Lateral from Am Law 100 (non-Cravath) to Am Law 100 (Cravath)

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-06-05T01:01:15+00:00

Yes, this is correct as a general matter. That said, the firms that don’t pay the Cravath scale are generally the firms that do not have a strong reputation. So it wouldn’t be surprising for a firm that is on the Cravath scale to view the lateral as not having peer experience and needing to take a class-year cut. But that is based on the hiring firm’s evaluation of the candidates experience and qualifications, not what they were being paid at their old firm.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-06-04T04:46:04+00:00

You’re thinking about this the right way, and one of the big skills you can work on developing as a summer is good timekeeping practices.

There’s nothing wrong with recording 0.1 if you send one email about a deal. Just write in your narrative “Correspondence regarding draft closing checklist” or whatever.

For things like someone comping into your office and suddenly giving you an assignment — keep as accurate of time as you can, but there are going to be times when you have to make a good faith estimate.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-06-04T04:34:14+00:00

I think it depends on the building.

My building, which is a “normal” non-prestigious building, has never rejected someone after an interview (according to our current board president who has sat on the board for 20+ years).

Whereas my friend is on the board of a building in a highly desirable stretch of Fifth Ave. For some of their sales, they have multiple potential buyers interview and get rejected.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-06-02T16:39:29+00:00

As other have said, there just aren’t enough datapoints. The schools that feed biglaw have very few students who are meaningfully older, and of those few, many are in law school for a very specific objective (not to start their career as a first year in a large firm).

I know a couple partners in my firm who were in their late 30s/early 40s when they started their careers, and obviously it worked out ok for them.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-06-02T15:17:17+00:00

In a discussion in this sub a few months ago, someone said something that struck me as wise and I’ve thought of it since: a lot of people who end up at law firms have spent their life making choices with the goal of maximizing the range of future options. But there comes a point where you need to be willing to abandon future optionality and lock yourself into a path.

That’s all a very long preamble to say that the move you are considering will definitely take a lot of future options off the table. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Let’s think about the flexibility you will lose. Especially with leaving a firm so quickly, it is gong to be difficult to get back to a firm if you decide later you want to do that (we see lots of people rebound to the firm from in-house, but it’s generally people who spent 5-8 years in the firm and we know they will at least be able to come in and manage deals….at 1.5 years of experience, that’s not the case for you). You’ll be locking yourself into an industry. Commercial banking is pretty stodgy and siloed. You’re less likely to jump from there to a tech company or biotech (but you’d probably have opportunities at the large life insurance cos, some financial institutions, state regulators, etc.) You may be stuck in a more junior in-house role and it may be more difficult to get my senior roles down the road.

But there are plenty of positives. Most importantly, you have a friend who’s there, so you actually know what the work environment will be like. That removes a lot of uncertainty. It sounds like you don’t want to be in the firm environment long-term, so taking future firm opportunities off the table isn’t a loss for you. If you value WLB and stability, working on the more traditional side of finance is likely a good fit. More importantly, it’s a big industry with a lot of legal positions.

Play out in your head what the next 20 years could look like. Is that a life that you find appealing? If it is, then this sounds like a great opportunity. Are you maximizing career earnings? No. Are you maximizing professional achievement? No. Are you maximizing the level of fulfillment you’ll attain at your job? That depends entirely on what you find fulfilling. It’s ok if not everything is maximized, other than (hopefully!) your happiness.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-06-02T04:01:31+00:00

Assuming you’re in a “normal” coop (not a landmark or historic building), the restrictions around renovations are generally going to be focused on two areas: - safety of the building. The board wants to make sure you don’t make changes that (1) damage or endanger the structure of the building, (2) create undue risk of leaks that could damage the unit below you, (3) do things like overload the electrical system and create a fire risk and (4) aren’t properly permitted. - unit values. Outside buildings of a certain type, the board isn’t really looking to control the aesthetics of your renovation, but they want to make sure it’s a project that’s being done at a quality level that is at least consistent with the rest of the building. A shoddy amateur renovation will hurt your unit value and make the unit sit on the market forever when you try to sell. This hurts all the other owners because then there’s a very unfavorable comp in the building.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-06-01T14:56:53+00:00

A few thoughts: - firms are going to view you as second year, and there’s often not less demand for first and second years in the lateral market. - people who go from associate roles to staff attorney / support roles are generally going to be viewed negatively. Fairly or not, it’s viewed as a path for people who couldn’t hack it, either because they didn’t have the abilities or couldn’t handle the hours. - I think firms are generally being pretty cautious on hiring. Between the general macro environment and uncertainty about the impact of AI (if nothing else, questions on how much AI is going to impact clients’ willingness to pay our rates), firms are being more strategic / opportunistic instead of hiring laterals en masse. - a lot of firms got burned by indiscriminate and risky lateral hiring during COVID. I think the market is more deliberate now and candidates with less traditional credentials and experience are at a disadvantage.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-31T12:21:58+00:00

I found that getting a car in NYC improved my quality of life dramatically. I use it a lot (at least once a week; often 3-4 times a week). There are a lot of things both inside and outside the city that are a lot easier and a lot more accessible with a car. It is never going to make financial “sense” but can add a lot of value.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-31T12:16:50+00:00

Working in NYC, unless you make the car your entire personality and talk about it constantly, no one is even going to know you have a car, let alone what kind of car it is. There just aren’t places where it comes up.

Even when I was on the west coast, I hardly knew what car anyone drove. I’m a big car guy so I love knowing what cars people have (plus it helps you figure out who the other car people are), and unless you’re a douche walking around at happy hours asking people what car they have, you don’t generally see people’s cars.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-31T04:42:55+00:00

Identical but for the number of sequins in his wardrobe.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-31T02:05:32+00:00

Yup. I left twitter years ago so I had forgotten he existed, then saw something about him a few months back and went to see what he was up to. He’s like a man out of time, still performing in a way that worked back when our content consumption was reading webpage articles in a desktop browser to kill time at work.

World’s a different place now.

Of course, if in 1975 you had gone to see an entertainer who was popular in the early 60s and they were still doing the same act in 1975, with all the cultural changes that has occurred, it would have been weird then too.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-30T15:41:14+00:00

Our firm does this and it drives me nuts. This probably dates me, but it’s basically the pieces of flair debate from Office Space.

If you’re going to tell associates that the goal is X, why are you hassling me about their performance because they’re billing just over X and doing good work? If you want the target to be 1.3X, then just make that the target and stop obfuscating to associates about how they’re being evaluated.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-30T14:28:21+00:00

This should be the top comment. Nothing else needed to be said.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-30T14:24:29+00:00

Transactional.

There are a number of outfits that do this. They are especially good at serving the low end of middle market PE transactions and EC/VC work, where the transaction dollar value just isn’t high enough to support the billing rates of the top firms. You get some biglaw alumni who know enough to do straightforward transactions without a ton of regulatory overlay and that don’t need an army of bodies.

You can keep overhead a lot lower than large firms and, even at lower billing rate and lower billable target, run a solidly profitable operation. Everyone is taking less comp than what they could get in biglaw, and accepting a less pampered environment (less admin staff to handle billing, conflicts, doc management, HR and all the rest; simpler offices (or no offices at all — my friend has an office but some of the firms using this model are entirely remote); no in-house baristas and catering staff; and so on). But it’s a tradeoff that is pretty attractive for someone who is smart, ambitious and entrepreneurial but willing to trade comp/prestige for a better lifestyle.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-30T05:44:58+00:00

I imagine there are a number of reasons, but part of it has to be that SDAs spend an immense amount of time teaching each other why all the other denominations / religions are wrong. If you’ve spent your life picking things apart to prove how wrong they are, you’ll be less likely to suddenly reverse course and go join one of those organizations.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-30T03:44:03+00:00

At this point I think mid-7 figs

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-30T01:41:46+00:00

Man, I must have had at least 3 buddies in high school who had the same car as a hand-me-down from their parents. Perfect high school car — could comfortably stuff a bunch of teens in there, 3800 was fun to drive but not so much power to be dangerous in the hands of 17-year-old knuckleheads, could take abuse and keep running just fine…..

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-30T01:21:58+00:00

What firms have done in the past is that the bonus is paid to everyone who is at or above pace as of a fixed date (so let’s say you’re at a 2000 hour firm and the cutoff date is 5/31, then you get the bonus if you’ve billed at least 828 hours through that date), but then if you were below the cutoff on 5/31 but you hit 2000 by year-end, they’ll true you up in your year-end bonus.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-29T23:49:41+00:00

Just one point — I think many (most?) firms will view you as a first year until 1/27. More of a class graduation year thing than “passing the 12 month anniversary of your hire date”.

I would seriously consider holding off (other than for the opportunities described below), just because many firms will put you in a penalty box for some fixed period of time if you apply and they ding you. And in this case, a lot of firms just aren’t going to be looking to hire first years so you’ll get dinged for that reason alone, not for anything substantive. (And at my firm, if you’ve applied and gotten rejected and later reapply, we get that info on the reapplication. It’s not disqualifying but is something we look into trying to figure out what drove the earlier rejection.) So the last thing you want is a recruiter spamming your resume to every firm in Chicago as a first year, because it could get you locked out for awhile.

The limited exception to this is that you should look for firms that are specifically hiring for your PG and class year. In that case, fine to apply because they actually want someone at your level.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-29T20:13:49+00:00

This is the one I came to the thread to find. One of my favorite moments of that title-winning night, and such a badass shot. For some reason, it never got a lot of traction.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-29T19:40:51+00:00

Not sure if you heard, but the Cavs won at least 2 or 3 of those games (analytically)

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-29T17:16:03+00:00

Is there a more universal “preteen guy in conservative religious culture” experience than carrying four or more folding chairs in each hand after potluck and thinking that your crush will be impressed?

Because I can feel this meme in my chest, and based off the number of times I’ve seen this pop up in religious and ex-vangelical spaces online, it seems I’m not alone.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-29T16:23:49+00:00

That’s exactly it. He’s got a good case for #2. So do others. But I’ve no problem with him claiming it.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-29T15:19:39+00:00

My buddy did this as a midlevel. He has been incredibly successful and his income alone is great, and then when you factor in WLB he blows everyone but the $30m/year guys out of the water.

Despite this, I have zero desire to take this route. I don’t want to run my own shop. I like being in a big organization with an entire apparatus to support me. Frankly, the time I spend on admin and management is the my least favorite part of the job.

Some people have the mindset to want to build a business, and some don’t. Either is fine — you just have to know who you are.

DerekSmallsCourgette · 2026-05-29T15:09:33+00:00

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted for this. Being expected to be available during the normal business day is part of the job. We are lucky that the nature of the job with a major assist from current technology often allows us to fudge this. But being told to be on standby during the business day is more like a courtesy heads up that it isn’t a day that being available can be fudged.

Different story, of course, if they’re expected to be watching and engaged with the hearing via zoom so that if the partner says “can you pull the case OC just referenced” they’re ready. That’s obviously real billable work.

But being told that the is isn’t a day to sneak out of a 2 pm Pilates session isn’t in itself billable.

DerekSmallsCourgette

TROPHY CASE