We want LI to be one of the friendliest places on the internet, where lawyers and law students help each other with their career related queries and occasionally discuss other stuff that might affect their lives too. In other words:
1. Be kind, respectful and helpful to each other.
2. Be bona fide, truthful, genuine and curious.
3. Assume the best intention of others.
Therefore, in using the site, you must agree to do your best to uphold these community guidelines.
Note that what you find here is written and moderated by anonymous people on the internet.
Therefore everything you read here is very likely unverified, rumour, speculation and/or downright false.
In continuing to read anything here, you must therefore agree not to take anything you read here as factual and that you will exercise due caution, diligence and common sense before acting on any information you may come across here.
You also agree to report any inaccurate or malicious comments with the buttons. Moderators take action within 24 hours, as required and appropriate under law.
Our full terms and conditions apply too.
Do you solemnly agree to all of the above?
Evidence of this is visible even within the most demanding Tier-1 firms. There are senior partners—sixteen years into practice—raising children, living well, and remaining professionally formidable. Many of them are driving BMW's and Mercs. Some are already being chauffeured in Maybach's. Their lives are not miracles; they are outcomes of sustained competence.
By contrast, there exists a quieter cohort: individuals unable to secure or sustain meaningful work, living in permanent uncertainty, often dependent on their parents well into adulthood. This is not bad luck masquerading as injustice; it is usually the absence of aptitude meeting the realities of a competitive profession.
The conclusion is uncomfortable but necessary. One should enter—and remain in—this profession only with the conviction that one has the temperament and ability to build a complete life within it. If marriage or children feel impossible because of the job, it is not the job that is slowly destroying you. It is the mismatch.