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Feces Starship posted:For firms that have ~2500 billable hour requirements, how on earth do they keep billing honest? They probably don't. Or they send their attorneys traveling a lot.
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Aug 4, 2011 04:10
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SlyFrog posted:I think this thread has been focusing too much on the "no jobs" stuff lately, and not enough on how the job itself will twist and corrupt you as a person. Clearly we need more, "The futile search for money is the only salve for my empty soul, for I have chosen a profession that makes monsters out of men," chat. Let me tell you about my "vacation" with my family this week. Saturday, travel. Sunday, edited brief, reviewed 70 page lease, returned calls on cell phone, was able to join family for dinner. Monday, went swimming with kids, then prepped the rest of the day for a depo. Tuesday - 8 hours of travel for a 2 hour depo, returned to vacation location only to have a multi-party email discovery fight. Today, worked all day on appeal on my laptop while sitting on deck, watching kids play. I did get to play a game of yatzee. Tomorrow, must finish appeal, and begin trial prep. Friday, if I get enough done with trial prep, I hope to go to on a boat ride. Probably not. Saturday, travel. entris posted:It's pretty cool/confusing having a secretary - what do I use her for? Copying? I don't have any idea how to handle that. LEARN TO DICTATE. I don't care how fast you can type, you can talk faster.
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Aug 4, 2011 04:50
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Solomon Grundy posted:LEARN TO DICTATE. I don't care how fast you can type, you can talk faster. Do people really do this? I never saw anyone do that but I guess I wasn't in litigation? I don't know about other people, but as someone who grew up in the computer age with an older secretary, I can actually type much faster than my secretary and couldn't imagine dictating stuff to her and having her type it up and having it be faster than me typing it. Then again, I'm also a strong writer and not a verbal person at all and I re-read and edit as I write. HooKars fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Aug 4, 2011 |
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Aug 4, 2011 05:09
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Last place I was at, half of the people used Dragon Naturally Speaking when 'writing' patents. I had no idea that people actually had a secretary for dictating...
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Aug 4, 2011 05:13
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NJ Deac posted:Patent law has two (arguably 3) career tracks... This is a really helpful post, NJ Deac, and I'm glad you took the time to type it out. Some of the careers outside of science seminars I've been to at major conferences have painted a similarly dismal picture of the law field. Used to be having expertise in a technical discipline was a good way to land a non-lawyer position as a technical specialist at a major firm. Alas, gone are the days. You're right that I'm interested primarily in patent prosecution, and I'm trying find out more about the career. I'm currently seeking one of those competitive positions as a technical specialist so I can get some exposure to the legal field and make a better decision about my future. The Dagda posted:That sounds pretty rad, why do you want to leave science? Regardless of how few law jobs there may be, I feel there are VERY few jobs for biologists. Working at big pharma you have to deal with layoffs, and assuming you want to have a job market at all you need to live in Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, or parts of New Jersey or New York. Employment anywhere else is spotty and lord help you if your company decides to downsize. Working at a university is an intellectual knife fight as you compete for those precious grants and tenure positions. Being a primary investigator means you do very little real science and instead spend your time herding graduate students through your lab and trying to keep them sober long enough to do some actual experiments. Regardless of the career path you pick you still work LONG hours and you don't generally see much financial return on the time you invest. The advantages to science are you can largely be your own boss and you do get the thrill of discovering new things.
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Aug 4, 2011 05:38
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Law is all of those downsides without the two upsides.
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Aug 4, 2011 05:41
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Do you have a PhD?
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Aug 4, 2011 07:13
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Solomon Grundy posted:LEARN TO DICTATE. I don't care how fast you can type, you can talk faster.
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Aug 4, 2011 08:56
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My office dictates. It makes sense for our most senior partner but the student was told she should learn how to dictate. I'm not sure how comfortable I'd be dictating. I'm the type, reread, and edit type. Speak, rewind, and rerecord seems meaningless to me since I'm still working on speaking off the cuff. I'd rather have my assistant do my formatting than type for me. Maybe that will change in a decade when I'm a brilliant advocate. Heh. But I'm sure they'll have speech-to-text perfected by then.
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Aug 4, 2011 13:02
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Penguins Like Pies posted:My office dictates. It makes sense for our most senior partner but the student was told she should learn how to dictate. I'm not sure how comfortable I'd be dictating. I'm the type, reread, and edit type. Speak, rewind, and rerecord seems meaningless to me since I'm still working on speaking off the cuff. I'd rather have my assistant do my formatting than type for me. Dictation is a tool, not a means to write briefs or contracts. I also am a very fast typist. But that is not the point. Dictation is extremely valuable for documenting things, not for writing. For example, if I have a phone conversation with a client, I pick up the recorder and dictate a 30 second memo about the conversation. Then 2 years later when the client is mad at me and says "I never told you that" I can demonstrate that yes, he did in fact tell me that. It is also extremely useful for giving tasks. At home in the evenings, I will be struck with thoughts of things that need to be done, and I dictate a 10 second instruction to my secretary - things like "prepare a bill for X, call accounting and get the costs for Y, pull the Z file and scan in the contract and email it to me, etc." I do a lot of appellate work, and dictation is invaluable for summarizing transcripts. I can read a transcript and dictate facts and page numbers at a much faster rate than I could type all that stuff myself. A transcript summary for a two week trial can reach 70+ pages. I'm not going to type "(Tr. Vol. VI, p. 749)" over and over again. As you get more comfortable with it, you can even dictate first drafts of substantive letters, then do the edits yourself. As soon as you realize that you don't have to rewind and get it perfect the first time, you can fly through it. Beleive me, as you get more and more buried later in your career, knowing how to dictate can allow you to dictate yourself out of holes.
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Aug 4, 2011 13:33
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nm posted:You must be in the only place that still does this. Not even the old fart senior partners get to dictate anymore.
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Aug 4, 2011 14:11
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HooKars posted:Do people really do this? I never saw anyone do that but I guess I wasn't in litigation? I don't know about other people, but as someone who grew up in the computer age with an older secretary, I can actually type much faster than my secretary and couldn't imagine dictating stuff to her and having her type it up and having it be faster than me typing it. Then again, I'm also a strong writer and not a verbal person at all and I re-read and edit as I write. It's faster for you. Who cares if it takes her an hour to type what would take you ten minutes, if it only took you five minutes to speak. You just saved five minutes, and can go do other poo poo.
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Aug 4, 2011 14:16
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I've noticed that everyone over the age of 35 at my firm dictates. EDIT: Which, to be clear, isn't a dig at Grundy but in fact quite the opposite - everyone who has been around for a long time uses the tool. Maybe I should learn.
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Aug 4, 2011 14:46
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Grundy is an old man though.
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Aug 4, 2011 15:29
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UCLA Law posted:We are excited to invite you to participate in UCLA School of Law’s Fall on-campus interview program this year, beginning on September 6. This Fall interview program will be our second session of interviewing and is primarily intended for small and mid-sized law firms, public interest organizations and government agencies. Blows me away that they CHARGE employers to attend.
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Aug 4, 2011 16:05
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Copernic posted:Blows me away that they CHARGE employers to attend. My guess it's to keep firms from just using them to build up stacks of resumes incase they ever actually need to hire.
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Aug 4, 2011 16:07
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Solomon Grundy posted:Dictation - it's so much more than 'take a letter.' Dictation is one of the very few things I miss from private firm work.
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Aug 4, 2011 16:45
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Feces Starship posted:For firms that have ~2500 billable hour requirements, how on earth do they keep billing honest? CaptainScraps posted:They probably don't. Or they send their attorneys traveling a lot.
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Aug 4, 2011 17:09
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I'm not doubting there's enough work to go around; what I'm doubting is that you can assemble 200-500 human beings that are willing to work that much as opposed to cheating and merely saying that you're working that much. I summered for the past two years at a small (~110 lawyers) midwestern firm where there's a 1800 hour requirement. It was drilled into us that lying about our hours was literally the highest non-criminal/fraudulent offense that would instantly result in our termination if caught once. There's one guy who billed 2200 last year, and he's revered as a God. He arrives at the office at seven in the morning and rarely leaves before nine. Work freaks exist. To get 2200+ you need to be a work freak. There do not seem to be as many work freaks on the planet as there are associate positions at megafirms. This puzzles me.
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Aug 4, 2011 20:35
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Baruch Obamawitz posted:It's faster for you. Who cares if it takes her an hour to type what would take you ten minutes, if it only took you five minutes to speak. You just saved five minutes, and can go do other poo poo. Making it rain, one non-dictated action at a time.
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Aug 4, 2011 21:16
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Solomon Grundy posted:Dictation is a tool... That's fair. I see it as a valuable skill but I just don't see it as having a place in my career just yet. As bottom rung of the firm ladder (and I will be for a while since they had to convert the prep room into my office), I won't be delegating tasks for a loooooong time. The concept of getting the assistant to photocopy one handout still baffles me.
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Aug 4, 2011 21:19
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Welp, Dow's sucking a big dick again, looks like this unemployment won't end soon.
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Aug 4, 2011 21:22
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Unemployment is going to be the same or worse for probably the next decade.
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Aug 4, 2011 21:39
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diospadre posted:Unemployment is going to be the same or worse for probably the next decade. There's an Oklahoma PD spot opening up, if anyone's interested.
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Aug 4, 2011 21:48
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Feces Starship posted:I'm not doubting there's enough work to go around; what I'm doubting is that you can assemble 200-500 human beings that are willing to work that much as opposed to cheating and merely saying that you're working that much. I doubt most of them cheated when billables were first hitting 2K, but I have no doubt a lot of them cheat at 2500. Keep in mind that when I entered LS in '02 there were still many NY BIGLAW firms where 2K was the genuine norm and 2200 was superstar territory, so this happened over less than a decade.
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Aug 4, 2011 21:48
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Feces Starship posted:I summered for the past two years at a small (~110 lawyers) midwestern firm where there's a 1800 hour requirement. Biglaw is not "large", its is biglaw and just another level. Call your 110 lawyer firm "small" to a boutique firm (that is actually small) and say goodbye to a job with good billables. Falsification of hours is huge. It can easily cost you your law license, will kill your reputation (word travels fast even in larger legal communities), and is probably criminal.
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Aug 4, 2011 22:43
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nm posted:Falsification of hours is huge. It can easily cost you your law license, will kill your reputation (word travels fast even in larger legal communities), and is probably criminal. Biglaw unethical? You don't say. It's the perfect system for partners. Set some unreachable goal, threaten termination if you don't reach it, act SHOCKED when your associate pads his/her hours. Fire them. Repeat.
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Aug 4, 2011 22:56
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2011/aug/04/law-case-sleepless-lawyersquote:Hidden deep within the enormous glass and steel buildings that house London's big corporate legal firms are little bedrooms where shattered lawyers can grab a quick nap. Some are done out in the style of Japanese capsule hotels, others are just plain old rooms with single beds.
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Aug 4, 2011 22:57
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Man that poo poo sounds loving terrible. Enjoy your money, I'll enjoy my life. I've literally never heard one single thing about life at huge law firms that makes me ever want to work in one.
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Aug 4, 2011 23:36
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Anyone else taking the MPRE tomorrow? I managed to fail the first time by a few points by not doing any prep whatsoever and being so hung over during the exam, I left after an hour. Watched the BarBri lecture, went over the handout a few times, and did a few practice exams today. I'm going to be golden.
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Aug 5, 2011 00:34
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William Lee posted:Anyone else taking the MPRE tomorrow? I was you exactly last fall and passed with an 83. You're golden as long as you don't want to practice in an 85 jurisdiction.
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Aug 5, 2011 02:34
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Between all this talk of tumbling stock markets and napping in steel cubicles I will quietly share that I received my post-grad offer today and accepted
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Aug 5, 2011 03:35
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joat mon posted:There's an Oklahoma PD spot opening up, if anyone's interested. http://www.law.state.ak.us/department/jobs.html There are 17 entry level AG / DA positions in AK, many in Anchorage. Alaska a) pays a living wage in the city and A Whole Lot outside of the city, and b) is awesome. Lots of you have outstanding offers of letters / phone calls of reference (nm). Also, that list does not include the plethora of PD offices across the State, nor does it include clerkships. Edit: I'm willing to negotiate various forms of tasty sandwich compensation and/or tasty pie compensation for favorable recommendations to anyone. BigHead fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Aug 5, 2011 |
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Aug 5, 2011 08:24
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sigmachiev posted:Between all this talk of tumbling stock markets and napping in steel cubicles I will quietly share that I received my post-grad offer today and accepted
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Aug 5, 2011 12:16
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Vander posted:I was you exactly last fall and passed with an 83. You're golden as long as you don't want to practice in an 85 jurisdiction. That was me 
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Aug 5, 2011 14:17
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Green Crayons posted:Clerkship? I recall that being the last thing you mentioned you were really working towards. I did the BigLaw SA thing in SoCal this summer so that's what I was talking about. As for clerking, that's still something I'm working on although more and more I think it's a futile effort given only decent grades last year and the fact that judges are trending towards hiring people with experience. My attitude at this point is that if it happens then tits, if not eh. E: Last time I checked ATL, most solid firms were giving 100% offer rates, except for those who are social morons. How's our little band here doing? sigmachiev fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Aug 5, 2011 |
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Aug 5, 2011 14:58
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Baruch Obamawitz posted:That was me I'll do you one better. I got an 85 on the first try, which satisfied every state but the one where I'm going to be working - California (and Utah but who cares about that).
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Aug 5, 2011 17:14
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God drat, I hate Lexis.
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Aug 5, 2011 17:50
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Haw, deputy public defender again on monday. Wooo.
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Aug 5, 2011 21:08
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nm posted:Haw, deputy public defender again on monday. Wooo. Congratulations on getting your job back (sort of?) 
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