Biglaw Blinders

Biglaw blinders are on your head so you don’t accidentally see reality and trample people on your way out the door.

Today, I’d like to talk about the Biglaw blinders. Not blinders like on windows, but rather blinders like the things carriage horses wear on their eyes to cut off their peripheral vision so they don’t get spooked and start trampling people. (They’re actually called “blinkers.”) Same thing in Biglaw: they’re on your head so you don’t accidentally see reality and trample people on your way out the door.

But when you leave — however you leave — the blinders come off. And it’s fun sometimes to look back at what you used to consider normal. Once you take off the Biglaw blinders, you start to realize, hey, a lot of that stuff wasn’t normal at all. What was I thinking?

  • Billing. Billing for copies, billing for four-minute phone calls, billing for hours of research that you could have stopped way earlier had the assigning attorney let you. All to either gouge the client further or to try to meet a billable-hour requirement that’s ultimately going to depend on a lot of variables you have no control over.
  • Hours. Duh. Do I even need to say anything? Funny how quickly it becomes normal to leave work at 1 a.m. every night. So much so when someone says they were able to leave at 10 p.m., the first reaction is always, “that’s not so bad.” That’s not so bad? It’s 10 o’clock at night and you’re just now leaving work!
  • Pay raises. Pay raises more than the actual pay, because there are other six-figure jobs out there and people land in-house positions all the time that pay around what they were getting at their firm. But their annual raises go back to normal, and normal isn’t the Biglaw raises. Last year, the official cost of living adjustment (COLA) was 1.7%, and federal government employees received a 1% raise. If 1% were the norm in Biglaw — strike that, even if 1.7% were the norm in Biglaw — then associates in New York entering their fifth year would make $213,570 instead of $230K. And then the next year, they’d be at $217,200 instead of $250,000. Pretty soon it gets to be a wide gap.
  • 24-hour support. My only non-law firm jobs of any length of time have been in state and federal government and in restaurants, but I’d be willing to bet not too many places have 24-hour on-site admin and word processing support.
  • Vacation. I previously wrote about Biglaw not being vacation-friendly, so I won’t repeat myself. Don’t put down any deposits!
  • Verbal abuse by partners (and, in my case, secretaries). I can’t believe some of the stuff I put up with. Don’t get me wrong — some of the partners I worked with were great. Most, even. But not all, because Biglaw is no fairy-tale world. I’d wonder how the person got to be such a kook. Obviously in SmallLaw there are difficult clients, but by and large, all clients just want to feel they’re getting their money’s worth. And the crabby clients wind up getting weeded out, for it’s hard not to be partial towards the pleasant clients. Whereas it’s relatively easy to keep raising the rates for the crabby ones. (“Oh sorry, that was the rate for June 24th. It’s now June 25th.”)
  • Work cafeteria that serves dinner. Think about that. The cafeteria at work serves dinner. Dinner. Hint for those who never worked in Biglaw: it’s not so attorneys can grab takeout to eat on their way home. Unless you’re at Google or working the night shift in a hospital, it’s not normal for work cafeterias to be serving employees dinner.

It’s hard to put the blinders back on once you’ve taken them off. Not impossible — after all, in a profession that has a median annual salary of $114,300, those numbers in the raise bullet above can look mighty nice. But there are other ways to make a buck. I’d rather leave the BBs off and have control over my practice, my clients, and yep, as corny as it may sound, my life. Biglaw blinders no more.


Gary J. Ross opened his own practice, Jackson Ross PLLC, in 2013 after several years in Biglaw and the federal government. Gary handles corporate and compliance matters for investment funds, small businesses, and non-profits, occasionally dabbling in litigation. You can reach Gary by email at Gary.Ross@JacksonRossLaw.com.

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