Do all corporate practice areas entail working for long hours or are there some where the work timings are more reasonable?

Employment advisory, TMT advisory, seed stage / VC investment verticals of the larger GC practise have relatively reasonable work timings. You will work long hours mostly in transactional practice (M&A, PE, Cap Markets, financing, projects) and not specialist advisory practise. I am not sure about competition practise.

I think the issue is not about work timings - it is about being available 24/7 (including holidays) which translates into longer working hours. No matter how you manage your work / deliverable, you need to be always in close proximity to laptop, ready to pick up calls and respond to email. This kills quality time off (cannot go for a drive, night out, hospital visits, etc.). But all successful lawyers I know love this or adapt to this pretty fast, and this becomes a way of life.

Beautifully summarised. It's actually about being available all the time.

But if I may ask, there must be partners who generally are chill about these things at the cost of low bonus/increments/delayed partnership?

Short answer - yes.

Long answer - Yes, but these partners are looked down by the firm and the superstar high-performing partners. Since the firms want their 'always available/accessible' partner to handle their marquee clients, the larger / important matters go to the superstar high-performing partners, and your super-chill partner gets sidelined. And this in turn affects your team's billing + the super-chill partner may not be always available for you as well (is this email okay? can i send this from your account? can i confirm the time for the call, what time is convenient for this call? are you joining this call? kind of situations). While you may initially like the chill partner, you will eventually wish you were in the 'always available/accessible' partner's team. The FOMO will hit you when you (i) listen to your colleagues say that they haven't slept for _ days straight, went home at 6 am and came back at 7am, haven't seen parents in a year etc., (ii) see queries in whatsapp groups at 3:00 am on a Sunday morning and someone actually responding at 3:02 am etc.

Fair enough. Thanks for the elaborate response. It's helpful.

Thanks for your reply. Very insightful. Anyone who has an idea about the competition practice?

It's just as bad as an M&A team. TATs are usually shorter with partners having less space to push back due to the regulatory interface.

Lot of people quit before SA level. Expectations are always high. Being a niche area you are expected to know everything under the sun.

Kya janna h comp law me?

It is not about practice areas but your reporting partner. Depends on their lifestyle.

If your partner doesn't have a life, he/ she will not let you have one either.