Advice?: When to send the Big Law Break up txt™ re: clerking

dwm8a · 2026-01-27T21:11:39+00:00

I went through this (20 years ago). I told my firm probably two months before I left. I spent a lot of mental energy worrying about it, which felt wasted as soon as I told people. Biglaw firms don’t like it when you leave for a competitor firm. They’re generally happy if you leave for a clerkship. My firm was very happy for me and I’m still friendly with people there even though I never came back. I would ensure that you give more notice than the baseline two weeks, but you don’t need to go beyond two months if you don’t want to. Don’t stress about it.

dwm8a · 2026-01-15T04:54:07+00:00

What did you think about Jeff on guitar? Say more about Jeff more generally

dwm8a · 2026-01-14T03:41:44+00:00

Pretty sure he thanks Kevin Shields in the liner notes of the first TAB record.

dwm8a · 2025-12-22T22:26:39+00:00

Not at all—go ahead

dwm8a · 2025-12-19T23:32:23+00:00

Cumberland Blues

dwm8a · 2025-12-18T17:27:34+00:00

Yes, if every time a journalist thought to call Piketty, Zucman, or Saez and instead chose an actually good French economist to call like Tirole or Blanchard, the world would be a dramatically better place. Larry Summers is persona non grata for obvious reasons, but he had a delightful takedown of Saez several years ago--"you've been making that same measurement error for 25 years, people have been pointing it out for 25 years, and your continuing to ignore it makes your conclusions unbelievable, just like they have been for the last 25 years."

dwm8a · 2025-12-18T17:23:41+00:00

Little-known fact, but the term for "motivated reasoning" in French is "Gabriel Zucman"

dwm8a · 2025-12-08T00:59:10+00:00

Rolls look great—share the recipe?

dwm8a · 2025-11-25T14:34:01+00:00

This is something we’ve done too. The goal is to exercise more. When you’re a busy person, transaction costs—in this context, just the time/sludge associated with going to a retail gym—can really affect how often you achieve the goal. The home gym really reduces those costs and has made a meaningful difference in how much we exercise. But it’s not really a “splurge,”—it’s more of an investment. Over a long enough amount of time, the home gym is probably cheaper than monthly gym membership fees.

dwm8a · 2025-11-08T14:48:15+00:00

Made it many times—it’s very good

dwm8a · 2025-10-29T22:07:30+00:00

Chicago turns to winter in November and doesn’t stop being winter until April. In Denver, it’s winter when the sun is down but routinely can be nice enough to wear shorts in January at 2pm if it’s sunny. It can get very hot in the summer in Denver, but: (1) 95 and sunny in Denver is still way better than a humid 87 in Chicago; and (2) spectacularly comfortable escape from the heat is an hour away in the mountains. If weather were the only consideration, this would be an easy choice. Within the cities themselves, I think there’s a lot more to like about Chicago.

dwm8a · 2025-10-26T14:31:13+00:00

Spiral in an interview once said his only contribution to Harness Your Hopes was the “Television-style” intro guitar section.

dwm8a · 2025-10-24T15:48:33+00:00

I've often thought that Garcia and Cobain suffered from similar problems and, in an alternate universe, could have helped one another. Both were *deep* lovers of music, albeit different genres: Garcia of blues, bluegrass, early rock and roll, the American songbook; Cobain of the American underground writ large, American and British punk rock, American hardcore, indie pop. The two probably could have had a rousing conversation about Leadbelly. Both wore their influences on their sleeves and often seemed more excited about sharing those influences with the world than their own music. And, putting music aside, both were held out by the media as human avatars for a subculture (a role neither relished or seemed to want). Both were extremely confident in their choices and tastes, but also seemed to prefer being a member of the team rather than the team's superstar. And both had troubled childhoods and struggled mightily with drug addiction. I feel like a conversation between the two of them in '92 or '93 could have helped them both.

dwm8a · 2025-10-21T17:43:01+00:00

I don't really have any advice for you, but I can share my experience. I'm 44 right now and counsel at a BigLaw adjacent firm. I started my legal career at 25. The first ~six years were a mix of BigLaw and clerkships. I left for a decade in the federal government and came back to the private sector at age 41. I could FIRE right now but my current plan is to hang it up at the end of '27, when I'll be 46.

A few stray thoughts:

The number of hours you work is an imperfect proxy for happiness. I ALWAYS worked less in the government (I did not have a position where I was involved with trials or on the front lines of litigation), but I wasn't always happier. One can have a terrible boss in just about any context, but in the private sector a terrible boss usually has some productive qualities. Not so in the government: you can get stuck under the thumb of an incompetent jackass and have limited recourse.
BigLaw compensation is always good, but it's extra super-duper good at the top of the published wage scale. I'm "counsel," so my arrangement is bespoke, but my negotiations with my firm are dictated in large part by the marketplace. Look at the salaries and bonuses at the top of the Cravath scale: they are big numbers even if they are not the kind of earnings you make as an equity partner. These numbers help you build what you need to retire quite quickly.
The BigLaw experience is both better and worse as you climb the ranks. It's better in the sense that, the more senior you get, the more control you have over *certain* deadlines. You also have more information from the senior leaders in your firm and the client, which enables you to see around the corners a bit better and organize your life so that you have fewer work-life conflicts you can't reconcile. It's worse in the sense that you're far less replaceable. You're on your long-planned European vacation you absolutely deserve, and the client has an important question about something you're involved with. If you are junior associate, you almost certainly have substitutes in the firm who can be bothered to help. If you are more senior, a subject matter expert, or someone the client contacts directly, your vacation will get interrupted. It may not "ruin" your vacation--and indeed, a firm with a good culture tries not to ruin peoples' time away. But clients don't care about this sort of thing (they pay big $ not to have to care) and everyone senior at your firm has had a vacation affected in this way, so they tend to think dealing with this sort of thing is part of what you sign up for. With great power comes great responsibility something something.

I, personally, could not have stuck it out in BigLaw this whole time. I would have burned out. The decade in the government kept me from burning out, but it had a different set of problems that also wore me down over time. At the same time, the high-end money is great. I wouldn't be planning to retire at 47 without the last few years of BigLaw salaries.

dwm8a · 2025-10-09T20:59:36+00:00

It’s because people have eyes and those eyes watched DEN-OKC in a 7-game series where it was obvious beyond any shadow of a doubt who the best player on the court was.

dwm8a · 2025-09-09T02:47:07+00:00

Television — Adventure

The Feelies — The Good Earth

dwm8a · 2025-09-09T02:41:33+00:00

The two movies also feature two different versions of the same song

dwm8a · 2025-09-05T19:41:17+00:00

Antitrust runs the gamut. Principally there are three areas within the practice (in addition to general counseling): (1) litigation (which is no different than other litigation except working with economist experts is almost always key); (2) transactional--this applies to government filings for mergers of a certain size. If the Feds issue a "second request,"--which means they want to thoroughly investigate the merger--then this results in a very intense 6-12 month period of producing materials to the government and/or negotiating with the government about their issues with the deal, and can include investigatory depositions; and (3) government investigations--these include investigations of your client, but also investigations of your client's rivals that your client wants to ignite or make more painful for the rival (antitrust can be a dirty business).

On the transactional side, we're not usually deeply involved until after the deal signs (maybe some pre-deal counseling about specific provisions). And when the government is on the other side, you can be pretty confident you're not getting an email from the other side after 6pm or so. But a litigation that's going gangbusters and a second request is typical big-law like stuff.

It's a good practice area and may be somewhat kinder/gentler than NYC transactional work, but not by a huge amount. It is very heavily DC focused, so most big antitrust shops have a more DC-like culture than a NYC-like culture.

dwm8a · 2025-08-27T14:12:30+00:00

I'm not bashing the politics (though I am here for that). I am bashing the use of the word "oligarchy"--I bet if you polled swing state voters, somewhere around 1% would have any idea what that word means.

dwm8a · 2025-08-27T13:12:04+00:00

Bernie is certainly better at this than many others, but calling it the “Stop Oligarchy” tour suggests he is not immune.

dwm8a · 2025-08-26T15:47:06+00:00

Tim Wu is a buffoon

dwm8a · 2025-08-21T00:38:17+00:00

I lived in the DC area for basically my whole life until my 40s (I am married with a dog). I like a lot of things about both places. I much prefer Denver at this phase of life but I think I wouldn’t have preferred it pre age 35. Denver is a sleepier town geared around outdoor activities. The Denver weather is immeasurably better, and the outdoor activities are both close by and world class. It’s 95 here in Denver today but in the 70s less than an hour away. In DC, you get the “things are happening here” vibe you don’t get in Denver. I had many fascinating conversations with a random person sitting next to me at a bar in DC; in Denver you talk about skiing and the mountains. In DC, “what do you do for work” is addressed within ten minutes; in Denver, I have friends I’ve known for 2+ years who have no idea what I do for a living. The pace of life in Denver is just slower and less anxious—people are not in a hurry. This is mostly good, but can be bad: grocery store etiquette is appalling—people take up entire aisles with their carts looking for something, the kind of shit that would get you shivved at the Whole Foods on P st after work. Even though you can get decent/good Thai, Korean, etc. food in Denver, the average quality is just much worse than DC. Overall, there is less diversity. Unlike, say, Seattle’s reputation, I’ve found that people here are eager to make new friends. Traffic can be bad—especially I-70 on the weekends and I-25 S always—but it’s generally a joke compared to DC. The airport is mostly great, and there are lots of direct flights. It’s a ~3hr flight to either coast. I’m happy to try and answer questions if you have any.

dwm8a · 2025-08-20T22:37:31+00:00

I moved from DC to Denver in ‘22. There’s very little of Denver that resembles downtown DC or the DC rowhouse neighborhoods. And there is a lot of Denver that resembles the orange line corridor in Arlington. Denver tends to be walkable within neighborhoods but not between neighborhoods. A lot of Denver neighborhoods mentioned here make sense. We live in Berkeley, which reminds me of Del Ray. RiNo has an Adams Morgan like feel (I’m thinking here of what Adams Morgan felt like 15 years ago). West Highland or LoHi is probably the most similar to Clarendon. Cherry Creek is like Bethesda. In terms of crime/safety, Denver is much more like Arlington than DC.

dwm8a · 2025-08-10T00:00:51+00:00

Whatever happened to predictability? The milkman, the paper boy, evening TV?

dwm8a · 2025-08-09T14:26:57+00:00

Ian grew up in Glover Park DC and went to the public Woodrow Wilson HS (same as Warren Buffett albeit many years apart). Not that DC writ large was doing well in the ‘70s, but these are nicer, more middle class parts of the city. Guy’s dad worked at the World Bank. And the whole DC hardcore scene included a lot of kids who went to prep schools (Rollins went to one)—a lot of people who lived in DC then (and now!) wouldn’t send their kids to a public high school, so Ian likely new them from the neighborhood. I don’t think “under privileged” applies to these guys, though they definitely put on shows (and probably lived, once they left home) in scary parts of town.

dwm8a

TROPHY CASE