Date: September 10th, 2026 8:47 AM Author: wine ungodly box office alpha
I have job applicants champing at the bit to work for less. It always blows my mind how little shitlaw associates are paid. I hired a guy recently who 20+ years of experience who said he was hoping to make 80-90k. He's on track to make 105 with me.
Date: September 10th, 2026 9:50 AM Author: thriller high-end area roommate
I have 8 shitlaw associates who make on average about 120k plus decent benefits. They love me. I pay staff a little above (the very low) local market rate and I am embarrassed by how happy that makes them.
You can hire useful people at very reasonable rates IMO
No Doobs but what kind of area are you located in and what kind of cases do you do? I'm in a Southern state doing general civil litigation. Most of it ends up involving some type of real estate dispute like who owns the family farm.
Date: September 15th, 2026 12:34 PM Author: thriller high-end area roommate
I am in a coastal state but not within the sphere of influence of any large city. We live in a very nice town of around 50k people where the voting base is solidly red. The opera is a couple hours away.
We do a little of a bunch of things. I more or less oversee real estate, corporate work, local governance/zoning, and low level tax work. I have a partner who oversees civil lit and estate work. Me and him can do pretty much everything the other can do except I don't know much about domestic matters and he doesn't like them so we rarely take them. And we have a third partner who does anything criminal (tickets, DUI, up to murder).
Real estate, decedent's estates, and traffic/DUI are the bread and butter.
Date: September 15th, 2026 7:27 PM Author: thriller high-end area roommate
I work very hard to make sure my practice is as quiet and boring as possible. I'm fact that's easily what I spend the most amount of my time doing. I immediately fire any client or employee who gives me the least amount of concern.
Date: September 16th, 2026 8:02 PM Author: thriller high-end area roommate
I'll clear 400K and change this year. Maybe 450. Crimbro about the same. Third partner about 10% more. He works way harder than me, I honestly don't do a ton of work at this point. I'm in the office right 930 to 5 and take a kind lunch. I do need to be there though, most of the questions from staff come into me. Other than that it's pretty chill and a good living in my part of the world. HBU?
That's great. I'm on track to make 2 mil or so. I have a few dozen shitlaw associates in multiple locations. I rarely go to court, but it is definitely not chill. I spend my time focusing on sales, collections, controlling expenses, hiring, growth, etc. I end up thinking about money almost all day, and I'm always scrutinizing our cash flow to make sure we survive. I live and die by the little notifications of a client paying an invoice. Slowly building assets so that one day all these ups and downs won't matter so much.
Date: September 16th, 2026 9:23 PM Author: thriller high-end area roommate
Damn son. I'm jelly of that income but you need to let go of some of that stress. Not worth it IMO. I picked two really good partners and we're very different but we literally never disagree about the biz. One of the guys works too much IMO but still takes plenty of vacation.
I remember back in the day being super worried whether I could take a draw that month (or the next month) but those days are long gone. I would make some changes if I was you, maybe fire some people and make a milli but lower stress.
They're not geniuses but some are surprisingly quite competent. But you have to watch shitlawyers. Every so often, one of them will flame out, become an alcoholic or drug addict, start filing bizarre and incomprehensible motions, or just disappear. I have multiple people in my firm who are "supervisors" keeping a close eye on my workforce, such as it is.
Date: September 10th, 2026 1:42 PM Author: passionate cuckoldry
I’m in-house so they’re completely a cost center. Hiring them purely for a function and will be ready to replace them with AI as soon as I can. Advertisement basically said NO STRIVERS.
Date: September 10th, 2026 6:46 PM Author: cheese-eating pit
Honestly, for a first in-house job this is fine. During ITE (2011-2012ish) I would have taken this without any hesitation. If you throw them some normal in-house work (random agreements and a variety of typical issues) so they can speak to it in a few years at their future interviews they'll be thrilled with all of this.
Are these people just non value additive? What do they do? Are these people from T50 schools who squeak into BL and burn out after 3 years? I just find the bifurcation in outcomes between lawyers unbelievable. Some are SL kings/BL partners, others are SL or ID associates or in-house peons. Is this self selection or is it just due to lack of relative ability? Seems like your path is determined from the beginning depending on whether you go TTT or T14.
Date: September 10th, 2026 7:14 PM Author: concupiscible doctorate
Lawyers don’t add value to society at all. It’s a Fake Job. Extremely shrewd and connected top 0.1% lawyers come in handy if you’re rich though.
Biglaw sells people on its Eliteness and the Polish of acing OCI. The highest high end stuff is prestigious and makes the rich richer and the prestige trickles down. Normal Bro big lawyers suck and are worth $0k in the actual economic system.
I know you bombed OCI and attended a TTT but some lawyers are value additive; I think of top corporate partners in particular whose legal acumen can be valuable in resolving business issue and facilitating 9 figure plus transactions. Then there’s the ambulance chasing CSLG types (recognizing he is the MJ of ambulance chasing but still) and borderline retarded paper pushing fake email job cost center people who send a few emails per week and who apparently (as I learned here) earn 100k. I’d imagine so long as you attend a T14 (or even T20) you won’t fall into that latter category.
Date: September 10th, 2026 7:58 PM Author: concupiscible doctorate
They do Nothing and they suck ass at what little they do, like redlining contracts for No Reason or because they have a quota of how much of others’ time to waste.
Date: September 10th, 2026 9:17 PM Author: cheese-eating pit
This is exactly wrong. Law firm lawyers love stupid redlines that are pointless because they bill hours. In-house people try to get deals done with as little grief as possible.
Date: September 11th, 2026 12:56 AM Author: concupiscible doctorate
you are literally an in-house guy speaking solely for himself.
Literally everyone in the entire world, every single Scumbag, every single prole, every single doctor, every single Nerd who has 50,000% more shit inside his brain than lawyers by the time he's 16 hates lawyers and thinks they do nothing. China doesn't even have them afaict and they are thriving atm. Ok yes maybe 8.75% of them are Cool like you but jfc you could literally say that about cops or mall cops or whatever. This is why I let my License Lapse.
Date: September 11th, 2026 1:14 AM Author: cheese-eating pit
My company literally has in-house lawyers in China so no. Chinese companies also absolutely employ in-house lawyers. You're just demonstrating that you have no idea what you're talking about.
But yes, I was talking to some German guy who was a tech exec at my co who said if it were up to him he would only hire lawyers like with advanced technical degrees and real world tech experience. I explained that our legal department would be massively understaffed and actually more expensive since we would have to use law firms for everything.
Date: September 11th, 2026 7:56 AM Author: concupiscible doctorate
This is just an example of what I was talking about itt. Everyone hates lawyers and thinks that they suck. That guy just wants lawyers to basically not exist or be Lawgineers with extreme Nerd tendencies with relatively little interest in liberal arts.
Date: September 11th, 2026 12:37 PM Author: cheese-eating pit
I agree with that, especially in tech. This isn't limited to lawyers though, tech bros don't want to interact with non-tech people pretty much ever. Maybe if they're female, 18, hot and being paid to fuck and nothing else. Even then they might prefer that they are nerd girls.
Date: September 10th, 2026 7:33 PM Author: cheese-eating pit
It isn't just lawyers, a lot of people in corps do normal functions where they're not that difficult to replace. I make around $500k at this point but there are a lot more lawyers making $200-250kish than $500kish and up (both where I work and in-house generally). I have a lot of institutional knowledge and am the person who built a lot of what we do for a variety of circumstances. The people making junior lawyer money will need at least a few years before they become truly valuable.
Background: tons are biglaw burnouts, some are not super impressive and were at smaller/shittier firms but happened to specialize in something we needed.
SL Kings are super rare, as are real BL partners (the ones with equity and not just glorified of counsels). I think people also fail to understand what "ability" means here. It isn't what the LSAT tests for or academic prestige signals or whatever. It is a combo of willingness to have your entire life be building your book of business and practicing law while consistently avoiding fucking up in a significant way (harder than you might think when you're sleep deprived for years on end). Many of these people are truly miserable, probably more as a percentage than people stuck as regular in-house counsels making $210k or whatever.
By the way, I went biglaw and ended up taking a lowball in-house offer and now make a good salary and have a decent QOL. I'm happy with my outcome. But law is a tough field no matter your background and because of oversaturation any flaws compound to make your path to success far harder.
Date: September 11th, 2026 12:04 AM Author: cheese-eating pit
Institutional knowledge is knowing how shit actually works at whatever company (the institution). How does anything actually get done there? Who do you need to talk to? How do they operate their business? No one goes to lawyers for a lecture on the majesty of the law or a legal memo. They want concrete advice and it takes the form of "we have product x and now we want to modify it in y way. Any problems here?" If you don't understand product x and don't understand the implications of y changes then you're useless. They have zero interest in teaching lawyers, so generally the person who they deal with needs to know that shit. As you can guess, hiring a junior and teaching them all of that takes literally years (especially in a megacorp) so the value of a new person is much lower because of this. And what they really want goes beyond just "legal advice." They want to know how to do whatever they need. We want to use AI to interact with customers. Ok, well, you need a notice that they're talking to AI and not humans. How do we get that notice? The lawyer needs to be ready to talk to the right people to make that happen.