Big Law to Investment Banking -- Thoughts?
I'm currently a 2nd year corporate associate at a top 2 NY law firm and am seriously considering the switch from big law to investment banking. The biggest issue for me is that while a big law job is more secure than one in IB, I look at the people 5-6 years ahead of me, as well as the traditional big law exit options, and find neither that interesting. Even the partners – the absolute best one can hope to be in big law – spend all of their time working and doing work that is marginally more interesting than that of a senior associate. At least in IB, as you move up the ranks the hours become better, the pay grows exponentially faster than it does in big law, and even if you don’t want to be a banker for the rest of your life (as I think is the case with me), at least you have some pretty exciting exit options to consider.
What makes this decision hard for me is that at 27 I’m still not sure what I want to do with my life. I know that I love transactional work, like working in a fast-paced, demanding environment, don’t mind long hours, and eventually want to be the one making the deals, rather than a lawyer/banker who only facilitates them. I think investment banking makes sense for me because I could develop valuation/pitching/modeling skills and down the road switch over to PE, or some other corporate/management role. While I’m realistic that being a banker may not be my dream job (and in many ways it is the different side of the same coin when it comes to big law), I at least think it will open more doors and point me in a better direction than my current career.
I was hoping that someone here who has made the switch (or even someone currently in the industry) could let me know about their experience, or maybe temper my expectations of what being a banker entails. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
PM me. Talk offline and I think I can help you with this.
As I stated above, I made the move from big law > IB.
Here's an extract from a PM exchange I had with the OP/
My view (at least tonight, at the moment, half way through a bottle of good red) is:
The key skill lawyers have but often fail to recognise is EXECUTION ABILITY. This is a key marketing point if you're interviewing with IBs. As a lawyer, you have to deal with short time frames, demanding clients, multiple issues, parallel workstreams etc and you can pull it all together without freaking out. This is sort of project management, but more project management under extreme pressure - which is what bankers do. I rate this skill that you get from being a lawyer more important to banking than your legal knowledge.
LEGAL KNOWLEDGE - useful, but not incredibly useful. I would market the legal knowledge point more as STRONG SENSE OF RISKS AND MITIGANTS - ie being a lawyer teaches you how to think about what could go wrong and how to mitigate that (more so than a banker - beware of becoming a pessimist like many lawyers are).
CLIENT INTERACTIONS - lawyers deal with clients and quickly develop the authoritative voice which reassures clients (but could potentially be all bluff and bullshit). That's a key skill if you're a client-facing IB advisor.
NEGOTIATION SKILL - not incredibly useful unless you're going into a buy-side PE role. However, you can still market yourself on this. I'd rank it below the execution ability point.
So, what are your weaknesses?
TECHNICAL ABILITY - I did a CFA and other financial qualifications while I was a lawyer, although mainly because I come from a tradition of resume building and not because I wanted to go commercial. It helped nonetheless. I recall being a lawyer and my eyes literally glazing over when I hit the numbers, flicking pages until I hit words. This stuck with me for a while after I made the shift to the commercial side and I still have a bias towards prose vs numbers. Of course, you interviewers may not be as aware of this as I am. In any case, technical knowledge (eg a little bit of accounting, a little bit of market knowledge) - this is a lawyer's weakness and something you need to be able to prove you've got. If not the CFA, you should find some sort of financial analysis course you can enrol in and put on your resume to show you are countering a lawyer's natural tendency to not look at this stuff. If you've got a good law firm, they'll sponsor you through a course (as it gets you to understand your clients better).
SALESMANSHIP - Lawyers exist to tell people what the risks are in a deal. They are worried about being sued if it all goes wrong. Lawyers get paid whether the deal gets done or not. Bankers are more focused on getting the deal done, because they only get their fee when that happens. If the deal tanks later, the client bears the risk in most situations, not the lawyers (unless they have been grossly negligent, engaged in wilful misconduct and/or one other carve out appearing in market standard engagement terms I can't recall [I can remember it now - 3rd carve out is fraud]). You'll need to convince bankers that you're not a naysaying guy who will only focus on downsides or precede every positive statement with 101 caveats.