LawSchool.Life

Except we know that’s wrong for our only 2 examples: Jones day and wachtell. Both black box. One above market player and one below market. One firm had 0 associates over 8 years blab to ATL; the other had like 100+ associates in 1 month blab.

A lot of these smaller firms that fucking grind want associates to buy into the culture. They don’t want the comp to be a distinguishing factor to an outsider/money whore. They want people committed to the team and don’t have a shortage of interest so they don’t have to set themselves apart from mar...

Key word being tight lipped ASSOCIATES. Tight lipped firm black box would def be below market. Tight lipped associates are above market. No one knows how much wachtell is above market anymore. 2nd years there prolly making like 500k ATL hasn’t gotten an update since they were 100% bonused.

The above is good advice, but I’d also consider reworking your resume at this point some too.

If you’re going to a firm with rotational program, rotate through things.

But yeah sounds like you should try transactional at a biglaw firm. And if you don’t like that, then you should probably think about non big law options.

Probably best to start by identifying the region you want to practice in as this stuff is pretty region dependent.

Then comb chambers and look at the band 1 practitioners for that region and look at their bios and you can see what they do.

Money in SPY averages a 9% annual return though. So yeah maximization is almost always risk preference based.

The subsidized loans don’t accrue interest in interest fwiw on PAYE for 3 years. Not sure if that’s true under standard 10 year payment or whatever lrap pays, but worth looking into that. Might be a moot point.

Ah small debt load and see you have some biglaw later from op. There’s no optimization here though. Just a risk preference. You can either get a guaranteed return on your loan balance or put the money in the market for an unguaranteed return or just buy shit you want and pretend it has a mark up on ...

Wait you’re planning to ride out lrap?! Don’t make any payments if going lrap or Pslf

For REPAYE, you have to file jointly. AFAIK this is wrong. You can file separately but your REPAYE payments are based on adjusted gross income (combined) regardless. Filing jointly is probably going to make more sense for most couples but it’s not a requirement. Correct thanks. I don’t think it wil...

For REPAYE, you have to file jointly. Which IBR payment is she on? Are you PAYE eligible? What’s her salary and your debt loads? There are times where it’s better to file jointly if you both have large debt numbers. For example, if her debt to income ratio is pretty significant, it will be beneficia...

Some guy in my firm apparently got 100K for billing 3K hours. A partner said jokingly ppl will feel bad when compared to this associate's performance. I was like nah bruh. Not even. Sucks how billing 3000 hours is automatically viewed as "good performance". I've worked with a few people who have hi...

Yeah my understanding of lrap was you sign up for PAYE but then over pay according to your lrap received monthly allowance which is equivalent/pegged to the 10 year repayment. No difference in that case but you get some government benefits under PAYE. So I think it’s actually slightly beneficial to ...

AOT - My plan A (as discussed above) would be the same: be on PAYE and put the excess covered by your LRAP to your loans. Based on the income exemption worldtraveler mentioned, your PAYE should be 0 for all time you’re abroad and under the 100k+ threshold. However, if that plan is not an option, I w...

On a different topic than PSLF, I just got back my REPAYE recertification. Not bad. Mine is based on full year employment in biglaw (ish) including bonus and everything.... Still comes out wayyy less than my 10 year flat payments are (based on what they revert me to while processing my recertificat...

The govt fucked it up. They couldn’t process people’s annual/IDR applications on time. Have you not read some of the wildly inconsistent crazy shit me and chicken have posted? The govt contracts this out to the most inept orgs. All of the news botched this story. You think 99% of people are paying m...

What kind of lit would you want to do? I don’t know a ton about these firms, especially their lit groups. I’d probably pick Katten just for the money and the fact that I’ve known multiple people to work there now and none have left in years (1 been there 6 years; 1 joined in 2015 as a mid level and ...

HUGE private letter ruling issued by the IRS (not amounting to precedent but is a blessing) that companies can set up 401ks for employees to go to student loan payments. Next step is for congress to authorize a higher 401k amount (tbd obviously) but if so, people on RE/PAYE will be able to defer inc...

Trying to decide if I should try to pay the accrued interest on my loans before it capitalizes in a couple months. Are the pros/cons I might not be thinking about for this? Similarly, are there pros/cons to going ahead and taking the loans out of deferment early or making early payments? Entirely d...

Thanks for taking questions. Just graduated and have 80k in federal loans. Starting big law soon. I don't think I have more than two years of big law in me. Is it misguided to spend my first year paying off this 80k as aggressively as possible (hopefully in a little over 1 year), and spend the rest...

Bumping this thread for anyone that wants to throw out their personal numbers since there should be some graduates looking into this soon. 1) with refi rates on the rise, REPAYE becomes more attractive bc the govt pays half your unpaid interest each month which effectively reduces your rate 2) with ...

Yeah it happens a decent amount. How have you seen it happen? Need advice. Thanks! Probably by (1) having excellent academics and (2) coming from a top pier firm or a top firm to a *lesser* firm. Just requires mass mailing and applying broadly with a compelling narrative for why you want to switch ...

Yeah it happens a decent amount.

Chasing prestige is where many people go wrong and why their biglaw careers end abruptly