Which Practice Areas Require The Least Work Hours And What's The Catch

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Which Practice Areas Require The Least Work Hours And What's The Catch
[00:00:00] What kind of lawyer works the least hours?
There are a couple of different answers to that question. One of the things that I would say is that government jobs are pretty awesome because the hours, aren't going to be as bad in government jobs. When I first started my first job, I was working in the justice department in Washington, DC, and I couldn't believe it. People would start rolling in there around 9:30, 10, and then by five o'clock it would be completely empty, pretty much at 5:30, there would just be no one there. You can have a home life and they are very prestigious jobs.
Anything that's deadline intensive, which is typically litigation, corporate, and other things are gonna result in a lot of hours because if a company is being sold, they're going to need to have all the paperwork done. There's real estate and a transaction happening that needs to be done in certain night times.
Now, things that don't have big deadlines associated with them. Our practice here are trusting estates, ERISA, tax law, anything that doesn't have major deadlines and things associated with it that are going to require you to work hard. But trusts in the states [00:01:00] is typically a very good one.
A lot of times, patent attorneys, because the work is very intensive in terms of the thinking processes. You don't need to work huge hours in that either. Again, the trade-off is when you go into a practice area where you don't have to work a lot of hours, it's going to be much more difficult to earn a lot of money.