A BigLaw Life 'Measured Out with Coffee Spoons' Wasn't for Him
As a number of major law firms celebrated their renown this week in newly released US News & World Report and Working Mother rankings, at least two former BigLaw associates were happy to have found a new life elsewhere.
Although he had wonderful colleagues and worked on high-profile matters, a corporate job in a class of 100 new associates at an unidentified Manhattan law firm wasn’t for him, writes Chris Graham in the Globe and Mail.
And, as noted by Above the Law, University of Southern California law professor Stephen Bainbridge noted on his eponymous blog that he worked at one of the four law firms cited by Working Mother, albeit years ago, and found it “a pretty miserable place to work” due to a lack of work/life balance.
While he also liked his law firm colleagues and had some interesting clients and fascinating projects, the pressure to bill, he writes, was enormous.
Graham wrote in a lengthy account of his decision to leave his firm after two years that the problem wasn’t so much the hours as the inability to plan an outside life due to the unpredictability of last-minute assignments.
“When your work is unfulfilling and unbounded, there are no amount of great colleagues, terribly important assignments and certainly even Martin Amis Money that can keep your chest from feeling like it’s being torn apart,” he says in the Globe and Mail article. “Your free time becomes amorphous just when you need it most and it becomes impossible to find something that feels like your life.”
His solution was an e-mail sent at the end of 2008 to Regent’s Park College at the University of Oxford, with a flavor of desperation reminiscent of a famous T.S. Eliot poem: “Please take me as a history and politics undergraduate. My life is being measured out with coffee spoons and the drawer is nearly empty.”
After earning a second bachelor’s degree, Graham isn’t sure what will come next. But, having made it as a BigLaw associate on Wall Street for two years, he is sure he can get by.
