Life after 4 years

An update on me

Well I’ve been working as a lawyer for a total of four years (including graduate training) so I thought it was about time to provide an update.

In summary, I’m still very happy to be a lawyer! The work is very challenging and I continue to learn every day. I prefer to be busy rather than sitting around with not much to do so the private practice environment suits well – that said, I could do with a few hours less in the office each week.

I’m certainly more jaded and cynical than when I started, but not enough that my general outlook on a career in law has changed (and not enough to actively dissuade you from studying – though some of my contemporaries would try). My least favourite part of working in private practice is the pressure pushed onto junior lawyers. This is much harder to manage than the long hours, and I feel like I’m only now starting to really find my rhythm.

I think I have been lucky with my firm – there have been some extremely busy periods and lots of pressure at times, but overall it has been manageable. I also have a good team of lawyers around my level which helps a lot. If I left it would probably be for a change in role (eg in-house) rather then lateraling to another big firm.

There’s only around 25% of my graduate group left, which is quite scary! Most have left over the last year or so – some to in-house roles but many to other large law firms. The grass is always greener I guess, and that lateral hire bonus would be nice…

Aims for the future are to make senior associate and to keep learning. I’m on track for the first one and it would be almost impossible not to achieve the second. Happy times!

An update on the blog

The frequency of posts on this blog has decreased over the last few years.

There are two main reasons for this. First of all, there was an increase in hours that I spent in the office. The second reason was that my topic to-do list, that I created when I first started, was slowly being ticked off! I’m pretty happy with this – I wasn’t sure that I would ever get around to sharing everything that I wanted to get through (though I still have one post to go on practical legal training)!

So where to from here? Well there are lots of other topics that are important to law students and junior lawyers that I would like to share. However, I’ll stay away from the 2,000 – 3,000 word posts for those (in my defense, I think the longer posts were necessary to drill down into the earlier topics so that I was sharing something actually useful, rather than offering massively broad generalisations with no real steps that could be followed). In any event, moving forward the the posts will be much shorter!

Oh, and I’ve also updated that painful theme that made the blog look like it was from the early 2000s.

Thank you

A big thank you to everyone who has visited over the last few years – I hope the blog has been useful. Please drop by every now and again, and as always, feel free to suggest any other topics that you would like discussed (eg use the comments section below)!

Cheers

Will