I moved out of my truck about a year ago.

I'll get a Pic for you, hold on.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5677012&forum_id=2#48633054)

The Silent Gen (and even Greatest Gen) leaders retired, died, and stepped away. They came up in an era when you took a house on the shore for 6 weeks in the summer and went to Europe for a month at a time and generally did no significant work while you were out. They worked hard when they were in, but they had the awareness to recognize that the demands of practice were, indeed, demanding. And they understood that they were building on the work of those who came before them and were setting up for those who would came after. The Boomers who replaced them were myopic maniacs by comparison, pulling up the ladder behind them. A 1958 ABA pamphlet encapsulated the legal world these old-guard lawyers came into. In the pamphlet, the ABA stated that there were “only approximately 1,300 fee-earning hours per year.” Fifty years later, 2,000 billable hours per year was a generally accepted baseline minimum for a decent worker. And 200 billable hours per month was a common lower limit for a moderately "full plate" where you could start, potentially, turning away additional work. (I'll pause to note that some of the older Boomers who are still in practice are self aware and embody some of these old-guard qualities. Those qualities are mostly absent in the younger Boomers and Gen X.)

Layer onto that the shock that 2008 ITE sent through most industries and the increased competition for partners with a portable book. Firms moved away from lockstep promotions and partner compensation. They decided that they could not have a down year, and that they had to pay more to top partners, and therefore they had to squeeze their young lawyers harder to get what they thought they needed.

At the same time, the long-term career rewards of that increased junior-associate workload diminished significantly. A Boomer colleague who was a lifer (40 years) at a single V10 firm estimated that over 50% of his incoming associate class became equity partners at the firm within 9 years of finishing law school. Most of them did it after 7 years. And he said that most of the rest did not want breakfast, instead choosing to leave for in-house, government, or business jobs. Now, it's standard for a firm, each year, to bring in 150 summer associates/150 first year associates + 75 lateral associates and to give breakfast to, in a good year, 10 associates.

In the meantime, society was coming apart at the seams. Desirable neighborhoods where a lawyer could have afforded to raise his kids decades earlier were either no longer desirable, no longer affordable, or both. There are about 60 million more people in the US today than there were just 25 years ago. That's 50% more than the entire population of Canada.

And the coup de grace, the worst of the worst, the evil thread tying it all together, was the shift in technology that occurred at the same time. Before 2008, you might log in from your hard-wired desktop at home, or, on occasion, someone might call you or send you a fax. And you often left the office with work to do before the next morning. But generally, no new work came in that demanded your attention before your arrival in the office the next morning. By a few years after 2008, everyone was connected to everyone else all the time. And a lot of them wanted a response immediately. "The other side just sent their mark up. How does the indemnity look?" "Plz review." "Where are we on this?" "Thank."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5677012&forum_id=2#48633264)

WE HAD A FIRM AND WE TRIED REAL HARD

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5677012&forum_id=2#48633287)