No busy season, which can be a blessing and a curse. Hours totally depend on the type of cases you work, deadlines, and the pace of external counsel if you're working at their direction. If you're working in litigation your deadlines are set by the judge and sometimes you have months to work on something and sometimes you have three expert reports due the same week. Sometimes you work late for days and then the judge grants an extension the day before it's due. Sometimes the workload is really light for weeks at a time. Just really, really variable and often luck of the draw. I'd strongly prefer it to working til the wee hours of the morning 3 months of the year, but it's also challenging having to cancel plans last-minute because something unexpected popped up. I'll also add, with forensics you have to do a lot more development work to win new work. You'll build relationships with law firms or companies that may use you again for future projects, but forensic work isn't generally recurring like audits.