A survey of trainees and junior lawyers for offices of American law firms in London shows that they spend up to 13 hours a day at work – twice the average work week in the United Kingdom
It comes with a lifestyle of Deliveroo dinners and picking up calls for “impious hours or days off”, an anonymous employee Said the legal cheekA legal information site which interviewed 2,000 workers in the various law firms in London, in November.
“I haven’t seen sunlight for three months,” said another anonymous employee.
Another participant said that although the holidays are respected, they should always answer the work calls.
Yes, all the tropes that show, as Costumes, You make you believe how long and hard law firms are working on their new staff work, may well be true.
Although it has the external signs of a toxic work culture that people would try to avoid, working for long hours in law firms is delivered with a beautiful salary. Departure wages in large companies exceed £ 170,000, or Almost five times The median income of the United Kingdom in 2023.
The tastes of Kirkland and Ellis and Paul Hastings, American law firms with practices in London, pay £ 172,000 and require an average of 12 to 13 hours per day, Time reported. On the other hand, British companies ensure that employees operate a little more on average while capping the starting salary at £ 150,000.
Admittedly, all industry companies do not have suddenly long hours in exchange for a six -digit pay check. Several of the companies listed by legal player in his survey limit their working day at around 9 am for freshly qualified lawyers.
However, it is far from the average Work week in the United Kingdom, which extends over 36.6 hours or 7.3 hours a day.
BOUNDABLE Hours are metric law firms that firms often use to measure the performance of their lawyers. In some cases, these hours bang for 2,000 per year. The United States requires a higher number of hours on average compared to Great Britain.
However, the model was controversial in the middle of pressures and costs of costs for a more transparent system. Lawyers also argue that there could be more effective ways to do the same work without a boosting hour structure that determines the salary. With the emergence of AI in public awareness, the legal profession is already beginning to change.
This did not reach its momentum, at least at the upper level. The best law firms in London hired partners at record speed in 2024, motivated by the appetite of American law firms to compete with talents in the British capital.
Part of the call for new talents in American companies is the high salary that they can swing compared to the British. The most estimated law firms rethink their partner salary structure in response to increasing competition.
“The impact of the coveted New Yorker at the highest levels of the London Legal Services market over such a short period was deep,” has a report By recruiting the company Edward Gibson said in July.
A version of this story was initially published on Fortune.com November 5, 2024.
This story was initially presented on Fortune.com
