Big city AUSA hours? Forum

[Anonymous User]

Most interested in NYC area but any data points would be useful.

1. What are the average hours like as an AUSA these days? How common is weekend and late night work?

2. What are the hours on a “good” week (non-trial) or “bad” week (ie trial prep / trial)?

3. What are the hours in the General Crimes section (first 1-2 years) vs a white collar section?

[Anonymous User]

Not big cities, but the AUSAs I worked with in Nashville, Memphis, Jackson, Bham and NOLA worked 40 hours a week unless in trial. I think a lot more of this just depends on your case load.

[Anonymous User]

Not big cities, but the AUSAs I worked with in Nashville, Memphis, Jackson, Bham and NOLA worked 40 hours a week unless in trial. I think a lot more of this just depends on your case load.

What would you consider a big city. Maybe over one million? Nashville and Memphis feel like big cities to me, but maybe my frame of reference is off.

[Anonymous User]

This is the poster about the Southern cities. Personally, I consider any metro area with 2 million plus as a big city. Nashville hits that mark for me- but just barely. The others all have metro areas of around .75-1.5 million and I'd consider them small to midsized metros/cities. I'm from a pretty small town near one of these metros, but just my 2 cent on it, ha. Many folks I've worked with would consider all of these small, aside from Nashville, and they might consider Nashville a midsized area. I conformed my comment since the OP inquired about NYC, I assume they'd think Memphis or Bham were small, ha.

[Anonymous User]

Not big cities, but the AUSAs I worked with in Nashville, Memphis, Jackson, Bham and NOLA worked 40 hours a week unless in trial. I think a lot more of this just depends on your case load.

I think, generalizing wildly, this is the case, but as someone who isn’t in a big city USAO, every time I’ve had to communicate with someone in SDNY they email me back late in the evening when everyone in my office has signed off long before. I suspect an office that’s filled with ex-NYC biglaw types, many of whom probably expect to go back to biglaw, has a different standard for hours than my semi-rural USAO filled with ex-local prosecutors.

Even in my office, the ex-big law refugee who got hired after me took a little while to adjust to the hours (they initially liked to wander around the office to chat at about 6:30 without realizing that if someone is still physically in the office at 6:30 it’s probably because they have something due).

Also, “unless in trial” is doing a lot of work there. I’d say in my office, people average about 2 trial a year, but it completely varies, both by and within the office. One friend of mine had 4 trials back to back. I know another office that goes to trial a lot because they won’t really negotiate plea offers. (At least, at one point that was the case. I can’t guarantee that it still is, but this is the kind of thing that can begin as one USA’s policy and become part of the office culture.)

And I’ve also seen border districts have crazy hours just due to the volume, depending on how willing their USA is to set thresholds/limits. San Diego is notorious for having stupid workloads.

So the short version is, Memphis, Nashville and NOLA are all decently large cities (I wouldn’t lump Bham and Jackson in that category), but I wouldn’t necessarily use them as evidence of the hours in SDNY/EDNY.

OP, trial is all-consuming no matter where you are. Maybe others are better at prep than I am, but I usually get 4-6 hours sleep during trial weeks and am working pretty much all the waking hours. I’d say the two weeks leading up to trial are probably 60-70 hour weeks, but again, it depends.

I can’t speak to NYC/big city hours specifically, but my sense is weekend/late night work is different from big law in that it depends in part on how you choose to organize your time. I tend to stay late in the office and work late during the week rather than work on weekends. People I know with kids tend to do the opposite. I suspect that even in SDNY you’re not getting made to stay late or work on the weekend; you figure out what you need to do to handle the workload, depending what it is.