Transcript
"I'm currently a rising second year in a big firm. Hours are pretty bad. Burnout, hate the work, bad firm culture. I'm expecting to get let go as there were a few signs and was told my hours are low. I have an exit starting summer 2021, but may not make it long enough in a biglaw firm." In most cases if you lose your job, this is a whole separate issue here, you should immediately start looking for a job. If you're worried you're gonna lose your job, that's the first thing, you should go all out.
So you should do everything you possibly can to find a job. I don't know what city you're in, but you should look in the city that you're in, you should probably also look at where you're from, and you should do everything you can to find a job, because you don't want to be without a job. And you don't want to talk about bad hours in interviews, you wanna talk about working hard. If you don't wanna be in big law, that's fine, but you don't wanna be let go. Without a job, it becomes very hard to get hired. The big issue is when you're in a market like New York, or Chicago, there's so many attorneys trying to find jobs there, that if you're unemployed, even if it's not your fault, they just don't hire because they don't know if there's something wrong with you.
Law firms won't be able to tell if you were fired or let go. You can always say you left, but if you left, it's still a sign you may not be a good-long term fit there. So if it was me, I would start looking for a job right away. If you do get fired, I would demand to stay on the website for as long as you can and have access to your email and voicemail. But other than that I would make sure you have another job. And if you're unhappy with the big law firm you're in, it doesn't mean that you're gonna be unhappy in big law. It just means you're probably unhappy in that particular firm. It just depends on the firm you with, every firm has different cultures and expectations. And you may learn a lot based on the bad experiences that you've had at your current firm, and fix those at your new firm.
