Q: Law vs. finance? A: Law just fucking sucks.

I believe I commented on so many law/law school posts, but they keep coming and coming. So let's put at rest this discussion---

If you really enjoy staying in an office or cubicle staring at 50 documents to find some differences in wording and point out to the client how 24 documents differ from the rest 26 because they allow you to cancel the contract for ABC reason and the other 26 only for AB reason, then you would be a great fit (expect this to take some hours).

If you enjoy gathering 300 documents from your database and organizing them in different folders to send to the client, then it's for you.

If you enjoy billing 3,200 hours = 3,200 hours of literally sitting staring at documents, then go for it. At least, in the business side, you can sit 7 hours in a meeting room listening to some bullshit material and that still counts as work.

If you expect being Martin Lipton reading a Supreme Court case and, while staring through the window, plotting the Poison Pill 2.0 and "cooking" the next defense for activist investors, then I'm sorry to disappoint you, but that's fiction. Your reality, for 10–15 years, would be organizing documents (secretary work), and going back and forth for 10 hours with another lawyer because you can't agree if in the following sentence: "The contract will be modified by both parties, upon common agreement, in cases ABCDEFGH, but in case H it can only be modified only if the party has reasonable reasons" - whether it should say "reasonable reasons" or "materially reasonable reasons".

I get it, it's extremely cool when a lawyer comes to you and tells you that you can do ABC but for D you may need XYZ documents and approvals. But that’s only relevant if you want to be a solo lawyer dealing mostly with average citizens, where pay may not be as great. If you're thinking of BigLaw, the business side already knows everything and everything was already negotiated. You're just drafting papers and doing some legal formalities that in 98% of cases no one even bothers to read. The 2% of cases where people do read them? That's litigation, and it's probably just to sue. So maybe litigation is more interesting than transactional work, but as you're reading this on WSO, I assume you care about business, and transactional lawyers are the ones supposedly covering the "business side" of law.

Also, it's interesting when you understand the law and solve your own needs (can do it with Chat GPT nowadays). But when you do all this work and see someone else reaping the profits, you start to question your self-worth. Am I a lawyer or just a bitch/a means to an end for someone else?

Deep inside, no one gives a fuck about your personality, about your interest in other fields, your business sense, or your networking skills. You can be an autistic awkward communist weighing 350 lbs - if you’re the best lawyer in your market, people will come to you. Lawyers are picked based on their technical skills and nothing else. If you think you’d make a great opportunity seeker, have entrepreneurial instincts, or strategic insights - I’m sorry to disappoint you, but no one gives a fuck 

It’s slavery work at its core - but hey, put on a suit, walk past a KFC, and you’ll feel better. That’s how most lawyers cope with the crushing reality that they’re glorified secretaries pushing paper for someone else’s upside.

Lawyers need to act like they’re doing important, intellectually stimulating work. Otherwise, how would you justify the debt, the effort, and the years of your life wasted just to end up arguing about comma placement in a boilerplate clause? That desperate need to convince the world that law is prestigious, that’s the only drop of joy many lawyers have left. If they become self-aware about where they actually stand in the value chain, that’s when the drugs, alcohol, social approval, etc. kicks in

Law school is not a swiss knife. You don’t enjoy it after 3 years? Too bad. Your skills are useless elsewhere. There’s no optionality. Billing hours in BigLaw is hell. If you wake up in your second year hating law, good luck. Your only exit is in-house counsel - a role in which you're seen as a cost center. And funny enough, lawyers compete for in-house jobs like it's the NFL draft.

All your life, you’ll have no decision-making power. You’ll push paper and sit at the kids' table while the business people, the ones who actually move the needle, take all the upside. Any time you try to offer advice on the business itself, you’ll be told to “stick to legal.” Your only chance of escape would be an MBA. So enjoy coughing up another $500k+ in opportunity cost after already torching time and money on your JD.

If you’re smart enough to get into law school, you’re smart enough to make it in business or finance. And believe me, you’ll look around in BigLaw and realize your classmates don’t even know the difference between revenue and net income, which, sure, makes you the most commercial-savvy one there, but it also makes the whole thing depressing. These people ask if Texas Pacific Group is a commercial bank. You’ll be the smartest in the room, and also the one with the most wasted potential among liberal people with unemployable undergraduates who can't calculate some basic percentages (heard about a situation firsthand where a lawyer seemed skeptical about some calculations done by an associate despite using =sum in Excel, and said to re-do the calcs - that's just the math level on the other side).

I genuinely feel sorry for the brilliant legal minds who went to Harvard or Yale only to end up proofreading 200-page agreements and sending redlines to partners who only reply to tell your work sucks (need to perform and deliver 100% perfection all the time). These are people who could have reshaped institutions or built something great. Instead, they’re stuck debating whether Section 7.3 should use “substantial” or “material.” On top of this, there are no management skills in law firms. You bill for 14 hours, go home sleep deprived, and the next day you're expected to perform again at 100% sharpness to do the most mindless work over and over again (let's see how much you tolerate it after 2-3 weeks). There is no "light at the end of the tunnel" which would make you at least tolerate it some years thinking that there's something better awaiting after that (i.e., like IB 2-years and out approach).

Your entire work as well rewards a pessimistic outlook. You're paid to catch anything that is off/mistakes. This becomes so ingrained in your character, that you become extremely critical of minor points outside of your work which makes you overall miserable and your outlook to things very procedural oriented (not many lawyers doing entrepreneurship because of this trait). More so, you don't develop any other sort of skills outside of legal research and legal writing: Presentation/social/maths/business/analytical skills, etc. Legal research and legal writing - that's all you'll do for +10/20/30 years. So congrats, you pigeonholed yourself.

If you want to read an even more depressive view of biglaw and make up your mind search up the "So you want to be a NY Corporate Associate" in Google and click on the link from the legal forum (TLS). The guy is a top 5 economics undegrad + HLS and wakes up everyday questioning his life. It's an old post. He was probably at Skadden/Cravath, which would be the equivalent of a bulge bracket on the legal side.