Anonymous User wrote:Because summer associate and recruiting season is coming up, as a junior at CWT, the horror stories are true. This is not a good place to work. Most juniors leave after a year, and the quality of each summer class keeps going down. I’d avoid this place unless it’s your only offer, and even then know you’re going to be looking to lateral within a year (like most people do).
They also increased the hours requirement for the bonus, and have refused any kind of work from home policy. They don’t pay bonuses until the last week in February (to discourage laterals) and I’ve heard it’s common for partners to transfer associate billable hours to non-billable hours. This hasn’t happened to me personally, but I’d be livid if a partner took away some of my billable hours to charge a client less.
With that being said, if you’re at a lower ranked school, it’s a good opportunity to get your foot in the door at big law. Our past summer classes have include people from lower ranked schools (think Fordham and below) and I think this year they’re hiring someone from Ohio State law.
As a mid-level at CWT: there isn't an official home from work policy but after your first year you can generally get away with working from home more often than the formal policy that was proposed if you want to (as was said at the associate meeting on this: don't mess with a good thing). That said...this does somewhat vary by partner/group so I can see how some people would feel miffed about the lack of a formal policy. In any case this feels like a fairly marginal thing to complain about at a biglaw firm.
I've never heard of billable hours being transferred to non-billable hours. That sounds made up. (a) Most work that CWT does in its main practices is fixed fee so cutting hours wouldn't really do anything and (b) even if it's an hourly deal, if the partner cuts the hours that appear on the bill (which happens frequently at all firms),
the associate still gets credit for billing the hours.
I don't perceive junior associate attrition to be much worse at CWT than is standard in the industry. Attrition used to be really high before about 2016, but that seems to have stabilized. Maybe still a bit above average I don't know, but half of each incoming class
does not leave within its first year.
Also lol at the OSU comment.
Working here can certainly suck, and it's definitely not for everyone...but there are certain perks that have made it work for me so far: (a) nobody gives a shit when I come in (unless there's a deal event or some other reason I
need to be in early, which is maybe once or twice a month), (b) I've had a lot of contact with clients since about midway through my first year, and (c) I've essentially been getting staffed as the mid-level on deals since November of my first year, which makes a huge difference in terms of quality of life because you'll have someone under you and can push the worst stuff down. First year did suck a lot, though.
I know TLS loves to circlejerk about how terrible CWT is, and maybe that was once true (and perhaps in some niche areas or for some particular associates it still is, I don't know), but as someone who works in their main practice area I just don't believe that it's
currently so much worse than every other biglaw firm. I can tell you that I'm in no rush to go to one of the other firms that does what I do because their associates seem to have it worse from what I can tell (Sidley has ludicrously thin staffing and Orrick only has like 4 associates and highly volatile work flow so they're either dead or not sleeping for weeks on end, plus Orrick's partners seem like they would be horrendous to work for).