Susman Godfrey Hours? Culture? Forum

[Anonymous User]

Staying in biglaw is also uncertain though, the attrition is good evidence of that. Top business schools are probably more the chasing comp move than law school, not to say that law school is far off

Some data for median starting salary and bonuses: https://poetsandquants.com/2023/01/25/m ... d-bonuses/

At top schools median starting salaries in the range of $145k to $160k, with a signing bonus of about $30k.

The department of education has *mean* starting salaries for law schools (which probably are reasonably close to the median since there's no long right tail -- if anything the median might be above the mean here): https://www.spiveyconsulting.com/blog-p ... graduates/

Closer to $160-180k.

Hard data on long-term outcomes is obviously a lot harder (and you start to need to factor in compensating differentials). Certainly if you're comparing biglaw and consulting, biglaw comes out ahead. I know partners in both, and the money for a v10 biglaw partner is an integer multiple of an MBB partner.

Business school these days is not for winners.

interesting info. Starting salaries seem comparable but business school is 1 year less tuition and 1 year more of working. that's like a 200k startup difference. Biglaw partnership is definitely lucrative but that is not the median outcome.

Again not saying law gets totally washed by business but business is a measurable amount more efficient

[Anonymous User]

Can someone give insight into how much Susman requires/wants associates to bill?
Workload?

I've heard they offer a lot of experience, but as someone coming off a clerkship with very little REAL legal training, do they actually *teach* you how to practice?

Senior SG associate. There's no requirement or desire, though the median tends to be around 2,700 hours. If you're much lower than that you'll likely get staffed to another case--not because the firm has some sort of expectation, but rather because associates are the scarcest commodity and there is always a backlog of cases needing them.

As others have noted, there is very little formal training. We're a firm where people learn by doing, and that's the kind of associate the firm tends to attract--i.e. very entrepreneurial, confident, go-getter types. Of course, that doesn't mean training is non-existent. Every associate is assigned an associate and a partner mentor (and eventually has the option for two partner mentors), and the mentors frequently give feedback not just on how to navigate the firm, but also on substantive tasks. And pretty much all of the associates and partners alike are happy to sit down and go over work product to give you pointers on how to improve.

Thanks for answering.
This may be impossible to answer, but do most folks generally stay?
Or is it similar to biglaw in that a lot of folks get run out/burn out/hate it?

Same SG associate. I'd say that most stay, but it can vary from class to class. More than half of the class that I started with is still around and the vast majority of those that left did so on their own terms.