background, which I planned to send out if things ever got really bad.  It was a symbol of defeat, my ace up my sleeve, but something to keep in the back pocket just in case.  I sent it out the same day the email came.

Of course, nothing happened at first, but even the act of sending out my resume made me feel triumphant.  Though my grand plan to work for several years and go in-house flew out the window, I felt all right.  I felt hopeful for the first time since starting work that there was an exit, and that the wheels were in motion.  It turns out however, that it would be a long and arduous eight months before I finally had my opportunity.

Biglawrefuge Launch

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Big Law Refuge Launches

In the past few months, I’ve been working on a side project for law students called Biglawrefuge. Biglawrefuge is a website that makes it easy to share employment data.  My motivation in creating the website is the same motivation that has made news throughout the legal community in the past few years: a need for increased transparency.

Law schools and law firms are extremely secretive about these statistics.  Law schools, for instance, at the lower tiers have been accused of gaming statistics by counting students employed in fields other than law in their job statistics or employing their own grads to inflate their stats.  Law firms on the other hand, often have hard GPA cut offs which make it not worth the while of the law school applicant who comes in under the bar.  My hope is that biglawrefuge will serve as a platform for law school students and graduates alike to share information (anonymously) with each other so that we, as participants in the legal community, can help one another to make better and more informed decisions.  After all, choosing a law firm is a big undertaking.  It’s often made at the beginning of a law student’s 2L year, when that law student only has a vague inkling of the differences that matter among law firms.

In the coming months, I’ll continue rolling out biglawrefuge to more communities and I’ll try to market it more.  Hopefully, with time, it becomes a tool the empowers its users and becomes an indispensable tool for lawyers, future past and present.

A candid look at biglaw and big law firms from a biglaw dropout

Leaving biglaw behind

To any readers out there, whether you’re a biglaw attorney, law student, engineer, working professional considering law school or spambot, here’s an update on my life just over a year after my exodus from biglaw. It’s been just over a year since I left:

Giving notice

I still remember the day I gave my notice to my boss, a young and rising partner in my law firm, that I was leaving for a startup. My former partner, a highly intelligent and skilled attorney, of course sensed my reasons for leaving. But instead of speaking candidly about my experience, we spoke through with the layers of etiquette built up over time by biglaw attorneys.

I told him how much I enjoyed working with my fellow associates and for him, how much I respected him and appreciated his mentorship, and how the opportunity was too good to pass up. He told me how he appreciated my contributions to the law firm, how I was practicing at a level beyond my seniority and about my bright future at the firm and that he would regret seeing me go. And though we spoke truthfully to one another, we managed to miss the truth entirely.

I didn’t tell him how much I disliked working at the law firm; nor did I tell him that I probably would have accepted any position that gave me the opportunity to leave. I didn’t tell him about the aggregate toll that responding to emails 18 hours a day had taken on my sense of normalcy and happiness. I didn’t tell him how I, in desperation after having worked the first 8 weekends in a row, applied to engineering jobs after just two months in biglaw. I didn’t tell him about the numerous spreadsheets I had created and obsessively updated detailing how much money I would have each month, the day my net worth would be zero, and the day when my ROI on law school would overcome the opportunity cost of giving up my past engineering career. I didn’t tell him how many late nights I had spent in the past 6 months fighting to keep my eyes open while I watched old CS lectures and studied abstract data types and binary tree implementations. I didn’t tell him how scared I was to accept the position because I seriously doubted the viability of the startup and knew that it was completely leaving behind my legal background to perhaps never be used again. I didn’t tell him that despite all my fears and doubts, how easy it was me for to make the decision.

The decision to leave

What had caused my desperation to get out after just two months? It wasn’t just the long hours. I thought that might be the case, that perhaps I was just lazy, but in the aftermath of leaving my law firm, I still continued to work 50 hour weeks with about 20 hours of work a week on my personal projects. In fact, I was still putting in more time than I had at the firm. That actually led me to discover about myself that I didn’t shy away from work.

It wasn’t just the unpredictability of work, although that was a huge contributing factor. It’s really hard to describe what it’s like being tethered to your work phone and being on hook for any quantity of incoming work at any waking hour on any day of the week. I lived in fear of my phone, having been burned many times in the past by “short fuse” deals that needed me to drop everything and work the weekend. Like a traumatized animal, I learned to fear the words “what are you working on at the moment,” knowing that my answer would inevitably lead to more work. It turns out that it only took a few months of Friday night emails asking me to drop everything and work the weekend to break me.

It wasn’t just the nature of the work either, although each deal on which I was staffed meant the drudgery of hundreds of agreements, leases, and licenses being dropped into the dataroom at any time of day, waiting to be reviewed and summarized by me. It wasn’t solely the environment either, although it was astonishing to see the facades of contentment when so many associates were unhappy. You see, biglaw attorneys are exceedingly polite to one another. So polite, in fact, that the real feelings of biglaw attorneys rarely manifest themselves, except to those closest to the associate. This can’t be unknown by biglaw partners, but because associates don’t openly vocalize their discontent, biglaw partners have no incentive to improve conditions. Instead, we pretended to have fun, making casual jokes or observations about current affairs. We had RC car races, eating contents, a goodbye party for every associate or staffer who left. These events made for great PR to those outside the firm, but it was never mentioned how the attorneys would just sit there either awkwardly making small talk or checking their mobile devices waiting for an excuse to get back to work. It was of course all of these things, and more, that brought me to my breaking point.

In the month leading up to my departure, after I had my offer in hand from the startup, I constantly wondered to myself if I was insane for wanting to leave my biglaw career behind. I was at one of the most prestigious law firms in the country, had spent the last 4 years of my life devoted to learning the law and had a clear ticket to society’s elite and comfortable wealth if I could just put in the time. I sought counsel from others who had made the leap. Perhaps not coincidentally, almost all of them are startup founders. They, for the same reasons as me (and probably all associates), hated the biglaw machine and wanted out. Unlike me however, they had already mustered the courage and taken the leap. I was still waffling back and forth with whether it would be worth trying to make it to another year or at least six months until I received my year-end bonus. Ultimately, it wasn’t anything any one of those other biglaw deserters told me. In fact, I heard nothing new from them. If you’re a biglaw reader, you’re also likely not reading anything new. No, I knew all the facts, had considered the cost numerous times, and was just trying to convince myself to do something about it. It turn out that I already had made my decision.

Once I decided I was leaving, I knew that nothing my partner or anything other associates could say would convince me to stay. I knew that it was the right decision to leave, not in a year, not in six months, but at the very moment I was planning. It wasn’t about the startup or all the work I had put in to get back to the level of engineering competence to get hired. It turns out that it was just about the opportunity to leave. It turns out that any opportunity to leave was good enough. I’ll never forget the feeling when I gave my notice to that young partner. I didn’t begrudge him at all, not for the weekends he made me work, the workload, or anything else at the firm. I knew it was just part of his job. Instead, my sense of unadulterated joy came instead from the hope of a better future and of a happier life that leaving instilled. As I told that partner that I was leaving, I felt an enormous weight lifted off my shoulders like nothing in the world was or could go wrong. I felt emboldened, powerful and most importantly, free. I joke to my friends that I’ll never have as good a feeling in my life ever again, not unless I become a slave and receive my freedom.

The aftermath

So then, what’s the postscript after leaving -has my attitude changed in the last year?
No. The short answer is that I have not regretted once leaving biglaw for engineering. I regret some of the things biglaw afforded, like the salary or prestige of being able to call myself a lawyer. But when evaluating things as a whole, I would change nothing about my departure.

In the past year, I’ve set to work on several projects, one of which I’ve described on this blog called Dockumo. I have other projects in the queue, like building a solution to bluebooking, an insane kind of drudgery that law students subject themselves to involving following imprecise rules on how to cite certain legal works. As I stated before, I still work long hours, but the biggest difference is the fact that I’m now working for myself. The work that I do feels like it has purpose, that it is bettering me and my skills as an engineer, and can build upon itself to enable me to create bigger and more expansive projects -projects that can help others. Software, to me, is still the most efficient solution to many of the world’s biggest problems. Being able to program software is a powerful concept and skill, and it leads to ability to create anything I can dream of if I just put in the time and effort. That feeling of hope and potential to me is the greatest motivator of all; it is what gives my work purpose and it was exactly what I was missing when I was a biglaw attorney.